Customer Success Manager

OverviewYard Stick is looking for a Customer Success Manager to help us fight climate change with soil. This will be an individual contributor role managing key customer success processes and relationships, with a focus on needs assessment, customer satisfaction and retention, and ongoing cross-functional project management. We are a small company with big ambitions, and therefore we need someone other-focused, entrepreneurially hungry, and exceptionally well-organized to ensure our customers and research partners love working with Yard Stick and continuing doing so for the long term.Yard Stick’s mission is clear: We must improve measurement if carbon removal via soils is to have meaningful climate impact. We have found great early success onboarding a portfolio of incredible customers, and we need a world-class teammate to expand our ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences and project execution.This role will report to Kelsey Chan, Yard Stick’s Head of Growth and Strategic Partnerships, and can be based anywhere in continental US time zones. It will include modest but fulfilling travel (semiannual all-company onsites, intermittent visits to customer projects) and market-rate salary and equity.This is a dream job for someone who is detail-oriented, customer-loving, has fun rolling with the punches as circumstances evolve, and wants to apply their expertise in a rapidly-growing startup with strong fundamentals and literal planetary-scale impact. This is a nightmare job for someone who has to be told what to do and isn’t comfortable “getting in the weeds”.We’d like to hire this person to start in Summer 2024.About Yard Stick PBCYard Stick is a remote-first climate tech startup with cofounders based in Boston, MA and Oakland, CA. We are on a mission to reverse climate change with agriculture. Scientists and farmers alike know that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric CO2 at gigaton/year scale. When these practices are adopted, more carbon is stored in soils, improving soil health and fighting climate change. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon efforts back - until now.By reducing the cost of soil carbon measurement by 70-90%, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer income, and combat climate change. Current soil carbon measurement technologies are slow, expensive, and cumbersome, relying on conventional soil cores and labs to quantify carbon stocks. In contrast, Yard Stick is fast and cheap - without sacrificing accuracy. As a testament to our technology’s potential, alongside our scientific collaborators, we were awarded $18M across six USDA Climate-Smart Commodities projects, and we have additional grant financing from ARPA-E, NSF, CDFA, and other discerning grant-makers. We’ve also raised another nearly $18M from top climate VCs, including Toyota Climate Venture Fund, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates’ climate fund), Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Extania, Pillar VC, MCJ Collective… the list goes on!For more background, check out some coverage of Yard Stick in TechCrunch, Fast Company, and AgFunder.We offer competitive salary and equity (benchmarked to 75th percentile of high-growth US tech compensation), health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have many team members with young families and have a strong track record of creative, flexible approaches to hours and communication expectations which let folks feel great about their commitments both to Yard Stick and their lives outside of work. We’re also a PBC, or public benefit corporation, which is an alternative corporate structure which protects our ability to prioritize climate impact over profits if the two are in conflict. You can read more about PBCs in this article which also features Yard Stick.About The RoleThis role will be the key dot connector to ensure that all customers get exactly what they need, when we promise it, and then some.Previously, Yard Stick’s Sales and Customer Success functions sat within the same team. The result was an easy transition between project contracting and execution, and an incredible starting book of customers spanning commercial and R&D goals. Yard Stick is growing fast, and as our project reach and offerings have expanded, we now have the need for dedicated Sales and Customer Success functions to provide the highest quality of service for our growing customer base. It’s time to bring on a team member to extend Yard Stick’s capacity while significantly influencing our overall strategic direction of our Customer Success function. The Customer Success Manager will split their time between ongoing project management of key accounts (e.g. deeply understanding customer needs and requirements and bringing the right team members together to execute projects), and leading overall customer success strategy (e.g. honing the customer journey, translating customer insights into product improvements, ensuring just as seamless a handoff between Sales and Customer Success as when both were done by the same team). This role will start as an individual contributor working alongside another customer success teammate. Based on business needs and performance in the role, the Customer Success Manager may have the opportunity to elevate to take on people management responsibilities as the team grows. Qualifications (Must Have)Demonstrated skill owning and nurturing customer relationships. You love getting on the phone with somebody to understand their needs. You’re engaging, personable, and other-focused. You read people well and take pleasure in probing to understand their motivations, expectations, and fears. You can articulate Yard Stick market hypotheses well, receive and provide feedback, and capture and share insights compellingly with an extended team, especially via written formats. You’ll enthusiastically follow a customer through the process of kicking off a project together, managing day-to-day operations, and growing our support of their work over time. The buck stops with you to ensure Yard Stick delivers on its commitments; you’ll coordinate the right internal resources at the right time to make sure customers get what they need and will nimbly adapt to find solutions as projects move through the customer journey. When you’re on point, nobody will ever wonder, “Hey, where’s [file X]?” - you seamlessly manage