Growth Designer – Roote

This is a unique opportunity to lead design and growth at Roote Projects, a nonprofit startup studio which catalyzes systems-level change across important areas like responsible tech, Web3, effective governance, and culture.

I. What is Roote?

Roote is an educational hub and for-public startup studio accelerating the personal and collective transformation necessary for humanity’s transition to the Wisdom Age.

1. Our educational hub runs the Roote Fellowship, a podcast, and a newsletter.
2. Our startup studio launches Roote Projects, ambitious projects which catalyze systems-level change for a wiser world. For example: Tweetscape and Web3 & Society.

II. Role Overview

This is a unique opportunity to design and grow world-changing ventures at Roote.

This role is a fusion between a design role and a growth marketing role:

1. Design potentially world-changing ventures
2. Run user discovery and validation processes for those ventures to determine whether we should invest resources in launching them
3. Work with project teams to increase growth and impact metrics (website conversion, DAUs, user retention, etc.) for high-impact ventures

This position is extremely entrepreneurial, both in terms of working on early-stage ventures, and also shaping how Roote’s startup studio will design and grow projects. If you’re interested in leading something new, uncertain, and exciting, please apply!

What You’ll Do

Design, validate, and grow ideas.

• Run all stages of the design process for various Roote Projects, from designing user interfaces for apps to creating media that brings a solarpunk future to life.
  • Leverage design practices across a wide variety of discliplines—from common frameworks like design thinking and human-centered design to niche practices like speculative design and positive sum design—to envision and scope world-changing projects.
  • Conduct user research, interviews, and tests; develop wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and clickable prototypes; and create and test real-world prototypes to solve user problems.
• Validate Roote Project concepts by testing demand from relevant audiences like funders and customers and gauging venture feasibility by doing R&D and quickly building MVPs.
  • Create landing pages, run digital marketing campaigns, and conduct other pre-product validation measures to quickly validate applicable concepts.
  • Implement initial versions of ventures to validate them using different methods: use code or no-code tools to build MVPs, run experiments and studies on MTurk, test media content, or build community around a movement.
• Grow Roote Projects by running experiments and building features that deliver value and increase growth across all stages of the customer journey.
  • Leverage qualitative and quantitative customer insights (like from NPS surveys and Mixpanel) to drive new product features that deliver customer/stakeholder value and promote product-led growth.
  • Track and analyze pirate metrics (AARRR) for various Roote Projects to inform experiments and initiatives to amplify key drivers of growth.

After 1 year, success looks like: we have designed 5+ Roote Project concepts that have had meaningful pre-product engagement from 50+ stakeholders each, and 2+ Roote Projects are steadily growing at 5%+ week-over-week.

After 3 years, success looks like: you’re leading a large venture studio with world-class design, validation, and growth teams. Our studio team employs 10+ people and is financially sustainable from donations and income from successful Roote Projects and has a repeatable process for launching impactful new ventures.

You May Be a Fit if You

• Have a strong bias toward concrete action. You should often ask: “Why can’t this be done sooner?”
• Have a strong bias towards ambition. You should often ask: “Is this the most ambitious plan we could come up with?”
• Design intuitive user interfaces and convey them through detailed requirements and high-fidelity mockups.
• Work iteratively and are comfortable with lean startup and design thinking.
• Have analyzed growth metrics and ran experiments to increase user growth. (Or just want to do so!)
• Have an appetite for learning new things, talking with new people, expanding your network, and working on many different projects.
• Thrive in uncertainty. You enjoy creating certainty from uncertainty.

Even if not all of these apply to you, we’d still love to consider your application, particularly if you’d like to learn more of these. Studies show that you can be considered for a role even if many of a job posting’s listed qualifications don’t apply to you. We evaluate all applications holistically.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

• You get to be weird and creative. This is not a traditional VC firm, tech company, online school, or academic research hub.
• You want to work with us. Here is our team. And here are our How to Work With Me Manuals.
• We have a great network. You want to work with global leaders and ambitious frontier people.
• You are aligned with Roote’s guiding mission and values.
• We have an extremely flexible leave policy and provide benefits including full health, dental, and vision coverage.

To learn more about Roote, check out our website, which includes our report on Building The Wisdom Age and our illustrated piece on Marriage Counseling With Capitalism.

III. Logistics

Type: Full-time.

Time Expectation: Start as soon as possible.

Location: We are a hybrid org based in the SF Bay Area. If you’re here, we work in the office together a few days a week. If you’re not here, we have quarterly offsites.

Compensation: $70,000/year. We expect to increase the salary as we grow.

(The listed salary is based on US rates. We adjust salaries to reflect regional costs of living.)