Christina Peña: “Lifelong Learner Shaping Education Products”

Title: Senior Product Manager, Student Product Group
Organization: Adobe
Age: 35

Christina Peña is a product leader and educator committed to expanding access and opportunity through education and technology. As a Senior Product Manager at Adobe’s Student Product Group, she builds tools helping students and educators create, learn, and share. She launched Adobe’s Product Led Growth team for Adobe Express for Education, serving millions of monthly users, and is now building Student Spaces — Acrobat’s newly launched AI-powered study tool, made with students, not just for them.

Adobe is the latest chapter in a career-long commitment to EdTech. She previously contributed to startups, including LightSail Education, scaling an award-winning literacy platform to 300,000+ K–12 students across the U.S., Mexico, China, and South Africa, plus LitLab.ai and EdLight, PBC. She serves as VP of Operations for the EdTech MBA Community, whose flagship fellowship has placed 200+ graduate students into EdTech internships across eight cycles.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Christina grew up in Houston, Texas, and began her career as a Teach for America corps member in the South Bronx, determined to serve communities like hers. Over seven years as a teacher, instructional coach, and school leader, she led the academic turnaround of a 500-student Brooklyn elementary school — raising math mastery by 29% and ELA by 14% — then steered the same school through the COVID-19 pandemic, sustaining 95% attendance during one of American education’s hardest moments.

That experience led her to dual graduate degrees at MIT Sloan and Harvard Kennedy School, focusing on product management, analytics, entrepreneurship, and education policy. At Sloan, she co-led the Hispanic Business Club and was recognized for founding a mentorship program for underrepresented applicants, now an official student organization. A native Spanish speaker, Christina now carries that mission at scale — from the South Bronx classroom to Silicon Valley. She lives in San Francisco, where her spare time includes hiking and photographing all 63 U.S. National Parks, creative writing, and boxing.