What are we working on at Rise Science?
The short answer: we exist to give all people the energy to make the most of life.
Our current product, RISE, is mobile app designed to help everyone with a phone master their energy. Weâre in the business of giving our customers energy. When we stay focused on that need, customers are happy.
It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep. However, the tools available today are focused on speciality niches. Some are trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others measure every physiological asepct your sleep (like Fitbit, Whoop, & Oura). While those businesses have executed very well theyâre relevant for maybe ~15% of the population.
Weâve always believed thereâs a significantly larger opportunity for impact by focusing on what the vast majority of us want: more energy. We all want more energy. Just last year, consumers spent a trillion dollars on caffeine alone. A trillion dollars on a drug that gives us a short-high. We believe people want real energy. We believe that people are changing how they view their health and turning to much healthier, scientifically sound solutions.
When youâre squarely focused on the need for more energy you design a much different solution than what exists. Rather than helping you fall asleep or track your sleep with hardware, our app uses behavioral data from phone to analyze how much sleep debt you have and your circadian rhythm so you can forecast exactly how much energy youâll have during the day and manage your energy.
It allows for some powerful use-cases: **
Itâs taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. Weâve invested millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter) and have millions of nights of data from 1m+ users - from 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.
Your challenge is helping more people have confidence to give Rise a try. In 2021 we had 1 million people install RISE. 200k started a trial. Your job is to ultimately increase the percent of folks who install that start a trial with us. To do that, youâll need to help our new installers to feel incredibly confident RISE will help them take control of their sleep and energy.
Doing this well wonât be one of those jobs you can coast and get by. Youâll need to be ready to build. But if you put 8 hours a day of solid work, and youâre the right fit, youâll directly improve the lives of millions of people in 2022.
Hereâs why you might not be a fit:
Weâve learned our day to day environment is unique. If you feel super confident about these three areas, we should talk. If not, you wonât find success in the role:
Customer problems start out fuzzy. About ~50% of the time there arenât clear patterns in similar products. If youâre not an expert in collaborating with engineers and PMs to go from fuzzy to clear testable solution youâll spin your wheels and will feel unproductive.
Youâll need to design polished consumer experiences quickly, without a well established, robust design system. If youâre more comfortable moving fast when working from a well established, robust design system youâre going to struggle in this role. If you canât expertly and quickly build your own sensible patterns and components for native mobile, youâll feel behind. The impact to the business is that visual and interaction issues will show up clearly in the quant data which slows down progress.
The area of sleep and human energy is complex. If you arenât naturally relentless in teaching yourself, going deep on problems, digging into peer-reviewed research and books, youâll struggle to develop useful and novel solutions. We expect our product teams to become the subject matter experts. We donât lean on a board of advisors or internal sleep scientists to make day to day product decisions.
Company culture and stage
Mediocre performance results in generous severance. At our size, we can only afford to keep our highly effective people. The upside of this is that youâre working with others who are performing at a really high level.
We encourage the people making, to make the decisions. Our core philosophy is that we value great people over process and we trust you to make informed decisions.
Progress and growth every day matters. If you struggle to unblock yourself quickly when youâre stuck, ask for help, receive constructive feedback, or arenât extraordinarily candid, you should consider another company.
We are building a product together. Product, design, engineering all sit at the same table, and we are all listening to the user. If you donât find yourself inspired by non-designers or itâs difficult for you to let go of your idea, youâre not going to be happy here.
We donât have all the answers. If you donât enjoy being in the uncomfortable space of not knowing and figuring out how to learn the answer, this isnât for you.
We avoid rules and believe in people over process. If you do your best work in a process-driven, rules-based environment and get uncomfortable that we rely on good judgement, you wonât be happy at Rise.
Youâll have every resource you need to do your best work.
Youâll be part of a dedicated empowered team thats focused on the same problem you are. That means you can maximize your time focusing on discovering the right problems to solve. And then solve it well. No other fluff. You and Kellie own the strategy and have the engineering resources to build and learn quickly. Hereâs a quick run-down of who youâre working with:
Kellie runs product management. Sheâll be your partner on end-to-end shipping: strategy, customer discovery, solutions & analytics. Before Rise, Kellie was a psychology researcher in stress and emotions and led mobile app growth at Wayfair.
Greg leads backend and decided to end his PhD in cell biology to write software. Working at a science-based company is his dream job.
Graham leads front-end. Before falling in love with front-end, he produced gangster rap beats.
Youâll have data to learn incredibly quickly. Weâve instrumented our whole product for doing high quality research. Need 5 people that installed but didnât start a trial to test a prototype? We can get them on zoom in 24 hours. Youâll also know how your solutions impacted customer behavior. We ship every new feature as a randomized controlled trial. This means you can see how your solution is working leading to much better and faster iterations. Lastly, youâre not starting from scratch. We know quite a bit about who these customers are and why theyâre not starting trials.
