What a Director of Program Management and Product Strategy Operations at Turnitin Wishes They Had Known Before Entering the Education Technology Industry
Kevin's role as Director, Program Management & Product Strategy Operations at Turnitin is uniquely challenging due to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and its implications for academic integrity, requiring a constant balance of "growth mindset and risk-taking." Navigating the diverse perspectives of engineers, product teams, and legal, all while grappling with "emerging legalese," makes the role's complexity something that could only be fully understood through experience.
Project Management, Product Strategy, Technology, Leadership, Ethical Dilemmas
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Kevin Tsay
Director, Program Management & Product Strategy Operations
Turnitin
Washington University in St. Louis, 2007
Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, MPP
Education
Technology
Operations and Project Management
LGBTQ
Video Highlights
1. The role is unique and involves balancing growth mindset with risk-taking in areas like education, academic integrity, business, technology, and AI.
2. The professional must navigate diverse perspectives on AI and its implications from various teams (engineers, product, legal).
3. Understanding the landscape of the role across different companies and the specific context of the work would have been beneficial prior to starting the job, although some aspects can only be learned through experience given the rapidly changing environment
Transcript
What have you learned about this role that you wish someone would have told you before you started?
What I would have liked to know about the role is just how unique it is in this space. The balance between a growth mindset and risk-taking is something I continue to reflect on.
This is particularly true with education, academic integrity, business risk, and technological risk. Now with AI, there are many different perspectives.
People are either excited, fearful, or a combination of both. When I think about my role and working with different teams, there are the engineers who see AI as already here and are ready to think about applications.
From a product perspective, the question is what AI truly means for our customers and how we can translate that. Then there's legal, which points out that there's no legal precedent for how we think about AI and academic integrity.
We likely need to figure out the emerging legalese. So, understanding what the role truly looks like is something I couldn't have fully grasped coming into it.
If I had a better sense of the landscape and what this role entails for other companies, specifically being able to put that into perspective for this type of work, that would have been great to consider beforehand. I say this knowing that some of it I probably couldn't have realized until I was in the role, as things are changing so quickly. That's part of the excitement too.