Jelena Stajić is Vice President of Product Management at ScholarshipOwl, an AI-powered scholarship platform. She has been with ScholarshipOwl for 10 years and began in quality assurance before transitioning to product management. Jelena has a passion for coaching and developed her own YouTube channel, Product Managers in Pajamas, to help early-career PMs. She was also recently interviewed by Teresa Torres’ team to discuss some of the challenges with implementing continuous product discovery at ScholarshipOwl.
In our conversation, Jelena discusses ScholarshipOwl’s transition from purely being a scholarship platform for students to adding a B2B component. She discusses how her team has re-framed ScholarshipOwl’s platform as a performance marketing channel for brands to reach students, as well as how this intent data adds immense value for brands.
It’s really been being in the right place at the right time. The company and I grew together. I think QA is one of the best ways to get into product management because you get to learn the ins and outs of a development team, understand execution really well, and these product development processes from a different angle. If you can invest in empathizing with user needs instead of only focusing on feature performance and identifying specific issues in user experience, QA can almost act as an associate product manager. I think it’s a great entry role into product management, and that’s what it has been for me.
We initially started as a platform that matched students in the United States with private scholarships. We matched students using their individual profiles, and then we added a feature that set us apart from the competitors and allowed them to apply for scholarships without leaving our platform. We automated things as much as possible to help make the process quicker, but we realized for students, it’s not just about quantity. We matched the average user to hundreds of scholarships, but it’s not feasible for them to apply to that many with everything else they deal with in their personal lives.
We then shifted our focus to finding students the right scholarships — ones that they can win. We developed a suite of strategy tools to help them optimize the application process to not require as much effort and give them all the information. We added things such as credibility scores of every scholarship and gave students competition data. We built some AI-powered recommendation engines and another AI engine that helps students reuse essays and get status updates.
All the scholarship inventory is external and beforehand, we were counting on organizations coming to us. That wasn’t really competitive because it didn’t have any differentiator. We noticed a huge problem with scholarship scams where organizations would publish scholarships just to collect data without the intention of awarding anybody money. A lot of scholarships got canceled or suddenly disappeared, and we realized we had a challenge with not having control. That’s when we understood another strategic decision to deal with inventory, and our solution for that was to have a scholarship management platform on the B2B side.
When I moved up to the VP of product role, that was the first challenge that I had to tackle. I’m very proud of that because I realized that we don’t have a competitive advantage if we continue only providing a scholarship management platform. I started analyzing the market and realized that all these organizations offering these private scholarships are doing it with a marketing goal behind them. Literally, every player in the industry who was serving Gen Z had a scholarship campaign as their main generator of traffic.
In fact, our most efficient marketing channel was our own scholarship at ScholarshipOwl as well. That’s where we pivoted to a marketplace model. We built a strong connection between B2C and B2B and made the B2B side essentially a Google AdSense of scholarships, where brands can run scholarship campaigns to reach Gen Z students.
All of a sudden, brands go from a “push” kind of relationship — pushing their message or product onto customers — to a pull. Students are looking for scholarships and then they find you and find your message. The relationship is totally different from a normal marketing channel. This way, we also ensure that students’ interests are represented and every scholarship is actually awarded.
Right. We currently serve over nine million students, either in high school or in college, and that number is growing by 150,000 each month. We offer detailed targeting for brands to segment and target the customers that they’re looking for. We added a lot of intent data so the brands can ask specific questions, and ask students to record videos, social posts, surveys, etc. This intent data is super valuable for brands and they can use it for market research or recruitment. And we make sure that part of the brand’s marketing budget goes directly to the students.
We had a campaign with Samsung recently and they were recruiting college students to be brand ambassadors for their products. They used our scholarship campaign to find the right students on specific campuses for their program.
It started with students coming and saying that they’d applied but no winners were ever announced. Then we built a model to scan every scholarship page for every scholarship that we had in our system. It checks the page for any changes, and we’d see scholarships disappearing in the middle of the application window. Everything disappears — the organization, the scholarship posting, everything.
It’s usually hard for individuals to notice because students apply to multiple scholarships and don’t track them individually. In our case, it’s a lot of aggregated data, so we see these scholarships disappearing and nobody getting awarded.
Sometimes, these organizations require a lot of other information, such as transcripts, proof of enrollment, etc. Because there is this exchange like, “I’ll give you a scholarship and you have to give me everything that I ask for,” people volunteer their data and often, these organizations are not credible. Now, we score every scholarship. We have a system and framework in place. I have a team that goes in and reviews everything about the organization and then we assign a score. If it’s a scam, we flag it.
We’ve been doing this for 10 years, so we have the experience to recognize what looks fishy and what doesn’t. ScholarshipOwl for Business solves this, because we take control of the flow, make sure the brands get their business met, and, at the same time, we hold the award funds in escrow. That way, regardless of what happens to the brand, we make sure the scholarship is awarded to a student.
Most of the challenges came externally in the sense of market education because, normally, organizations place scholarships in the corporate responsibility department. Sometimes, when we talk to customers and they hear the word “scholarship,” they’re like, “No, you need to talk to the corporate responsibility department. That’s not us” or, “We tried it before and it never worked for us.”
Nobody’s doing it in the same way that we are doing it, so it takes a minute to explain, but we are doing it. That’s our angle because in most cases, you don’t think about using scholarships that way. Once we explain that we’re like a Google AdSense for scholarship and that it’s a basically performance marketing channel, they get it. But before that, they often don’t.
The main difference is that everything else acts as a push, especially when you’re looking at doing campaigns on Meta, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Gen Z is very smart. It’s a digital generation. They can figure out what an ad is so easily, starting from influencer ads to native ads within the platform. There is a level of banner blindness. I see it in my generation as a Millenial, but in Gen Z the threshold is even higher.
The main difference is that nobody has ever said, “Oh, I want to see an ad in that.” But students are looking for scholarships. They’re actively engaging and searching. It’s not just that the brand puts out a scholarship to give money, but that formulating it in the right way really appeals to and engages students. It’s not just about the exchange. It has to relate to the student’s interests, who they are, and their goals in life. It has to resonate to a certain level, and that’s what we help brands figure out. Also, marketing budgets are typically much higher than that of corporate responsibility. That way, we make sure that there’s a lot more scholarship money available.
I started a channel to help people who were like me when I began my career in product. When I started, there was not enough content about product management, especially in remote companies or in startups. There was maybe content focused on big companies, and I still see the same trend. There was nobody like me on a tiny team with very few resources in a bootstrapped company. I couldn’t relate to many of the things that I was learning and reading online, which is why I created my channel.
At the beginning of every one of my videos, I mention feeling everything everywhere all at once. Everything is happening, and you cannot figure out what you need to do. That’s who I want to help with this channel. Product management can seem so hectic. I’m trying to help with things like defining product processes, providing different frameworks, and advocating for mental health in product. I’m actually a trained coach and I think coaching is the way. I love to coach my team because I believe that it really helps.
I don’t believe in managing people. I believe in helping them get unblocked with whatever is in their way. I truly believe that we are the ones who stand in our own way through our mindsets, not the skills that we lack. I want people who watch my channel to understand that they’re not alone. You can master this, and you’ll figure it out, and here’s how you can do it.
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