Marysela Garza Granados: “Designing for Equity in Early Learning Systems”

Title: Product Manager
Organization: Khan Academy
Age: 32

Marysela Garza Granados grew up watching her parents champion education despite having limited formal schooling themselves. As a proud first-generation college graduate, she carried that belief into the classroom. Starting her career in 2015 as a bilingual teacher, she saw firsthand how systemic inequities shape early learning. She didn’t just teach; she led identity-based support groups and showed up as a Latinx leader for her students and community.

That classroom experience made her hungry to drive change at a larger scale. She moved into education leadership and content roles, building the skills to support not only her own students but also teachers and systems more broadly. When the pandemic disrupted education nationwide, she channeled that urgency into a role at TFA–Houston, where she led a revamp of corps member KPIs — redesigning the framework to reflect real classroom challenges, centering equity, and measuring meaningful growth. Resulting in a fairer, more effective system that improved teacher success rates.

Seeing how strategy and product thinking could multiply her impact, she pursued an MBA at UCLA to sharpen her leadership and management skills. That investment paid off in her next chapter, product management. Today, she is a product manager at Khan Academy Kids, where she applies her equity lens to ensure that content reflects and uplifts the diverse learners she has always fought for at scale.

Rooted in honesty, driven by data, and fueled by curiosity, Marysela thrives on feedback and brings scrappiness and deep communication skills to every room she’s in. Her next goal is to grow into a senior product manager role at Khan Academy and become the kind of leader who drives lasting impact for students of color.