<p>We're hiring a Lead Product Manager—focused on getting more users to try RISE and improving their experience during their first few weeks. I wrote this letter to help you decide if this is the right opportunity for you. In it, I share what you need to be successful, what success looks like, and challenges you're likely to face.</p><p>If it turns out this is a fit, I believe that you will be hard-pressed to find something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.</p><p>It will take you time to read through, but if you do, you should learn something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on, and know if you'll thrive in our current environment. You won't find traditional requirements. Mostly because this isn't a traditional role and we're not looking for a traditional person.</p><p>For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propels your personal growth.</p><p>Thanks in advance for reading &amp; sleep well,</p><p>Oddie</p><p>Head of Product @ Rise Science</p><hr><h2>What are we working on at Rise Science?</h2><p>The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday-people that helps you be less tired and get more out of your day.</p><p>Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing drug there is. It's the foundation of literally everything we can measure about you. And it's your nights that dictate your days.</p><p>Read about how we got started: <a href="https://www.notion.so/Founder-Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b">Our founders' journey to sleep and its importance</a>.</p><p>You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...</p><p>Through years of user research and product development, we learned that&nbsp;<strong>people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.</strong></p><p>What people&nbsp;<em>really</em>&nbsp;want is to have more energy.</p><p>It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep. However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, &amp; Oura). None of these services are designed to help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, WHOOP’s recent peer-reviewed paper shows that while their tracker is accurate for measuring sleep it&nbsp;<strong>does not effectively improve sleep behavior</strong>. For people to feel better&nbsp;<em>sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient</em>.</p><p><strong>RISE is not a sleep tracker.</strong>&nbsp;Our mission is to affect long-term behavior change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is what people want. And to do that,  you need to make the feedback loop between your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise&nbsp;<em>Science</em>. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to guide our product development.</p><p>It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build scientifically robust algorithms to help people live the best lives possible.</p><p>If you want to see it for yourself,&nbsp;<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rise-track-sleep-circadian/id1453884781">start a free trial</a>.</p><h2>The work we do next will determine our success</h2><p>While we’re not an established category with hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. Our product works well, we have tens of thousands of happy customers and a scalable path to impact more people. We didn’t get lucky on product. We got here with a human-centered product team. But <strong>the work we do next</strong>, together, will ultimately determine how many lives we can improve and write the Rise Science story.</p><h2>Some challenges of working at Rise Science</h2><ul>
<li>You'll be our second product manager hire and have a lot of autonomy.  <em>We aren't a long established company. If you enjoy building companies you'll enjoy it here.</em></li>
<li>You've got to be comfortable with ambiguity.  <em>We don't have all the answers and we aren't always right—you're allowed to be wrong at Rise Science.</em></li>
<li>You'll have to balance both doing and thinking. <em>You'll have to both support the team as they build while also plan for what's next.</em></li>
<li>We are building a product together. Product, design, and engineering all sit at the same table and we are all listening to the user.&nbsp;<em>If you like being on an integrated team and like actively collaborating with other disciplines, then there’s a good chance you’ll be happy.</em></li>
<li>We are a small team and rely heavily on each other but are also responsible for managing our own priorities. <em>You won't have a team of researchers and analysts and will be expected to do your own qualitative and quantitative digging, with help.</em></li>
</ul><h2>What your days at Rise Science will look like and what success looks like:</h2><p>Success is positively impacting more peoples' lives by: 5x our paid subscriber base in 2021 on path to 3x it in 2022 in a cost efficient way.</p><p>You'll be responsible for getting new customers onboarded and helping them make progress in their lives during their trial so they fall in love and subscribe to RISE. You should have passion and skills in these areas:</p><ul>
<li>Shipping features that help new users connect their problem to the value of a product soon after signing up and increase the rate at which users refer RISE to friends and family</li>
<li>Running A/B + multivariate experiments and coming up with an experimentation plan</li>
<li>Experience or familiarity with SaaS products and metrics</li>
<li>Conducting user interviews weekly</li>
<li>Comfortable with and enjoy digging in to data. That could be using product analytics tools, such as Amplitude, using Tableau and SQL with our data warehouse, or simply CSVs and Excel.</li>
<li>Driven by delivering real business results</li>
</ul><h3>Within 1 month, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Gain an understanding of our product, how it fits into our customers' lives, and the science behind sleep. We don't expect you to be an expert in sleep or health technology—we'll help you get there.</li>
<li>Try using RISE yourself to see it the way a customer does.</li>
<li>Handle customer support tickets to learn about the issues customers have with our product.</li>
<li>Begin forming a full-funnel picture of our product, and start identifying key gaps and opportunities.</li>
<li>Partner with the Head of Product (me) to set initial priorities and align on expectations for your role.</li>