Design works well at Rise. Jason, who heads our design function, has been designing interfaces professionally since 1998. He was at Rise in 2018 when it was bunch of ideas cobbled together and his work has enabled us to go from 0 to 1m+ installs last year. Heâs an expert. A rare breed that has done it all. Leading big teams, being the principal designer, deep in product, deep in marketing. You get the idea. Youâll get to learn directly with him. This means thereâs no problem youâll run into that he wonât be able to guide you through. Youâll find heâs selfless, low ego and kind.
Here are the cultural reasons we love working at Rise:
Youâll do work most days that will directly improve peopleâs lives. Each pixel you move, every word you type, will help more people feel better and be more productive. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the worldâs health, happiness, productivity, and longevity. Youâll talk regularly with people whose lives youâve changed.
Youâll work with a team where human-centered design is the center of how we develop our product and business. IDEO was our first investor and I did my Masterâs in Don Normanâs human-centered design program.
Youâll collaborate with Jason, who heads design, to continue the work of developing an effective and efficient design system for use across marketing and product. As a design team of two, youâll shape the practice at Rise Science.
One of our core values is growth. That means every week; weâll 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 successful, it has to be a great big step in the right direction for your career, not just a job.
If entrepreneurship is interesting to you, youâll also have a front-row seat to all the company buildingâs ups and downs. Your work will be in front of some of the top consumer health investors and operators that backed and worked at teams at companies like Fitbit and Peloton.
More than anything else, we realize that life is short. So even though weâre solving an unthinkably large problem, taking time for yourself and your family is essential. Without it, we donât believe you can live your best life and do your lifeâs work. And of course, weâll get your sleep in order. ð
FAQs
Who will I report to? Youâll technically report to me. Iâll have hiring and firing decisions. Jason is the design functional lead. Heâs responsible for coaching you on how to be successful at Rise, evolving our design culture, and if a tie-breaker is needed, making the final call on a conflicting decision.
Why isnât Jason hiring for this role since heâs head of design? Company building is a team sport. Jason has critical product opportunities heâs focused on and my job is maximizing his focus on that. Heâll be playing a key decision role in the interview process and of course someone youâd want to work with.
What seniority is needed for the role? Language around seniority is misleading. So whatâs most important is that when you read what would disqualify you, you can point to evidence of how youâd do well in our environment. Years of experience also isnât a great metric. Jason has been doing this for 23 years. But if youâve got 5 and you have the talent, this could be a great opportunity.
What are the career growth paths? It really depends on what you want which is something Iâll work with you on. When we all do our jobs really well, it creates more opportunity for more talented people to come on board.
Compensation? We know great talent deserves to get paid well in cash and equity. We donât share ranges at this stage because we donât know what skills youâre coming in with and donât want to disqualify you depending on your needs. Once we have an idea weâll share our comp dataset with you so we see the same data. Weâre not Facebook or Google but weâre confident that weâll meet your financial needs.
Location? US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. Weâre a 100% distributed team (most in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute minimum. However, we work semi-synchronously collaborating on zoom so itâs important to have 4+ hours overlap with US eastern time.
What youâll need to be successful: Expertise in interaction design: You think in flows, not just static screens. Youâve been making it effortless for people to move around consumer applications for many years. Other designers respect your interaction skills and tap you for advice.
Expertise in user-centered design methods: Customer feedback is an inspiration and something you crave to keep your creative juices flowing. You use iterations to maximize your opportunities for feedback. You know what needs to be learned, how to put together a discussion guide, facilitate the session and synthesize the findings.
Good visual design fundamentals: Making the right typography choice or reworking a layout to optimize clarity is effortless for you. You know how to apply a style guide effectively but also know when to extend beyond it.
Competent writer: Youâve solved design problems with words and designed with content.
Skills and experience that separate you from your peers
Several years of mobile design experience Data visualization chops Worked on products that design for behavior change Motion design experience Effective across a wide range of design tools If this sounds interesting, letâs talk. Instead of a cover letter, email me at jeff@risescience.com | Subject: âLead Product Designerâ and include your answers to the questions below. We appreciate thoughtful responses, but please donât spend more than an hour.
Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter?
Think about your current or last job. When itâs time for me to talk with your boss what would they rate your performance 1-10? Why? What were you hired to do?
Weâd love to understand the relevant work youâve done. If you have a tidy portfolio, feel free to send the link/pdf it will help us speed things up. If you donât have a portfolio, youâll need to get creative.
What can you send us that would give us confidence youâve got the relevant skills? Weâll be going deep on your work in our 2nd conversation so donât spend too much time here.
What to expect Next Iâll hand review what you send. Iâll respond with either âI donât think the fit is hereâ or that we should move forward with the process. If we move forward, hereâs the rest of the process weâll use to learn together if this is an amazing fit for you:
45 min Interview: We meet over Zoom to meet each other and decide if spending more time together makes sense. Your time is valuable and we donât want to waste it.
60 mins Work Review: Youâve read the job letter and what we need you to do. During this conversation Iâll ask you to walk through, in detail, how youâve done this in a past job. I may invite a few team members to join.
Paid Work Simulation: Weâll 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 3 hours, and weâll both have a clear sense of how we work together by the end.
Team Talks: At this stage weâre incredibly confident that the role will be great for you. Get to know the team youâd be working with. Youâll find time with 1-4 of your potential future team members.
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