🟢 Open to Product Manager / Project Manager / Program Manager roles — let's talk

Cecil Jose

Product Manager · Cadmus

Higher-education assessment · remote, global team

Turning support tickets, customer insights, and backlog items into shipped features.

Product Manager at Cadmus, an assessment platform used by universities worldwide. Started in Client Success, moved into product in December 2024, and now drive research, competitive strategy and end-to-end delivery.

See what I've shipped Get in touch
3,476
Cleaned NPS responses analysed to shape the roadmap
40+
Competitor products mapped across the assessment market
300+
Client requests resolved at >90% CSAT before moving into product
6
Core features taken from research to shipped release
About

From the front line of client success to the product table

My path into product was earned, not designed.

Feb 2022
Business Ops & Client Support
Fresh Prints
May 2024
Client Success
Cadmus
Dec 2024
Associate PM
Cadmus
Now
Product Manager
Research · strategy · delivery
300+client requests resolved, front line
>90%CSAT held while doing it

That front-line seat is what pulled me into product — it put me closest to the people actually struggling with the platform.

What travels with me: read the ticket, the survey response or the call transcript before trusting an opinion in a room.

Messy, high-volume customer signal → a shipped, adopted feature, without losing the thread back to the original problem.

At a glance

  • CompanyCadmus
  • Current focusProduct Management
  • Before productClient Success · Business Ops
  • Moved into productDec 2024
  • Core domainHigher Education
  • Customer baseUniMelb, UWA, UCL, Glasgow
Experience

My path into product

Present

Product Manager

Cadmus

Research, competitive intelligence and feature delivery across Cadmus. Cross-functional work with Design, Engineering and customer-facing teams on file & media submissions, exam integrity, marking and academic integrity.

Dec 2024

Associate Product Manager

Cadmus

Moved onto the product team, taking on NPS/voice-of-customer analysis, backlog organization, and competitive comparisons as first responsibilities.

May 2024 — Dec 2024

Client Success

Cadmus

300+ client requests owned, CSAT above 90%. Analysed recurring themes and shipped better templates and help-centre articles — team CSAT up ~10%.

Feb 2022 — Jan 2024

Business Operations / Client Support

Fresh Prints

Two years running operational process and client support at volume — service delivery, escalation handling, keeping commitments to customers.

Research & Strategy

Turning signal into a plan

Before anything ships it has to earn its place. Five standing sources of customer signal:

NPS data → student-facing features Voice of Customer → teacher-facing features Backlog sheet Support tickets Comms (Sales) team feedback
Research → Roadmap

Turning a year of NPS responses into a prioritised roadmap

Voice-of-customer analysis that became a concrete set of shaped engineering & design pitches.

In short

Student NPS was negative and a year of open-text feedback explained why — unreadably. I cleaned it, tagged every comment, built the dashboard, and turned the four biggest themes into pitches worth +17.5 points of expected gain.

Respondents per theme & expected NPS gain (hover a bar)
Spellchecker
103 respondents · accuracy, grammar & auto-caps · expected +5%
103 · +5%
Editor formatting
100 respondents · fonts, indents, line & double spacing · expected +5%
100 · +5%
Referencing
85 respondents · Zotero / EndNote insertion without format loss · expected +4%
85 · +4%
Tables
64 respondents · row/column management closer to Word · expected +3.5%
64 · +3.5%
Bars sized by respondents raising each theme unprompted; expected NPS gain per theme taken from the improvement PRD.
4 pitches shaped & briefed 3,476 responses analysed Spellchecker now in build

Read the full case study →

Competitive Intelligence

Building Cadmus's competitive intelligence backbone

A living feature-comparison matrix used across teams to make prioritization calls

In short

Nobody knew where Cadmus led or lagged across LMSs, integrity tools, proctoring and specialist platforms. I built and maintain the comparison — 40+ products, four categories, quarterly — partly by booking sales calls with competitors.

Impact

Four gaps became roadmap items — group assessments, vivas, smart comments, multimedia. I owned two end to end; one, Work Playback, now sells as a paid add-on.

4 roadmap items originated 1 shipped as a revenue-generating add-on Used by Sales for positioning

Read the full case study →

Core Features Shipped

From pitch to production

Owned end to end — user stories, design reviews, release notes, customer documentation. Each card carries an adoption footprint against 12 enterprise tenants.

Competitive win

Work Playback — from competitor gap to paid add-on

Research surfaced the gap, Sales wanted it, I shipped it — and it helped convert a pilot into an enterprise contract.

Shipped & monetised
What I owned

Turnitin Clarity exposed writing-process visibility; ours sat locked in an internal tool. The capability existed; the surface didn't. Six hand-offs → one click from the class list.

Step 01
Gap found

Quarterly competitor refresh flagged submission replay as a row Turnitin Clarity led and Cadmus left blank.