<li>Start building relationships with engineers and designers on your product team as well as across the broader team.</li>
<li>Be familiar with key SaaS growth concepts such as CAC, LTV, etc, and be able to leverage these types of metrics to drive effective and impactful decision making.</li>
<li>Begin owning your team's weekly sprint process and performance against Growth KPIs.</li>
</ul><h3>Within 3 months, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Begin analyzing and creating new qualitative and quantitative research to start forming hypotheses about how our product can help improve customers' lives soon after installing our app.</li>
<li>Lead day-to-day product execution for your team delivering value to customers on a weekly basis. You’ll write briefs, validate designs, and organize releases.</li>
<li>Have run and evaluated A/B experiments to drive learnings and identify future opportunities.</li>
<li>Understand the engineering behind the RISE product well enough that you can predict some product trade-offs and ask your team productive questions.</li>
<li>Collaborate with team members focused on Marketing/Growth to align product and marketing strategies in order to create a cohesive user experience and maximize impact.</li>
<li>Facilitate 6-week roadmap planning for your team and represent the plan to the rest of the Rise Science team.</li>
</ul><h3>Within 6 months, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Build on your developing customer/industry expertise and take firm ownership of your
team’s strategy. You will likely start identifying opportunities and generating hypotheses
that the Rise Science team has not explored before.</li>
<li>See a high impact project through from start-to-finish. You’ll assume ownership for results
of your team’s product releases and how you learn from them.</li>
<li>Start developing a deep understanding of quantitative and qualitative customer data.</li>
</ul><h3>Within 12 months, you will...</h3><ul>
<li>Push your team to do its best work yet. You’ll know the team well and understand how to
encourage them to do work the whole team and company is incredibly proud of.</li>
<li>Advance the craft of product management at Rise Science. You’ll set a good example and share what you’ve learned.</li>
<li>Be ready to take on new challenges to help your team and the broader product
management organization—including things we likely haven’t anticipated yet!</li>
<li>Hire new Product Managers to support further growth.</li>
</ul><h2>Some reasons you might like working with us</h2><ul>
<li><strong>You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives</strong>. Each feature you launch and customer you interview will help more people become better at sleeping. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world.</li>
<li>You'll work with a <strong>team that cares about the full customer experience</strong>. We're not product first or acquisition first or outcomes first, we're led by our customers' needs and that means we need to be thoughtful about the entire journey our customers go through.  Here's a <a href="https://www.notion.so/risescience/Rise-Team-Values-How-we-do-great-work-as-a-team-5e6bfd3dd9a14632ad659b499f0a1caf">link to our values</a> that support quality work getting done. I'd encourage you to read them as they're a direct window into what your future team members care about.</li>
<li>More than anything else, we realize <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">life is short</a>. So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, <strong>taking time for yourself and your family is essential</strong>. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we're built on low sleep debt 😉</li>
<li>One of our core values is growth. That means every week, we'll talk about how we can help you grow. What skills, experiences, people can <strong>help you get to your next career goal</strong>. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.</li>
<li>You'll get a chance to perform in front of some of the top consumer health investors that backed teams at companies like Fitbit and Peloton—we're well funded.</li>
<li>You'll talk regularly with people whose lives you've changed.</li>
<li>If it's important to you,  you'll also have a front row seat to all the ups and downs of company building (you'll be on of the first 10 employees).</li>
</ul><h3>Compensation?</h3><p>We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for companies of our size and capital raised. I'll share up to date market data with you so we're seeing the same data. We'll dig into specifics as soon as it's a clear fit on both sides.</p><h3>Location?</h3><p>US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. We’re a 100% distributed team (most in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute minimum. However, we often work semi-synchronously so it’s important to have some solid workday overlap.</p><h2>If this sounds interesting, let's talk.</h2><p>Instead of a cover letter, <strong>email me at [oddie@risescience.com](<a href="mailto:oddie@risescience.com">mailto:oddie@risescience.com</a>?subject=Rise_Science_Lead_Product_Manager) | Subject: 'Rise Science Lead Product Manager' and include your answers to the questions below</strong>.  We value great writing and clear thinking.  So take the time you need. But no need to spend more than an hour or so.</p><ol>
<li>Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter? What surprised/excited you about the opportunity?</li>
<li>Tell me about the most significant project you've led that drove conversion or product growth.</li>
<li>What's your favorite app or software based onboarding process? Why?</li>
<li>You're not always right with products and features. Tell me about a time that a feature didn't work. How did you find the root cause and what steps did you take?</li>
<li>What gives you energy day-to-day about Product Management? And what do you find drains your energy the most?</li>
<li>How do you approach developing and prioritizing ideas?</li>
<li>What's your approach to deeply understanding our customer?</li>
</ol><h2>What to expect next</h2><p>I’ll hand review what you send. I’ll respond with either “I don’t think the fit is here” or that we should move forward with the process. If we move forward, here's what the rest of the process we'll use to learn together if this is an amazing fit for you looks like.</p><p>













































