{"slug": "a-q-a-with-career-design-s-new-chief-product-officer", "title": "A Q&A With Career Design's New Chief Product Officer", "summary": "Kiley McEvoy, Thayer ’07, joined Dartmouth's Center for Career Design in June as its first chief product officer, a role more common in tech than academia, after nearly two decades in product management at Google, YouTube, and ed-tech company Quizlet. McEvoy is developing custom AI-powered tools, including a skills-tracking dashboard and an alumni career-mapping platform, to enhance the center's one-on-one coaching and extend its reach to students and alumni.", "body_md": "In June, [Kiley McEvoy, Thayer ’07](https://careerdesign.dartmouth.edu/staff/#kiley-mcevoy), joined the [Center for Career Design](https://careerdesign.dartmouth.edu/) as its first chief product officer—a role more commonly found in tech companies than liberal arts colleges.\n\nMcEvoy returns to Dartmouth after nearly two decades in product management at Google and YouTube, a stint in the federal government, Shaper, and, most recently, the ed-tech company Quizlet.\n\nThe center’s [unique formula](https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2026/04/career-center-built-lifetime-fulfilling-work) uses close one-on-one coaching, expanded internship funding, a network of 80,000 alumni, and personalized guidance from custom, AI-powered tools to prepare students. McEvoy is the first chief product officer in an Ivy League career center.\n\nThe idea is to leverage McEvoy’s engineering training and career in learning technology to create custom platforms specifically designed for students and alumni, who may also use the center.\n\nThese tools include a dashboard where students can easily keep track of the skills they develop over four years and a platform that lets them map the career trajectories of alumni with similar interests to their own.\n\nAlready, he’s begun a review of the technology and products currently in use at the center and identifying ways to make the career-design process more efficient and responsive to student needs.\n\nDartmouth News asked McEvoy to talk about the opportunities he sees and how the platforms he is developing can help extend the coaching and relationships at the heart of career design.\n\n**What is a chief product officer?**\n\nA CPO is really just a head product manager. The job is to stitch together the expertise of a lot of different groups—engineers, designers, legal, data scientists, etc. You have to speak all of those languages, and, most importantly, understand the end user and what they need and want in a product so we can deliver an engaging experience—in this case, for students and alumni planning their careers.\n\n**Why does the Center for Career Design need a CPO?**\n\nLots of external career-planning tools are sold to schools, but none offer a customized experience for the Dartmouth community. My main purpose is to work with students, alumni, and staff to understand their needs and build something that can go beyond just broad recommendations of career paths. We want a platform that lets everyone helping you plan your career—alumni, coaches, and students themselves—engage with you in a single place. That’s typically not the development approach an outside vendor can provide.\n\n**How does artificial intelligence fit into these new tools? **\n\nMy approach to using AI tools is cautious and careful, and I don’t leverage it where I don’t think it makes sense. The main benefit in this role is that it allows us to build tools faster and leverage a lot more information when helping a student explore career paths. But the end result won’t simply be a chatbot that spits out your perfect career. Career planning is a very personal experience that depends on the knowledge and collaboration of a coach. The main goal of the platform we’re building is to allow coaches to work with students across more surfaces in ways that current undergraduates have come to expect.\n\n**What would that look like for students and alumni?**\n\nLet’s say a student is in a course they find especially interesting. Or the opposite—they’re starting to realize there’s a particular aspect of their major they don’t enjoy. The student might not realize it, but those are valuable data points that might help their career coach identify or rule out roles in the industry that student is focused on. By having a readily available platform on that student’s phone, they could easily feed those quick insights to their coach ahead of their next meeting. It also might be a similar insight an alum had provided in their use of our platform, creating a strong reason for connection on both sides.\n\nI can give a personal example where I could have benefited from a career coach. In product management, there’s lots of different types of products you can work on, and early on I gravitated toward the flashy, cool ones. I worked on Google Glass and YouTube, thinking that the excitement and the press that those were getting would lead to career enjoyment. I’ve also worked on things that were less flashy, such as search result quality, Medicare, and product experience personalization. Things that are more highly analytical, but that no one is writing articles about. If I’d had the chance to talk with other alumni further along in their product management careers, I think I could have reached that realization much earlier than I did.\n\nIt took me a decade to understand that those highly analytical and experimental jobs, where you’re diving into the data, made me much happier. Those are the kinds of insights we want to help a student have in their junior or senior year, not a decade into their career—and having alumni contribute their own experience is a big part of how we get them there.\n\n**How did your experience at Thayer shape you?**\n\nThayer was an awakening for me. My undergrad degree was engineering, but not applied engineering, so when I found the Machine Shop and labs in Thayer, it opened my eyes to the hands-on side of building. I’m a passionate builder, in the sense we’re talking about now of building platforms and technical systems, but in my personal life, I’ve been building a cabin in Colorado—something I wouldn’t have done had I not been part of the cabin-building club at Dartmouth. Thayer helped me kind of custom-build a degree to become a product manager. I took classes in computer science, I took classes at Tuck, and obviously many at Thayer, and then when I applied for a job at Google, I was able to say, essentially, I got a degree in product management from Dartmouth.\n\n**How have you navigated the changes in the tech industry and in the career landscape over the course of your career?**\n\nA lot has changed, but the underlying theme of everything I’ve done has always been the problem-solving skills I learned at Thayer. Thayer taught me how to walk into a brand new domain without false confidence and to take in all the information, understand the problems, and find the tools to address those problems. Another thing I’ve learned is to always focus on the end user. Product managers are inventive, but often what is in your head is not what the user actually needs or wants. It’s not enough to ask, what would you like me to build? It’s an in-depth process to facilitate and work with users and brainstorm with them to help them realize what would make a difference in their lives. I’ve spent a lot of time studying that process at Google and Quizlet and the U.S. government.\n\n**Did your work at Quizlet inform how you’re approaching Dartmouth students?**\n\nMy job at Quizlet was focused on high school and early college users, and that has helped me see the amount of pressure and stress students are under, which seems to be significantly more than when I was in high school and college. Students need the tools they’re using to just work. They don’t have time for things that are broken or inefficient or not delivering what they need.\n\n**How will you engage students in your work?**\n\nI’m working with the interns at the Center for Career Design, and I plan to expand that into a much larger program. Students and young alumni have already been reaching out to us with ideas. I want to have a platform soon where I can invite them to come on in so we can build together, even if they aren’t pursuing a technical degree.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-q-a-with-career-design-s-new-chief-product-officer", "canonical_source": "https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2026/09/qa-career-designs-new-chief-product-officer", "published_at": "2026-09-02 15:19:41+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-02 15:55:06.818578+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Kiley McEvoy", "Center for Career Design", "Dartmouth", "Google", "YouTube", "Quizlet"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-q-a-with-career-design-s-new-chief-product-officer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-q-a-with-career-design-s-new-chief-product-officer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-q-a-with-career-design-s-new-chief-product-officer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-q-a-with-career-design-s-new-chief-product-officer.jsonld"}}