Life360 is hiring a Chief Product Officer
Hi, I’m Chris Hulls, cofounder and CEO of Life360, and we’re hiring a CPO. That is me in the top left, along with Samir Kapoor (CTO), Jon Troutman (VP of Design), Ariana Hellebuyck (VP of Marketing), and David Rice (COO) — together we are the people you’d be most closely working with at Life360. I started with this introduction because Chief Product Officer means different things to different people, and I want to help you understand both what it means to us and how you will fit in with the rest of our company’s leaders.
The Life360 Elevator Pitch
I’ll start with the quick elevator pitch for Life360. If Facebook is for friends and LinkedIn is for professionals, we are the same thing for families, but focused on safety and coordination. With features that range from location sharing and place notifications to help alerts, automatic car crash detection, and emergency dispatch (we send out an ambulance to a real accident on average over once an hour!) Life360 is used by families around the globe to make life easier and get peace of mind.
While the Facebook for Families pitch isn’t new, we have the stats to back it up, and from a product leader’s perspective, these numbers should impress you. Some examples:
- One in ten families with kids in the US use our product today, and we have nearly 30 million active users worldwide.
- Our retention and engagement is best in class — we are used on average ten times a day and churn flattens to 0% (and actually ticks positive after ~18 months).
- Beyond just having amazing market fit, we have an exceptional attachment rate to premium of 18% — ARR has gone from ~$1m to over $75m in just a few years.
- The company grows organically and doesn’t need outside capital — over 80% of new registrations come through word of mouth and we can become profitable whenever we want.
- We have deep resources at our disposal — over $60m is in the bank and we are approaching 200 team members with a 100-person HQ in San Francisco with satellite offices in San Diego, Las Vegas, Hyderabad, and Kyiv.
As a company whose success is primarily driven by the quality of our product, you will be assuming the helm of arguably the most important group in our organization. Unlike many companies where product might play a supporting role, at Life360, it is the core of who we are.
So why are we looking for a CPO? And what does that mean in our context?
The high level answer is that we need help scaling, particularly around people, process, and strategy. This is not a situation where we are looking to pivot the vision — things are going well and we have a clear idea of what we want to get done. But, we are growing very quickly (in some areas gracefully and others less so) and we need a strong product leader to bring it all together and guide us through our next wave of growth.
We also have a lot of initiatives that are early in their ideation, and we need someone with both the creative and management chops to bring them to life. For example, we have a partnership with Allstate to give people car insurance deals based on how they drive (they came to us because we literally have the largest set of driving data in the world — even bigger than Uber or Lyft). The deal is inked and we are aligned on the vision, but how it comes to life is largely a blank slate and would be the purview of the CPO.
With that context, outside of the standard CPO boilerplate, your four top core areas of focus would be:
Drive product strategy and execution
You’d work with David (COO) and me to take the company’s vision and turn it into a cohesive strategy. This would be a shared effort at the exec level, and then after it is pinned down, you and I would work together in turning it into actual plans for the product. You’d find that I am personally very opinionated about the vision, and then also the very detailed specifics of the UI, but everything in between would be your zone of control. Vision is largely mine, strategy is shared between us, and execution is yours.
Own the product development process
The product team has a lot of raw talent, but different people in the organization often do things in their own way, which worked when we were small, but we are at the point where we need more systems and rigor. You’ll be responsible for everything from helping define what it means to be a successful product leader to running our strategy and roadmap process, balancing between when to be agile vs more waterfall, learning from competition, assessing high-level feature ROI, developing a philosophy around experimentation and the use of data, and everything else that goes into shipping products. You’ll have the pleasure of working with Samir Kapoor (CTO) who joined in 2019 and has done an excellent job of bringing this discipline to our engineering organization.
Develop a team of world-class product leaders
The maxim of only being as good as your people is something we fundamentally believe in. You would be tasked with building a team of inspiring product leaders, both in terms of recruiting new people to the organization and developing our up and comers. We are firm believers that a smaller team of excellent players is almost always better than a larger group of average ones. Our current gap in product is at the player-coach level and bringing in a strong director-level bench would be one of your primary objectives for the year.
Build out a culture of extreme user experience excellence
We believe that our long-term core competitive differentiator will be having an amazing user experience. This is easy to say, but extremely hard to do. Too many products atrophy and lose their magic as they mature. Teams get siloed and miss the bigger picture. Decisions are made by committee. Too many tradeoffs are made. This is one of our core values, but we unintentionally slipped here in recent years as we grew. Things are going in the right direction, but we want a CPO who is absolutely passionate about delighting users at every step of the way and has an extreme belief that the little details matter. This is where I am most fanatical as CEO — I need 100% alignment on this value in whoever we hire.
Who are you?
- You are a seasoned product leader with a track record of building stellar teams — I will be asking you to tell me who your best hires have been.
- You have worked at companies that have a reputation for valuing user experience and building delightful products.
- You are a strong strategic thinker and storyteller with the ability to motivate and inspire your team around a shared vision.
- You have incredibly high expectations for your people and also set a strong example with your own output and work ethic (this is not a kick-back 9 to 5).
- You are a passionate believer that design and user experience is a competitive differentiator in its own right. Data informs you, but user experience excellence takes precedence.
- You believe that to succeed in your role, staying hands on and getting into the details is critical. You are great at delegating, but ultimately take ownership of everything we ship.
- You are known for being able to have tough direct conversations while also remaining kind and respectful.
- You naturally gravitate to risk taking and big swings and are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.
Bonuses
- You have been-there done-that at companies just beyond our current scale (say 200–300 employees with 10–20 PMs) so you know what is coming next, but aren’t so far removed to be out of touch with the challenges that come with our unique size.
- You have a strong track record in mobile apps, with an even bigger bonus if you have done things that deal with location, subscription, or lead gen.
- You are an active user of our product, so you intuitively understand the value we are providing to our users.
Other Details
We’re centrally located near South Park in San Francisco (8 minute walk from CalTrain, 10 mins from BART, 1 minute drive after getting off the 101). We think an in-office presence is critical for senior leaders, but have work from home Fridays for the entire company. We offer competitive benefits and compensation, and are publicly listed on the ASX (Australian Stock Exchange). We chose this non-traditional funding route instead of doing a late-stage private round because you get the liquidity of a public company with the upside of a private one. Our equity is no longer the proverbial lottery ticket — you can sell shares whenever you want.
Interested in learning more?
The world is small, so ideally you come in through a trusted referral, but feel free to apply here if we don’t happen to have any connections that intersect.