</p><ol>
<li>
<p>Interview: We meet over Zoom and cover some basics, then focus our conversation on questions about your past work and how it relates to what you’d be doing at Rise Science.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Work Review: You've read the job letter and what we need you to do. During this conversation I'll ask you to walk through, in detail, how you've done this in a past job. I may invite a few team members to join.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Work Simulation: We'll send over a take-home challenge that will let us simulate working together. This is designed to be similar to the type of work we do here at Rise Science. This stage should take no more than 2 hours total, and we'll both have a clear sense of how we work together by the end.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Team Talks: At this stage we're incredibly excited about your potential with Rise Science. Get to know the team you'd be working with. You'll find time with 1-4 of your potential future team members. You will also spend time with our CTO and CEO talking about how Rise Science can support you on your personal journey.</p>
</li>
</ol>

We're hiring a Lead Product Manager—focused on getting more users to try RISE
and improving their experience during their first few weeks. I wrote this
letter to help you decide if this is the right opportunity for you. In it, I
share what you need to be successful, what success looks like, and challenges
you're likely to face.

If it turns out this is a fit, I believe that you will be hard-pressed to find
something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.

It will take you time to read through, but if you do, you should learn
something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on, and know if you'll
thrive in our current environment. You won't find traditional requirements.
Mostly because this isn't a traditional role and we're not looking for a
traditional person.

For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something
that matters and propels your personal growth.

Thanks in advance for reading & sleep well,

Oddie

Head of Product @ Rise Science

* * *

## What are we working on at Rise Science?

The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday-people that helps
you be less tired and get more out of your day.

Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing drug there is. It's the
foundation of literally everything we can measure about you. And it's your
nights that dictate your days.

Read about how we got started: [Our founders' journey to sleep and its
importance](https://www.notion.so/Founder-
Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b).

You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it
doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...

Through years of user research and product development, we learned that
**people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.**

What people  _really_  want is to have more energy.

It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep.
However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are
trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your
sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, & Oura). None of these services are designed to
help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, WHOOP’s recent peer-
reviewed paper shows that while their tracker is accurate for measuring sleep
it  **does not effectively improve sleep behavior**. For people to feel better
_sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient_.