Step 02
Sales pulled it

Commercial team flagged it as a live deal differentiator and asked for prioritisation.

Step 03
I pitched it

Wrote the shaped pitch: timeline access straight from the class list.

Step 04
Built & shipped

Delivered with engineering, feature-flagged, then hardened against real support feedback.

Step 05
Sold as an add-on

Billable module, live in 4 of 12 enterprise tenants — and part of converting a pilot to enterprise.

Helped convert a pilot to an enterprise contract 4 of 12 enterprise tenants enabled 6 manual hand-offs → 1 click

Read the full case study →

Submissions Shipped

File Upload & Image Capture

Letting students attach files, photos, and video to any submission — including inside lockdown-browser exams

What I owned

Cadmus could only hold writing; teachers reconciled emailed files by hand. Two epics, a fixed two-month appetite, and camera capture proven inside a lockdown browser where file upload stays disabled.

Impact · adoption footprint
6 of 12 enterprise tenants

6 of 12 enterprise universities adopted it — and the 50MB MVP cap was raised to 200MB once multiple institutions surfaced the same use case.

Webcam capture in LDB & non-LDB Shipped as a billable add-on

Read the full case study →

Marking Shipped

Smart Comments

Reusable marking feedback that doesn't turn into clutter

What I owned

Three universities wouldn't adopt Cadmus Marker without a QuickMarks equivalent — a blocked sale reading as a satisfaction gap. I marked with theirs myself, then added two things they don't do. Sold into all three.

Impact · adoption footprint
All Cadmus Marker tenants

Live for every Cadmus Marker tenant. The planned import path clears a real switching blocker for institutions sitting on years of accumulated comment banks elsewhere.

Unblocked & sold into 3 universities Live for all 12 Marker tenants

Read the full case study →

Academic Integrity Shipped

Generative AI Declaration

A trust-sensitive feature taken from stakeholder pushback to a shipped, documented release

What I owned

Ideated custom GenAI instructions and oversaw the designs. Held one integrity line in review: the AI-agreement checkbox must never be pre-checked. Owned the release and both support articles.

Impact · adoption footprint
All 12 enterprise tenants

Adopted by every enterprise tenant, strongest pull from the UK where AI policy moved fastest — a documented, opt-in way to set expectations instead of a blanket ban.

Opt-in by default, never pre-checked Strong UK university uptake
Marking & rubrics Shaped, specced & designed

Zero Point (Qualitative) Rubrics

A fourth rubric format that decouples the rubric from the score, for disciplines that mark holistically

What I owned

Humanities academics mark holistically; all three formats forced per-criterion scoring. After discovery at Glasgow and James Sprunt I rejected the cheap path — 0% weighting — and argued for a distinct fourth format.

Differentiated vs. LMS "no points" modes Scoped across 4 assessment types

Read the full case study →

Exam Integrity Shipped

Invigilator Key & Inactivity Timer

Giving invigilators real control over lockdown-browser re-entry, without over-building for edge cases

What I owned

Product leadership argued a re-entry key was redundant against the access code. I kept them independent — a key typed by an invigilator changes student behaviour in a way a memorised code can't — plus a 30-minute inactivity default.

Impact · adoption footprint
5 of 12 — every LDB tenant

Live for all five lockdown-browser tenants — the only ones it applies to — and now the first tool Support reaches for on exam-integrity escalations.

Used by Support to resolve LDB integrity escalations Shipped to ACU & LDB tenants

Read the full case study →

Skills

Toolkit

Product & discovery

PRD writing NPS / VoC analysis Backlog prioritization Competitive analysis Release management

Cross-functional collaboration

Design reviews (Figma) Engineering scoping Support & comms alignment Stakeholder communication

Tools

Figma Notion Jira HubSpot Google Sheets / Docs SQL (analysis)

AI-assisted workflows

GenAI response bucketing AI-assisted documentation AI video demos

Using the product I build — and acting on what I find

I test Cadmus the way an academic would, not the way a spec says to. 29 distinct issues no ticket had captured — logged, grouped by family, and turned into one consolidated Rubric Improvement pitch.

10 defects 10 missing capabilities 9 clarity & UX Hover a tile for the issue

One of those 29 — zero-point rubrics — turned out to be big enough to become its own project. Read that case study →

Found
Defects surfaced through hands-on product testing
Logged
Catalogued in a single rubric issue tracker
Grouped
Clustered by theme & ranked P0–P3
Pitched
One consolidated Rubric Improvement pitch
Shipped
Fixes released across marking & rubrics
"Cecil's greatest strengths include empathy, accountability, and versatility... he's proactively led projects on the product team, collaborating effectively and driven by a strong desire to become better. He continues to find optimal solutions to problems, and consistently ensures developers, designers, support teams, and commercial teams remain aligned throughout the product development process, even under pressure."
— Manager feedback, Cadmus product leadership