complex information to benefit both Yard Stick and customer stakeholders alike.Absolute comfort managing complex, cross-functional projects. Customer engagements at Yard Stick bring together various components of work from our multi-disciplinary team and therefore depend on strong project management and coordination to execute successfully. You are someone who can systematically keep track of a multitude of project details, timelines, and stakeholder needs. You are skilled at giving direction to cross-team members who you don’t directly manage, and are able to effortlessly sus out the relative priority of tasks at hand and communicate this to teams you work with to provide great customer experiences and project outcomes. You expertly hold teammates accountable to clear commitments and great work even though they don’t report to you.Exceptional written communication. This is critical for working with our customers, and also for effectively collaborating remotely with cross-functional teams at Yard Stick. In this role, you will be the key translator of customer needs and questions back to the other teams at Yard Stick to help inform priorities of what we build next and set customer expectations. Whether it's developing an informational one-pager for customers, laying out software spec for a new feature, or explaining a decision made on a particular pilot via Slack, you should be comfortable with clear written communication. Comfort being a generalist and ability to learn quickly and problem solve as necessary. IDEO talks about “T-shaped people” - you’ve got some domain expertise which you’ll gladly deploy as needed, but you’re an excellent collaborator in all circumstances. You’re rarely held back by considering something “your job” or not and you learn quickly when confronted with new systems/information/domains. When you have to Google something, you’re top-quintile smart about it with only an hour or two or self-directed learning. This skill will be especially crucial when leading projects that are custom or first-of-their-kind. You will be one of the key collaborators in designing new execution models and processes.Strong personal independence and entrepreneurial attitude. You are known for finding ways to get stuff done well and are always thinking about the “so what” in any situation. You don’t sit around waiting for your boss to answer a question, but rather get it done one way or another with what you’ve got. You assess the situation, consider solutions, make a plan, and execute. You tend to be way out ahead of everybody else and anticipate others’ needs well.Strong ability to organize information well. Since you’ll often be the only person with a specific piece of information or experience, documenting, interpreting, and sharing it well is paramount. Doubly so since Yard Stick is a remote-first company. You’re a little obsessed with folder organization and file naming conventions, and you love setting up lightweight systems to make sure everybody can see the right stuff at the right time without always asking you for help. You can get a mushy set of data dumped on you and sort through it quickly and efficiently to identify what really matters.Personal, durable enthusiasm for the challenge of climate change. It matters to you that you’re working on a problem of existential significance. You get fired up by the fact that your work can help avoid others’ suffering. You’re briefly overwhelmed by the scale of the problem... and then you’re right back in the ring doing your part.Qualifications (Nice To Have)Instinctive motivation to connect insights to strategy. When you learn something about a stakeholder, you can’t help but think about what that means for Yard Stick. You’re constantly interrogating Yard Stick’s worldview against what you’re learning in the “real world.” When you’ve got data you believe in, you’re not afraid to confront senior leadership’s opinions with conflicting evidence that may require an adjustment to the company’s plans and activities. And vice versa: When Yard Stick’s leadership makes a commitment to a given strategy, you’ll flow it through your day-to-day interactions in a way that makes sense to a wide variety of customer archetypes.Mature understanding of “business fundamentals.” You like learning about how and why people make money, and you have an innate curiosity regarding markets. You probably don’t have any experience in “finance,” but the big picture of how money moves around and why is something you love learning about and discussing with others. Bonus points for any basic knowledge of offsets, carbon markets, and other business models which connect explicitly to climate change.Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and InclusionYard Stick’s impact goals go well beyond climate science. Why? Our company operates primarily in the US agricultural sector, which is predicated on centuries of mass land theft and disenfranchisement of Native and Black people. This harm continues today. If we’re going to work in this sector, we need to leave it better than we found it.Consistent with our core value of “Pursue Justice,” we speak up about these issues, and we support emerging solutions and relevant policy efforts such as H.R.40 and S.300. We also publicly highlight the risk of further racial discrimination in emerging agricultural legislation like the Growing Climate Solutions Act and in press coverage ensure that the discrimination in past and present US agriculture is part of the conversation right alongside more typical topics like who our customers are, or how our tech works.Regarding hiring and culture, we work to create a work environment where everyone feels confident sharing their ideas, problem-solving happens openly and collaboratively, and mistake-making is welcomed. We’ve recently organized lunchtime all-team discussions on issues like labor equity in Florida produce, Pigford v. Glickman (the largest US civil rights settlement in history), and other contemporary moral concerns in agriculture. When hiring, we standardize our interview process and questions to reduce “likeability” bias, benchmark salaries against industry databases to reduce negotiation, and utilize tools like the Gender Decoder (this one is feminine-coded, fwiw). Climate change is arguably the most complex challenge ever faced by humanity - we need all of humanity activated to fight back, and that motivates us to build a diverse team.