 **RISE is not a sleep tracker.**  Our mission is to affect long-term behavior
change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is
what people want. And to do that, you need to make the feedback loop between
your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic
literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates
behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise
_Science_. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to
guide our product development.

It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested
millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify,
Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high
schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build
scientifically robust algorithms to help people live the best lives possible.

If you want to see it for yourself, [start a free
trial](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rise-track-sleep-circadian/id1453884781).

## The work we do next will determine our success

While we’re not an established category with hundreds of thousands of paid
subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. Our product works well, we have
tens of thousands of happy customers and a scalable path to impact more
people. We didn’t get lucky on product. We got here with a human-centered
product team. But **the work we do next** , together, will ultimately
determine how many lives we can improve and write the Rise Science story.

## Some challenges of working at Rise Science

  * You'll be our second product manager hire and have a lot of autonomy. _We aren't a long established company. If you enjoy building companies you'll enjoy it here._
  * You've got to be comfortable with ambiguity. _We don't have all the answers and we aren't always right—you're allowed to be wrong at Rise Science._
  * You'll have to balance both doing and thinking. _You'll have to both support the team as they build while also plan for what's next._
  * We are building a product together. Product, design, and engineering all sit at the same table and we are all listening to the user.  _If you like being on an integrated team and like actively collaborating with other disciplines, then there’s a good chance you’ll be happy._
  * We are a small team and rely heavily on each other but are also responsible for managing our own priorities. _You won't have a team of researchers and analysts and will be expected to do your own qualitative and quantitative digging, with help._

## What your days at Rise Science will look like and what success looks like:

Success is positively impacting more peoples' lives by: 5x our paid subscriber
base in 2021 on path to 3x it in 2022 in a cost efficient way.

You'll be responsible for getting new customers onboarded and helping them
make progress in their lives during their trial so they fall in love and
subscribe to RISE. You should have passion and skills in these areas:

  * Shipping features that help new users connect their problem to the value of a product soon after signing up and increase the rate at which users refer RISE to friends and family
  * Running A/B + multivariate experiments and coming up with an experimentation plan
  * Experience or familiarity with SaaS products and metrics
  * Conducting user interviews weekly
  * Comfortable with and enjoy digging in to data. That could be using product analytics tools, such as Amplitude, using Tableau and SQL with our data warehouse, or simply CSVs and Excel.
  * Driven by delivering real business results

### Within 1 month, you will...

  * Gain an understanding of our product, how it fits into our customers' lives, and the science behind sleep. We don't expect you to be an expert in sleep or health technology—we'll help you get there.
  * Try using RISE yourself to see it the way a customer does.
  * Handle customer support tickets to learn about the issues customers have with our product.
  * Begin forming a full-funnel picture of our product, and start identifying key gaps and opportunities.
  * Partner with the Head of Product (me) to set initial priorities and align on expectations for your role.
  * Start building relationships with engineers and designers on your product team as well as across the broader team.
  * Be familiar with key SaaS growth concepts such as CAC, LTV, etc, and be able to leverage these types of metrics to drive effective and impactful decision making.
  * Begin owning your team's weekly sprint process and performance against Growth KPIs.

### Within 3 months, you will...

  * Begin analyzing and creating new qualitative and quantitative research to start forming hypotheses about how our product can help improve customers' lives soon after installing our app.
  * Lead day-to-day product execution for your team delivering value to customers on a weekly basis. You’ll write briefs, validate designs, and organize releases.
  * Have run and evaluated A/B experiments to drive learnings and identify future opportunities.
  * Understand the engineering behind the RISE product well enough that you can predict some product trade-offs and ask your team productive questions.
  * Collaborate with team members focused on Marketing/Growth to align product and marketing strategies in order to create a cohesive user experience and maximize impact.
  * Facilitate 6-week roadmap planning for your team and represent the plan to the rest of the Rise Science team.

### Within 6 months, you will...

  * Build on your developing customer/industry expertise and take firm ownership of your team’s strategy. You will likely start identifying opportunities and generating hypotheses that the Rise Science team has not explored before.
  * See a high impact project through from start-to-finish. You’ll assume ownership for results of your team’s product releases and how you learn from them.
  * Start developing a deep understanding of quantitative and qualitative customer data.

