Education Product P&L and Funnel Recovery — Interim Director

The mandate

The interim will hold the education product commercial seat, deciding within approved pricing and spend limits. The urgent need is to distinguish a healthy acquisition funnel from volume that weakens contribution, increases refunds or creates support obligations the product cannot absorb.

The director takes responsibility on 19 October 2026 for a nine-month bridge while the permanent role is recruited. Gurugram is the primary base, with hybrid preparation and onsite commercial reviews. The opening phase establishes cohort and funnel definitions; the final two months require the successor to lead contribution and acquisition decisions rather than simply inherit a dashboard.

Handover must show a reconciled link between leads, paid enrolments, realised revenue, refunds and support cost. The permanent director must decide a representative acquisition-versus-margin tradeoff using approved evidence and demonstrate that stop conditions work. Unresolved data or product dependencies remain visible with owners, not described as recovered because one headline conversion percentage improved.

Delegation permits directing existing commercial teams, changing spend allocation within the approved monthly envelope and authorising budgeted initiatives up to ₹15 lakh. Material product pricing departures, permanent hiring, new financing and changes to education delivery standards require retained executive approval. The interim cannot claim academic or regulated product authority from ownership of commercial results.

Out of scope are curriculum design, enterprise capital strategy and corporate acquisitions. The director works with product and finance specialists without replacing them. Five days weekly are covered by the proposed day rate; exceptional travel and a materially expanded product perimeter require written agreement. No automatic promotion, permanent conversion or guaranteed turnaround result is attached to the appointment.

What you will own

• Establish the cohort contribution baseline linking acquisition, enrolment, refunds and support cost, identifying definition gaps before approving an education product growth or recovery decision.
• Decide acquisition-spend allocation within approved budgets using payback and realised contribution evidence, rejecting channels whose apparent conversion improvement depends on unsustainable discounts or omitted operating obligations.
• Direct growth and operations teams through a joint funnel review, preserving accountable owners for product delivery and source evidence rather than treating marketing volume as the whole commercial outcome.
• Challenge refund and retention assumptions with finance and product specialists, distinguishing customer behaviour evidence from academic or service-quality conclusions outside the director's delegated commercial authority.
• Approve budgeted commercial experiments with explicit stop conditions, measurement windows and retained pricing approval, ensuring underperforming trials do not become unpriced permanent commitments by default.
• Escalate material pricing or product-capacity choices with downside contribution and customer consequences, avoiding unsupported guarantees that acquisition activity can solve a delivery or product problem.
• Transfer the P&L seat through successor-led cohort and spend reviews, accepted funnel definitions and a signed register of open product dependencies and executive-retained decisions.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate director-level product P&L or equivalent commercial responsibility in education, consumer technology or an adjacent cohort-led business. Provide a spend or pricing decision personally owned and identify executive approval retained. The role requires durable contribution judgement, not growth presentation production or authority assumed from a director title without operating evidence.
• Show practical funnel, CAC, payback and contribution analysis with realised revenue, refunds and support cost reconciled. Explain a channel that looked strong on conversion but failed economic review. Candidates must distinguish commercial interpretation from curriculum, academic, regulated or specialist product decisions, preserving their authorised owners rather than extending P&L accountability into unsupported competence.
• Evidence turnaround or growth correction through a redacted experiment with explicit stop conditions and a decision changed after results. Describe failed assumptions and the customer consequence. The director must understand finance and product constraints without claiming that a marketing intervention guarantees retention, academic outcomes or an enterprise-level financial recovery.
• Establish eleven years of relevant experience, responsible commercial team leadership and a tested transfer to another product leader. Show source definitions, spend limits and unresolved dependencies retained honestly. Provide a successor-led funnel review that distinguished realised contribution from acquisition volume and identified the retained owner's decision when further growth would exceed an approved spending limit.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference PCT-INT-2026-IND-35.