Product Manager Jobs at Nori

Tl;dr

Do you want to lead product decision-making that will help Nori and our industry scale to gigatons of carbon removal capacity and contribute to solving climate change? We’re looking for a product manager to own the vision, roadmap, and execution on the supply side of our marketplace. Demonstrated experience in small organizations where you’ve balanced planning and research with hands-on engagement in execution is a must.

About Nori

We’re a team of believers. We believe that humanity can stop and even reverse climate change by removing over 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. How do we get people to remove that much carbon at scale? Pay them! Nori’s marketplace is the infrastructure that creates the financial incentive for people and companies to remove massive amounts of CO2 from the air.

Nori is a venture-backed and highly values-oriented company. Our focus is on people and planet. We’re composed of a diverse set of people with complementary skillsets, all unified in the mission of restoring the world’s atmospheric carbon balance back to 300ppm.

We strongly suggest that you read in detail about our company values and mission at https://nori.com/careers.

About the role

You’ll be the Product Manager charged with the supply enrollment product area, solving problems for our suppliers (anyone who can verifiably remove and store CO2 from the atmosphere). Supply enrollment is a critical area of the business – demand for carbon removals will always outpace available supply making supply enrollment a key bottleneck to Nori’s growth. Right now, supplier onboarding, specifically the capture of historical and projected future farming practice data, represents the bulk of the surface area of Nori’s software product. Nori began its journey with soil-based removals on US-based croplands but this will quickly expand to include other locations and methodologies.

You’ll work closely with the leadership team and supply team stakeholders to establish a roadmap and success metrics and by Q3 you’ll have a full product team to collaborate with to reach those goals.

Collaboration with our Product designer on customer discovery and user testing will be a key ongoing aspect of the role. There will also be a variety of partnerships with third party data sources and carbon quantification services that you will partner with the head of engineering on cultivating and implementing.

Who You’ll Work With

You’ll be a core member of the Product team at Nori. You’ll be embedded in the supply-focused cross-functional product delivery team (UX, Engineering, QA). Additionally, you will work very closely with stakeholders in the supply and methodology teams. You will collaborate closely with our technical project manager and the marketplace PM in areas where the two product areas intersect. You will also communicate often with executive leadership to establish the strategy and priorities of the Product team over the short and long term.

Each of these teams work a little bit differently, but they work hand in hand with each other to create an inventory of verified carbon removals that can be sold through our marketplace.

The Product Team

The Product Team is responsible for the Nori marketplace, supply-side enrollment app, marketing website, and any of the technical/software aspects of Nori’s work. We are actively expanding the product team to build out a second marketplace product squad. The Product team works with the other teams—Supply, Sales, and Communications—to support business development needs.

The Supply & Methodology Teams

The Supply team works with Nori Suppliers: anyone who can verifiably remove and store CO2 from the atmosphere. The Methodology team works on developing the requirements for how projects are enrolled (see current methodology). Both teams report to the Head of Supply and Methodology. As Nori’s current focus is on our Croplands Methodology, the Supply team is working with farmers as well as the partners and companies around them to enroll croplands into the Nori market.

The Demand Team

The Demand team sells carbon. Specifically they sell Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs) to B2B customers as well as through partnerships with other companies, like NFT marketplaces and carbon footprint companies. They stay in tight communication with the Supply team about how much inventory they will have to work with. And they partner with the Communications team around how to get marketing messaging out, and create new content for presenting to potential customers and partners.

The Communications and Marketing Team

The Comms and Marketing team produces and hosts our two podcasts, Reversing Climate Change and Carbon Removal Newsroom, as well as manages all our marketing and social media channels.

Five Key Aspects of the Role

• Learning / Discovery - You will be expected to go deep on understanding the carbon removal landscape, the companies and methodologies involved, and especially the soil-based removal practiced by farmers. You will share this knowledge with the product teams regularly and use your insights to identify the most pressing problems impacting our supplier’s experience.

• Customer Centricity - You should be able to represent the customer perspective in all aspects of work such as product decision making to company meetings. Nori needs to collect a significant amount of data from each of the farmers we work with. This is currently a source of friction and frustration for all parties involved. The upshot of that is that there’s an abundance of opportunity to improve on and simplify the enrollment process.