### Within 12 months, you will...

  * Push your team to do its best work yet. You’ll know the team well and understand how to encourage them to do work the whole team and company is incredibly proud of.
  * Advance the craft of product management at Rise Science. You’ll set a good example and share what you’ve learned.
  * Be ready to take on new challenges to help your team and the broader product management organization—including things we likely haven’t anticipated yet!
  * Hire new Product Managers to support further growth.

## Some reasons you might like working with us

  * **You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives**. Each feature you launch and customer you interview will help more people become better at sleeping. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world.
  * You'll work with a **team that cares about the full customer experience**. We're not product first or acquisition first or outcomes first, we're led by our customers' needs and that means we need to be thoughtful about the entire journey our customers go through. Here's a [link to our values](https://www.notion.so/risescience/Rise-Team-Values-How-we-do-great-work-as-a-team-5e6bfd3dd9a14632ad659b499f0a1caf) that support quality work getting done. I'd encourage you to read them as they're a direct window into what your future team members care about.
  * More than anything else, we realize [life is short](http://paulgraham.com/vb.html). So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, **taking time for yourself and your family is essential**. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we're built on low sleep debt 😉
  * One of our core values is growth. That means every week, we'll talk about how we can help you grow. What skills, experiences, people can **help you get to your next career goal**. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.
  * You'll get a chance to perform in front of some of the top consumer health investors that backed teams at companies like Fitbit and Peloton—we're well funded.
  * You'll talk regularly with people whose lives you've changed.
  * If it's important to you, you'll also have a front row seat to all the ups and downs of company building (you'll be on of the first 10 employees).

### Compensation?

We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for
companies of our size and capital raised. I'll share up to date market data
with you so we're seeing the same data. We'll dig into specifics as soon as
it's a clear fit on both sides.

### Location?

US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. We’re a 100% distributed team (most
in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute
minimum. However, we often work semi-synchronously so it’s important to have
some solid workday overlap.

## If this sounds interesting, let's talk.

Instead of a cover letter, **email me at
[oddie@risescience.com]([mailto:oddie@risescience.com](mailto:oddie@risescience.com)?subject=Rise_Science_Lead_Product_Manager)
| Subject: 'Rise Science Lead Product Manager' and include your answers to the
questions below**. We value great writing and clear thinking. So take the time
you need. But no need to spend more than an hour or so.

  1. Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter? What surprised/excited you about the opportunity?
  2. Tell me about the most significant project you've led that drove conversion or product growth.
  3. What's your favorite app or software based onboarding process? Why?
  4. You're not always right with products and features. Tell me about a time that a feature didn't work. How did you find the root cause and what steps did you take?
  5. What gives you energy day-to-day about Product Management? And what do you find drains your energy the most?
  6. How do you approach developing and prioritizing ideas?
  7. What's your approach to deeply understanding our customer?

## What to expect next

I’ll hand review what you send. I’ll respond with either “I don’t think the
fit is here” or that we should move forward with the process. If we move
forward, here's what the rest of the process we'll use to learn together if
this is an amazing fit for you looks like.

  1. Interview: We meet over Zoom and cover some basics, then focus our conversation on questions about your past work and how it relates to what you’d be doing at Rise Science.

  2. Work Review: You've read the job letter and what we need you to do. During this conversation I'll ask you to walk through, in detail, how you've done this in a past job. I may invite a few team members to join.

  3. Work Simulation: We'll send over a take-home challenge that will let us simulate working together. This is designed to be similar to the type of work we do here at Rise Science. This stage should take no more than 2 hours total, and we'll both have a clear sense of how we work together by the end.

  4. Team Talks: At this stage we're incredibly excited about your potential with Rise Science. Get to know the team you'd be working with. You'll find time with 1-4 of your potential future team members. You will also spend time with our CTO and CEO talking about how Rise Science can support you on your personal journey.

