User Experience Manager (m/f/d) – AI for Lifelong Learning

grow.file is building a new infrastructure for making competences visible and usable — across educational phases and areas of life. For this we are looking for someone who understands our users and their practice and brings that knowledge directly into product and market development.

As User Experience Manager, you work at the interface between users, practice partners, the product team and the management. You start by accompanying one of our central development projects and grow from there, step by step, into responsibility for further grow.file use cases and partners.

This is not a pure coordination role. We are looking for someone who understands people and their practice closely, turns many individual observations into robust patterns, and derives concrete impulses for product and market from them. You make sure we understand early which problems are relevant, how our solutions work in everyday practice, and what follows from that for product and market.

Competence shows itself every day — in playing, learning, solving problems, collaborating, working and coping with new situations. Yet much of it is neither captured systematically nor made usable across educational transitions today.

grow.file is developing an AI-based competence infrastructure that interprets evidence from real situations, derives competences traceably, and makes their development visible over time. Rather than sorting people into rigid checklists, we want a profile that grows with them.

Our approach is lifelong by design:

• Early years & early support. Recognising developmental steps early and giving educators concrete pointers for individual support — scientifically grounded and embedded in existing systems.
• School & teaching. Making visible the strengths and learning progress that grades alone miss, and helping teachers align learning more closely with each learner's actual stage of development.
• Family & everyday life. Giving parents orientation on questions of development and upbringing, while making everyday situations usable as valuable evidence of competence and growth.
• Careers guidance, training & work. Connecting competences from school, internships, training and everyday life into a coherent profile, making development trajectories visible and supporting transitions into internships, training, further education and work.

We do not build these applications as separate products side by side. Our goal is a shared competence infrastructure that connects different applications and existing systems.

One of your first major undertakings is being developed together with partners from vocational rehabilitation. It produces a low-barrier prototype that brings together competence information from different sources and supports young people and professionals with reflection and transitions into internships, training and work.

You coordinate co-design, testing and feedback with young people and professionals, and make sure their experiences flow systematically into product development. You observe usage, hold conversations, structure feedback and recognise recurring needs. Together with our Project & Product Lead and CTO, you derive requirements and next development steps from this.

As the organisation grows, you carry this work over into further areas of grow.file — from early years and school through family and careers guidance to further education and the world of work. We want someone who understands how grow.file works as a whole — and carries that knowledge from one undertaking to the next.

You plan and accompany interviews, co-design formats, tests, pilots and feedback loops with young people and professionals. You observe how our solutions are used in everyday practice, listen closely, and recognise the recurring needs behind individual pieces of feedback. You document these insights in a structured way and make them usable for product decisions.

You coordinate institutions and participants, prepare dates and tests, follow up on agreements and document results. You are a dependable point of contact for our practice partners and ensure a continuous flow of information between practice and the product team.

Together with the Project & Product Lead and CTO, you translate observations and feedback into concrete requirements and next development steps — without turning every individual wish unfiltered into a feature.

Over time you carry this work over into further application areas: you help identify relevant institutions and partners, hold first conversations, structure needs and application scenarios, and develop possible pilot projects from them.

• the ability to listen to people attentively and derive relevant patterns from their experiences
• a very structured, independent way of working and high standards for documentation and follow-through
• the ability to prepare qualitative feedback precisely and make it understandable for different audiences
• a confident manner with young people, professionals, managers and institutional partners
• an affinity for digital tools and an interest in AI-based products
• excellent written and spoken German
• a willingness to travel regularly to our practice partners across Germany
• a completed degree in a relevant field, or equivalent demonstrated qualification

• experience with user research, customer discovery or qualitative research
• experience with interviews, workshops, co-design or participatory formats
• experience in education, vocational rehabilitation, early years, school, further education or the labour market
• experience in project coordination, partnerships or business development
• experience with AI-based tools and AI-native workflows
• experience in a startup or a small organisation
• experience working with people with disabilities

We expressly welcome qualified people starting their career too. What matters to us is the ability to learn, independence, structure and a good feel for people and organisations.

We work with short paths and large areas of your own to own. If a date is missing, you organise it. If a piece of feedback is unclear, you ask. If a partner is waiting for an answer, you take the next step. If you spot a recurring pattern, you make it visible.

For us, AI is part of daily work — in research, documentation, analysis, communication and product development. We expect curiosity and a willingness to use these tools actively.

At the same time, with AI in particular, we don't care whether a result sounds convincing but whether it holds up. Checking sources, recognising uncertainty and testing results belong together for us.

We work iteratively and pragmatically. At the same time, our products operate in sensitive educational and developmental contexts and can influence decisions about people. That is why care, data protection, accessibility and traceable decisions are part of how we understand quality.

We look for people who can push back when they see a better way. Once a decision is made, though, we expect it to be carried out consistently. We don't want a culture of endless alignment, but one in which good arguments quickly lead to good decisions.

• You arrive very early. You help shape how we work with users, partners and customers — processes, tools and standards included.
• You are close to the product. Insights from practice can flow straight into product decisions — and you can see for yourself what gets better as a result.
• You work across use cases. Vocational rehabilitation is a first context. Early years, school, family, careers guidance and further education follow.
• You connect product and market. You learn which problems users and organisations actually have, and where relevant applications for grow.file grow out of them.
• The role can grow with the company. The first project funding provides the entry point. We want to develop it into a long-term key role between users, product and market.

• 27 hours per week
• Starting as soon as possible
• initially a fixed-term, project-based contract; a long-term collaboration is our explicit goal
• individual contractual pay, oriented to the comparable public-sector remuneration foreseen for the role
• remote-first, with an emerging hub in Leipzig
• regular visits to our practice and project partners
• direct collaboration with the management, the Project & Product Lead and the CTO