Chief of Staff

About Motion

Project management systems today are great at letting companies record their tasks, but place all of the burden on human project coordinators. These tools don’t know about the team’s time and resources and don’t have any intelligence — someone has to manually match tasks against their assumptions about the team’s capacity. Not only does this process waste precious company resources, it’s also error-prone and leads to overwork, missed deadlines, miscommunication, and micromanagement.

Motion is building the world’s most intelligent project management system — one that doesn’t require a project coordinator manually tracking each task, but rather an intelligent system that can make sense of hundreds of tasks across dozens of projects and automatically coordinate them across every person on the team. Motion allows companies to focus on the work they need to do rather than wasting up to 50% of their resources on overhead.

Our users give us data on their workload (e.g. projects and tasks) and resources (employee roles, calendars, and schedules). Based on all this information, Motion makes intelligent decisions about how tasks should be executed — better than any human project coordinator. Teams that use Motion know what people are working on at any given time, when each task will be completed, and whether any tasks will fall behind schedule. The moment something changes, instead of the coordinator having to figure out all the cascading effects, Motion instantly creates a new optimized plan for the team.

Motion is the project management system of the future. We are growing extremely quickly, trusted by thousands of customers, have millions in revenue, near-infinite runway, and an exceptionally talented team. Most of Motion's 30 employees work in engineering, and the majority of those in business and operations roles also have technical skills.

About the Hiring Manager

Hi, I’m Ethan, Motion’s Co-Founder and COO. I truly believe that exceptional companies are built by exceptional teams, and at Motion I’m trying to build the most talented team that’s ever been assembled. Before starting Motion, I began my career as a software engineer at WhatsApp and Facebook, where I saw firsthand how tiny teams can achieve outsized outcomes and learned how great tech companies operate at scale. I was a consultant at McKinsey, where I learned about business and operational best practices. Finally, I joined the world of quantitative trading at Citadel and DRW, where I learned how to compete in the world’s most competitive profession, and built a trading desk from scratch where I evaluated and hired traders making 7-figures. These experiences taught me a lot about what world-class teams and operations look like, and when I started Motion I wanted to build something even greater.

At Motion, I wear many hats. For the first 3 years, I mainly wrote code, and to this day I'm still very involved with frontend and growth engineering. I oversee our world-class marketing and support operations, and I built our data science and analytics stack which powers them. But what I am most proud of is how I hired most of our 30 employees, which ranged from closing senior execs over months of conversations to doing first round phone screens for entry level positions. After I make a hire, I’m deeply invested in their development - I mentored my first two Chief of Staff hires into becoming Head of Growth and Head of Customer Experience respectively, and I mentored the youngest software engineer at Motion into becoming an engineering manager.

I believe Motion is at a pivotal moment in its trajectory. Revenue is growing rapidly, the product roadmap is clear, it’s starting to feel like we are “winning”, and we are accelerating our hiring plans. This will inevitably cause growing pains, and it’s my mission to help Motion navigate this next phase smoothly. How can we accelerate hiring without lowering the bar for candidates? How can a larger team collaborate without becoming inefficient or misaligned? How do we keep the urgency and not become complacent after raising a huge round of funding? These are the problems I’m looking for a partner to help me solve. Along the way, I will teach you everything I know about building an exceptional business, and we will have a great adventure together.

About The Role

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff who will work closely with me to manage our most critical initiatives during our next chapter of hyper-growth. You will lead our efforts in hiring, setting company culture, people operations, and business development. I’ve worked hard to ensure Motion’s team is one of the highest talent-density teams in the world, and you’ll be responsible for maintaining and even improving our culture of excellence as we grow. After 1-2 years, your role will transition to a leadership position in People or Business Development, depending on which areas you excel at.

You will be successful at Motion if:

• You're ambitious and you’re looking to prove yourself. For most people, this role will give you the most responsibilities you’ve ever had, while holding you to higher standards than other companies you’ve worked at. Expect to work your hardest and do the best work of your career at Motion. You will receive lots of coaching and feedback that you should seek to grow from

• You don’t just want to work on “strategy” and “managing stakeholders”. You should by default expect that you’ll have to do all the work to get the task done, not just think up ideas and then boss other people around. Lots of people at Motion are extremely intelligent, experienced, and more strategic than you, and until you gain enough experience you should not assume your ideas will win. We will help you gain that experience

• You are a fast learner and can quickly familiarize yourself with a complex business and product. You don’t get lost in the weeds in details that don’t matter. You don’t need every edge case spelled out for you because you can figure out the goals of the project and fill in the blanks

• You are good at assessing talent and enjoy helping others succeed. You have strong EQ and communication skills. You can empathize with others, know how to motivate them, believe in them, fight on their behalf, gain their credibility and respect, while being firm and pushing back when they’re being unreasonable

• You are quantitative and can write (simple) code. It’s extremely important that you are not always blocked waiting on engineering or data teams to do simple tasks for you. Being able to code makes you self-sufficient, and we’ve intentionally built our business team to be technical. You will be given a simple coding exercise during the interview process to verify this point

About Your Background

We’re looking for someone with 3-5 years of professional experience. Experience in startups, consulting or finance, and/or MBA may be helpful, but we are open to considering any candidate who believes they are a good fit based on the success criteria above

Motion is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone is treated with respect and given equal opportunities. We do not discriminate based on gender identity, race, ancestry, disability, religion, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We welcome and encourage all qualified candidates to apply for our job openings. 

Helpful Links:

Motion Culture: https://motionapp.notion.site/Motion-Company-Culture-21bd766b1f864764b0db2fa72529b182

Motion in the Press: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/19/2393012/

https://www.usemotion.com