Overview

Yard 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 PBC

Yard 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 Role

This 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.