Senior Product Manager

Early-stage, a16z-backed bio-wearables startup looking to hire a Senior Product Manager to help us shape and execute on building wonderful experiences that will help our members realize their health goals.

We are a distributed and international team, but prefer United States time zones. Details about us, the role, and interview process are below.

Role Overview

Watch a video to learn more about the role from Scott Klein, our Head of Product, here.

Who We Are

Levels is an early-stage startup working to solve the metabolic health crisis. We're doing so by empowering individuals with continuous data about their glucose levels. Through Levels, people gain insight about the ways in which they can improve their metabolic health by optimizing diet and exercise.

If you want to know what we're all about, you should check out the following pieces of content from a few members of the co-founding team:

• The Secret Levels Master Plan – written by Sam Corcos (CEO)
• Broken Brain podcast – featuring Casey Means (Chief Medical Officer)
• The Kevin Rose Show – featuring Josh Clemente (Founder)

What We're Working On

Poor metabolic health is a risk factor for many diseases, and few people have the right tools to create tight, positive feedback loops with their diet and exercise. We've seen massive value of using wearables that provide real-time insights, including continuous glucose monitors, to create informed behavior change. Currently these devices are used primarily to treat disease; our mission is to expand access to this technology early, and pair it with insight-driven software, so that people can optimize their health behaviors before they reach clinical thresholds for disease.

We're still in the scrappy startup phase, so are looking for people who are comfortable with ambiguity and having wide impact. We've been distributed and remote-first since Day 1 (even pre-COVID!), and care a ton about communication, autonomy, curiosity, and initiative.

We've been running our beta program since early 2020 and have thousands of happy paying members who are using Levels to stabilize their energy levels, lose weight, optimize athletic performance, and learn strategies to reduce risk of chronic disease. Customer excitement has been off the charts. We're generating meaningful monthly revenue and are currently preparing for a public launch in 2022 (with more than 150,000 people on our waitlist).

Our team is highly experienced, and many team members have started and sold companies before. We love learning from each other and are looking for people who bring a new set of experiences and backgrounds to our team.

Role Overview

First and foremost, we're looking for someone who is excited about what we're doing—you don't need to to be an expert in metabolic health, but should be excited to learn and engage in the space.

As our Senior Product Manager, you will both shape and execute on building wonderful experiences that will help our members realize their health goals. This is a high impact role, as you'll have the opportunity to define the relationship with a wellness product that demonstrates how food and activity affect health in realtime. Working as a leader alongside our functional teams, you'll help a nimble and fast-moving startup impact millions of lives.

Product Managers come in many shapes and sizes, but we define them as being equal parts Product Shaper and Software Project Manager. You will be expected to transition between these activities fluidly based on the stage of the projects you’re leading. This role will also require you to be sufficiently technical (we don’t have Program Managers), at the very least to understand the general lifecycle of what it means to build and ship quality code.

🚀 We recently wrote an extensive piece about how we think about the role of a Product Manager, and their relationship to how we utilize Directly Responsible Individuals to help ensure we have great accountability and high decision velocity in a remote+async environment.

At minimum, you should read about the Shape-Ship-Sync and GM-Artist-Scientist frameworks we use to have a common language around activities and responsibilities as a PM here at Levels

Responsibilities

This role is most closely aligned with a GM-Artist archetype, and should be most comfortable taking features and internal projects from inception to delivery. Let’s dig in to specific activities...

Shape the product

• Talk directly with members to learn more about how they interact with the Levels ecosystem (application, community, media). Crystalize learnings into problems and opportunities.
• Work with design counterparts to envision, build, and test possible solutions with actual members. We value experimentation and exploration, staying as lean as possible during early product cycles.
• Work with engineering counterparts to estimate implementation costs, discuss alternative approaches, and make sure everyone is aware of the cost (and opportunity!) of introducing something new to the member base.
• Be a leader in advocating for the member above all else, constantly iterating and pushing the envelope to create amazing work.

Ship the product

• Write product briefs to communicate why we’re choosing to solve this particular problem, and tie it back to the emotional discovery in the Shape phase. You should be able to galvanize the team and get them excited.
• Understand how software is built, and be able to ladder into new things in a crawl-walk-run fashion. We value iteration and shipping velocity during the building phase.
• Communicate with teammates in support, marketing, and data, to get supporting documentation, launch comms, and analytics hooks embedded as part of the building phase.

