Blackbird is hiring a Product Operations Specialist

Blackbird's Founder Success team has built a number of MVP programs and products that are now ripe for scaling, and we are now looking for an organised operator to join our small but mighty team to help us build the infrastructure that underpins these initiatives.

We’ll be looking to you to optimise some of our current processes and completely overhaul others across our key community products - the Blackbird Founder Academy, Giants and the Talent Network.

Although this role is systems-first, we’re also looking for someone interested in upskilling in customer and community experience. Everything the Founder Success team at Blackbird is building is to serve our community of founders, operators, and mentors. Your technical abilities will be complemented by your desire to create incredible community experiences and put people at the centre of your work.

This role has now closed

About The Role

This role calls for a hyper-organised person who's excited by building on a combination of new tools, quickly becoming a superuser and evangelising them to the rest of the Founder Success team.

Some of the tools we currently use include Canva, Airtable, Asana, Zoom, Zapier and Notion - you don’t need to know all of these but need to be willing to jump in and discover how to best use them for our needs, plus introduce us to new platforms and ways of working.

You'll be working with our Head of Community, Dani, our Community and Communications Manager, Mel and our People Lead, Nell. You will be the engine that keeps our Founder Success programs running, and will quickly become our go-to person for optimising and scaling our Founder Success products to create delightful experiences for our community members. Some of the community programs you will work across include:

• Giants: Early-stage founder 1:1 mentoring, founder knowledge-sharing and networks
• Blackbird Founder Academy:A cohorted program helping our portfolio to level up
• Talent Network:A platform connecting our portfolio’s open roles with talented people ready for a career move

If you love digging into the details of workflows, improving systems, testing out new tech and building in public, we want to hear from you.

These are the key responsibilities of the role

Program infrastructure building: We currently use Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Zoom, Asana and Circle - you don’t have to know all of them, but you need to be willing to learn and get joy out of optimising how we use these platforms and new ones.

Systems and automations: You’ll be in charge of automating processes across all programs and products. This means you’ll be comfortable with platform integrations, and upgrading workflows to our programs in the service of creating an awesome UX for our communities.

Data Analytics: Setting up and driving analytical insights - what is humming and optimising it. You’ll ensure our biggest goals are measurable, tracked and optimised at every stage.

Supercharged organisation: You’ll coordinate content and videos across our programs and turn them into resources platforms for Giants and Academy.

Programs comms triaging: You’ll help us upgrade our communications operations for our programs, including our program outreach and event communications through better systems and automations.

Skills we are looking for

We’re looking for someone as passionate as us about building an iconic investment business, and joining Blackbird’s Founder Success team. It’s our team's mission to supercharge ANZ’s most ambitious founders right at the beginning. We do this through creating programming and products for founders and operators in our portfolio and the ecosystem. You must have a high ownership mentality and the ability to take responsibility for goals and outcomes. This is a full-time role based in Sydney or Melbourne.

Recent graduates will be considered for the role alongside candidates with commercial experience.

Your background is less important than the key skills, which include:

Analytical: You will relish analysing and interpreting data to synthesise key insights and know-how to surface these insights to help optimise our programming.

Internal stakeholder management: You’ll be splitting your time across programs which means you’ll need great communication skills and a high level of organisation.

Tools:One of your superpowers include discovering new platforms and tools and being a heavy user of integrations that link these types of apps and tools together. You will have non-negotiable experience with Airtable, Notion, Zoom.

Process-driven: You’ll be detail-oriented and will hunt out inefficiencies with ninja-like aptitude.

Learn-it all: The only limits are the ones you put on yourself. We’ll encourage you to up-skill in customer experience and product management and support you to take on more ownership in line with your development.

Product Mindset: Can you scale it exponentially (rather than linearly)? Things that are scalable: culture, communities, protocols, languages, directories, playbooks, software etc. Things that are not scalable: service relationships.

Hospitality Mindset: In our dealings with founders and investors, we take a hospitality mindset. We serve our founders, not the other way around. We are about people, not companies. Similarly, we treat our colleagues with generosity and respect: one team, one dream.

Working at Blackbird

We believe that building a diverse and inclusive team is critical to Blackbird’s success. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. We use Applied to ensure every applicant gets an equal chance of success.

Our June 2020 half-year Culture Amp engagement score is 95.

We offer:

• Flexible working: Whether it’s working from home or leaving early to pick up the kids from daycare or school.
• Generous parental leave: We know family comes first and we are proud to offer generous parental leave - 16 weeks for primary carer and 6 weeks for a secondary carer, subject to a 12-month minimum tenure. This includes a continuation of KiwiSaver payments while on unpaid parental leave and a supportive return-to-work policy.
• Learning & Development Budget: Our team is hungry to continuously learn and you’ll receive a budget to spend on whatever you’d like to learn - from coding courses to meditation, to enable your continued learning & self-development.
• Unplugged weekends: We work hard without letting work get in the way of life. We’ve implemented no Slack or emails on weekends, so you can switch off and enjoy yourself.
• A share of Blackbird’s success: We think it is important to share successes with the whole team. All Blackbird employees receive carry in our funds and are owners in the management company.

Blackbird is a Pledge 1% member — we pledge 1% of our time, equity and profits to help not-for-profit causes in our community, with a focus on greater gender diversity in STEM education.

About Blackbird

Blackbird is a venture capital fund based in Australia and New Zealand. We invest in every type of technology from software to space, unified by the biggest of ambitions. We invest in wild hearts with the wildest of ideas, right at the beginning. We invest in wild hearts with the wildest of ideas, right at the beginning. As a result, we have a unique working culture, captured in our Mission & Values and our Operating Principles.

We have more than a billion dollars under management and a portfolio of over 70 companies including some of the most successful Australian and Kiwi startups such as Canva, Zoox, SafetyCulture, Ask Nicely, Halter and Partly.

We’ve written a lot about what we love at Blackbird, so check out our blog if you want some more information about us. In particular, you should read about our mission and values, our master plan, and what we look for in founders.

Good Luck!