• Limit work in progress of the Supply Product team. You will be responsible for prioritizing the supply product roadmaps while simultaneously working to preserve the focus of the product team and limit distractions for them. There is a long list of good ideas and nice-to-haves, and even must-haves, but it is your responsibility to make sure that the team is limiting its work in progress and meeting their goals.
• Be open and seek cross-functional collaboration. While you will be a member of the Product team and working primarily within that framework, you will be expected to collaborate closely with other internal teams. Nori is an innovative company on a number of fronts, there is no template or body of prior experience for the work we’re doing. Your role will include facilitation, curation and filtering of a diversity of perspectives and ideas from inside and outside the company.

You’ll Be Responsible For…

• Working with both internal and external stakeholders to make decisions about what gets built next. Planning out a flexible roadmap that meets both Nori’s strategic goals, as well as continuously improving our users’ experiences. In particular, you will be partnering with the Supply Program Manager to plan out the overall roadmap and goals for the Product team.
• Clearing obstacles for the Product team
• Acting as liaison to our external partners who are helping bring in Supply and informing overall product requirements
• Limiting work in progress and keeping the Product team moving forward on current goals
• Crafting and maintaining our product vision for the Supply-side components of the Nori marketplace and app.
• Partnering with our UX designer to conduct user research and synthesize results with the goals of simplifying and optimizing suppliers’ experience with our app

Must-haves

• A proven track record as a Product Manager or related role translating customer needs into product realities and shipping software.
• Experience working hands-on with Agile software development teams to provide direction, set priorities and define requirements that bring new features to life.
• Experience owning the vision and roadmap of a product area, measuring the product impact and communicating that impact internally and externally.

Nice-to-haves

• Deep experience with two-sided marketplaces
• Experience working in a startup environment
• Agriculture experience

Key outcomes and metrics

• Team and company progress is measured in monthly OKRs
• Total projects enrolled and NRTs enrolled in the marketplace
• Total time to enroll a project, and total time for farmer to input data for enrollment
• Customer satisfaction metrics as it relates to product

You’ll be a good culture fit here if you can...

• Handle a steep learning curve
• Know what it takes to build and ship enterprise-grade software
• Work with abstract ideas and requirements to create something more concrete
• Contribute to an environment where the Product team can be effective in accomplishing sprint deliverables
• Respond to team dynamics with a focus on continuous improvement
• Ensure a good relationship between the Product team and internal stakeholders
• Know how to measure progress meaningfully
• Stay playful and light without taking things too seriously or personally
• Limit work in progress and stay focused on the current goal

Key challenges in this role

There is a lot of ambiguity in what we’re building, and it’ll be up to you to work with the appropriate internal stakeholders to sort through all the concerns and suggested requirements to make sure we’re still hitting our deliverables. You will also be dealing with multiple teams, each with their own stakeholders, and each with their own opinion on what should or should not be included in requirements. You must have a strong sense of self to navigate these waters and lead teams to clarity on what will or will not be implemented in a sprint. There are a lot of educated and strong opinions inside Nori, and it’s your job to synthesize all those into something we can build.

What’s the payoff for all this hard/fun work?

You’re not just working at some mobile ads startup—you’re directly helping build products to reverse climate change. Here are some of the non-cash benefits we offer:

• 100% of health, dental, and vision benefits covered for you and dependents
• Four weeks of PTO, up to five after a year of service
• Paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s off every year
• 12 weeks of parental leave
• 401k with 3% company match
• Stock options
• NORI tokens
• Relocation assistance, if necessary

Beyond those measurable benefits, we also think this is just a really fun place to work:

• You’ll get to work with experts in carbon sequestration and marketplace economics who are defining a new industry.
• There is a steep learning curve here, and for people who get excited by that, there’s no better place to be.
• We have a lot of fun in our office, keep a well-stocked pantry and fridge, and generally like each other’s company. Happy hours in Ballard happen regularly!

Logistics

We are committed to in-person work in our Ballard neighborhood office in Seattle and look forward to meeting you there.

The expected salary range for this role is between $135,000 to $153,000, depending on experience. We use detailed benchmarking tools to establish salary and equity offers, and everyone at the company is paid in the 55th percentile for their experience and role. For this reason, we’re transparent about what we can pay you, and we don’t negotiate on compensation.