Sync the people

• Report on project status, resourcing needs, timelines of near term launches. Communicate with senior team leaders to get additional help or buy-in as necessary.
• Translate initial hypotheses into learnings, member patterns, and actionable next steps after our member base starts to use the thing we built.
• Advocate for where we should be spending our time. This is where you should shine, balancing each opportunity against the others for the engineering time we have available.

Reference Content

• Product Manager & Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) Strategy - February 2022
• Joining the team at Levels Health
• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #52 - What is a Directly Responsible Individual? (Ben Grynol & Scott Klein) on Apple Podcasts
• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #75 - What is Product and what does a Product Manager do? (Sam Corcos & Lenny Rachitsky) on Apple Podcasts
• ‎LEVELS - A Whole New Level: #91 - From zero to one (Ben Grynol & Scott Klein) on Apple Podcasts
• Levels raises $12M from a16z and others to bring its biowearable to market

Requirements

Why you might be excited about us

1. We're solving a massive global problem and help people live healthier. If you're into health, wellness, fitness, and wearables, you'll love being part of our team and mission.
2. Our headcount is small and talent dense (~20 total in product group), so you'll be able to contribute efficiently and without bureaucracy. You'll quickly have responsibility over big areas of our company operations.
3. We don't have a ton of meetings. If we can effectively solve a problem asynchronously, we do. When we do meet synchronously, you'll always have the opportunity to contribute.
   1. Check out levels.link/meetings to learn more about the way we think about meetings
4. Our team has a wide range of global experience (Y Combinator, Google, Stanford, SpaceX, Uber, JustEat, Apple, Atlassian, etc) and are excited to learn from you, too.
5. You'll be able to work remotely and set your own schedule. We don't micro-manage and will create an environment in which you can do great work.
6. We'll mold your role to shape a career you're excited about. We care a ton about your satisfaction and job happiness, and will help prep you for whatever you're looking for in the future.
7. We work hard and also highly value balanced work/life. We care about family and your own personal development, and don't expect for you to always be engaged with work.

Why you might not be excited about us

1. We're still relatively small (~50 people total), so if you like more established companies, it's not (yet) the right time. You'll help build our company's culture.
2. Since we're an early stage startup, projects and priorities may shift.
3. Our customers love us, and there's a lot we can improve. It's a great place to be, but means there's some jank. (Nothing too scary! 😃)
4. Though we will always help you learn, we can't yet provide close mentorship—we're looking for someone who is already a leader.
5. Since you'll have a lot of responsibility and creativity over projects, they may not be defined perfectly initially. You'll be expected to bring your own experience and perspective to help us do the right things, and raise flags if you think we should do things differently.

Being Successful at Levels

Not all of these are hard requirements, but they do describe the kinds of people that we think would be most effective at Levels right now:

1. You're a builder at heart – you've built systems and scaled processes in the past from start to finish as functional leader within your company or organization
2. Ability to build a long term vision and plan, but also to be spontaneous and scrappy to execute it
3. Preference for ambiguity and open-ended problems for which you'll define the strategy. You love thinking broadly and creatively about problems and how to solve them efficiently
4. Passionate about data, technology, and feedback loops as a means to foster behavior change for better metabolic health
5. Worked on a remote or distributed team before, or strong interest in learning and adapting to a new style and culture of working
6. Enjoy thinking through trade-offs, with both mindfulness of short-term needs and our long-term direction

Being Successful as a Senior Product Manager

To be successful in this role, you should clearly identify with most of the following:

1. You’re an ardent defender of the user and their experience gaps first, and only consider solution space once you’ve established a firm bond with their experience using products that you build.
2. You've started from scratch in a product and know what it means to iteratively conceive, deliver, and polish a feature so that it lands.
3. You’re comfortable with long-form written communication, and can articulate complex subjects in ways that help your coworkers understand and build product to solve for
4. You're deeply invested in creating productive and healthy relationships with your cross-functional partners. Collaboration and excellent communication is one of your superpowers.
5. You understand common software development patterns, including the different types of characters involved to build and ship great code. You’ll also have good intuition to drive delivery timelines in an empathetic way.

Interview process

We want you at your best, and won't be giving you gotcha-style questions. We want to get to know you, hear about what you're interested in, and learn about what you hope to do in the future.

🎥 With your permission, we'll record most of our video calls in the interview process. This is part of our remote culture and helps those outside the interview loop get a glimpse of what you're about. It also helps us do our homework, so you don't have to repeat yourself on each call and we can pickup where we left off.

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1. Meet us and learn about Levels

You'll first talk to Sam Corcos on a 30-minute Zoom or audio call; you won't need to prepare anything in advance. The goal of this conversation is to get to know you and mutually explore if we might be a good fit for each other. You'll learn more about Levels and have a chance to ask any questions about our company, team culture, and product.

If we're both excited to continue, we'll send along a bunch of information about the company that you can go through on our own time. You'll then have the opportunity to chat with other people in our company to learn more about them and the company.

2. Technical conversation

You'll have a 45 min Zoom with Scott Klein to talk in depth about your work experience. The call will allow you to walk through your resume, and tell us about your approach to problem solving, how you think about process, your approach to working with other people and teams, and of course how you best interface with users. You won't need to prepare anything in advance.

This is primarily used to get a better feel for your past experience, how you work, and whether we might be a good fit for one another. It'll be used to design the rest of the interview process.

Through this and the next steps, you'll meet more people in the company so we can get to know each other.

3. Technical challenge

You'll have a take-home assignment that you will have a week or so to complete — instructions for the assignment will be sent at the time of the challenge. This will be an open-ended exercise that will allow you to share how'd you go about taking on this role at Levels given what you've learned so far in your career, and through conversations with us.

Following completion of the assignment, you can present your work to us through a recorded Loom, or on a Zoom if you prefer. Since we're a remote-first company, communication skills in this format are critical.

4. Additional team chats

First, we'll connect you with the functional leaders in design and development who you will be working closely with. Then, we’ll also connect you with 2-3 other co-founders and leaders in different areas of the business to give you a chance to learn more about the company, and give our team a chance to learn more about you and your background.

5. Reference conversations

We will talk to a few people you've worked with before to learn more about how we can best work with you. We expect to hear great things, so this is primarily so we can work with you as effectively as possible.

Applying

🎥 Excited to learn more and want to start the process? APPLY HERE.

We'll try to respond to most applications received within 48 hours. Please let us know if you have timing constraints. We'll try our best to respect your time through the process.

You can learn more about what we're up to by checking out:

1. Our company's blog to learn more about the space we're working in, where we write about metabolic health. We recommend The Levels Secret Master Plan to get a feel for our company vision and The Ultimate Guide to Metabolic Fitness for a primer on core concepts like glucose and metabolic health.
2. Our recent press covering our business and seed fundraise led by a16z (full announcement here) including The New York Times, TechCrunch, Men's Health, VentureBeat, Business Insider, and Fitt Insider. For a full list of press and media placements, go here.
3. User generated video content from enthusiastic early access customers: Why This Wearable is the Future of Fitness, How This Needle Improved My Diet, Levels Wearable Is Future of Dieting For Meditation, Weight Loss and Overall Fitness, and What a CGM Tells You About Your Metabolism.
4. Social media posts from customers documenting their results with Levels on Twitter and Instagram.
5. Recent publication regarding metabolic health and SARS-CoV-2 by our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Casey Means.
6. Podcast appearances: Broken Brain, The Kevin Rose Show, Diet Doctor Podcast, and many more here.
7. Podcast appearances: The Kevin Rose Show, Broken Brain with Dhru Purohit, The Pomp Podcast, Ben Greenfield Fitness, Wellness Mama, Bulletproof Radio

No recruiters or agencies, please. Thanks!

Benefits

Compensation & Benefits

You can see read more about our benefits (Work at Levels), which includes medical, dental, and vision insurance in addition to generous paid time off policies.

The compensation for this role includes salary, equity, and our employee benefits package. The target salary for this role is level dependent, and ranges from $195,000/yr - $235,000/yr, which may be adjusted higher or lower in exchange for less or more equity during the offer phase.

We determine our compensation using 90th percentile benchmark data from Carta for companies of our size & stage, based on the San Francisco / Bay Area market regardless of where in the world you live. You can read our transparent Levels Compensation Philosophy - November 2021.