Strategy Lead

Salary: $120,000 - $180,000 equity benefits

Location: Hybrid, preferably based in Los Angeles with travel as required 

Manufactured is a venture backed inventory platform. We are building the first inventory exchange for SMBs creating, making, and selling physical products around the world. We serve customers doing $1M - $100M in annual revenues in Fashion, Accessories, Healthcare, Construction Materials, CPG, Food, Electronics, Home Goods, Industrials, and Commodities. 

With over 800 vendors across 25 countries (and growing), we make the inventory cycle a breeze by handling everything from vendor discovery and negotiation to shipping, warehouse coordination, quality control, PO advances, through to collections. With over $150 million in volume powered by Manufactured since we launched in 2019, we deliver a compelling inventory partnership for fast growing SMBs. 

We are a post-Product Market Fit, Series A startup that is growing 850% Year on Year. There is tremendous opportunity in our ~45 person team to take ownership, make an impact, and build an extremely rewarding, accomplished career. 

We don’t care about: 

• Where you went to college
• What you studied
• If you’ve worked at blue chip companies 

We do care about: 

• What you’ve done
• What you can do
• How you’ll do it 

This looks like: 

• Making success a priority: We value ownership, initiative, and tenacity 
• Having a point of view: We hire smart people and want to hear opinions. We’re low ego, and we welcome feedback and new ideas informed by data and intuition 
• Being a good person and teammate: We all contribute to a positive, inclusive workplace. Direct communication, kindness, and integrity are non-negotiables 

You’ll be trusted and challenged to do your best work in a fast moving, high performing environment. If this sounds like you, please read on! 

We’re hiring a Strategy Lead! As our Strategy Lead, you’ll play a key role in helping our CEO design, develop and roll out roadmaps, strategies and tactical implementation steps for those roadmaps. As part of this, you’ll also work on corporate strategy, research, fundraising, and the foundational knowledge base that future goals and activities are based on.

Qualifications: 

• 6 years experience in a Strategy / Corporate / Chief of Staff / Founder role at a fast growing startup, ideally in FinTech, E-Commerce, Manufacturing or Retail 
• You have some experience in an startup role in a fast scaling startup. We are open to emerging leaders
• You have the highest discretion and impeccable judgement around information sharing both, internally and externally 
• You have a track record of building clear and concise communication assets, researching data and trends to add to those documents, 
• You can work with multiple stakeholders across internal and external business units to build clear, tactical, goal oriented implementation plans that are easy to follow, easy to read and reflect the CEO’s vision for the department / business / outcome. 
• You’re a strong communicator and have successfully worked with both technical and non-technical collaborators to understand and communicate complex business concepts in a simple and easily understood way. 
• You’ve been around high growth startup founders and seen both the boom and the bust of startups.
• You’ve been part of fundraises and have built and implemented operating documents & checklists that guide these processes.
• You are a fair and inspiring operator that wants to be a business leader. 

The role: 

• Partner with the Founder / CEO on tactical, intermediate and strategic roadmaps
• Support company strategy: Work on fleshed out, detailed implementation guides, operating manuals and roadmap documents that are both concise and simple to understand.
• Work with internal and external stakeholders to drive implementation and comments on these roadmap documents and work with the Founder / CEO to refine the documents / annotate any updates.
• Build out fundraising decks, distill data points, and track metrics internally and externally to justify and update the roadmap documents that envision the
• Coordinate, manage and own operating knowledge bases inside the company, keep documents updated in collaboration with functional and business team members.
• Research, coordinate and collaborate on new business strategies, explore practical issues, learn new lines of business, new industries, new geographies and help identify key leverage points of entry
• Build comfort around documenting and implementing strategies both in technical and non-technical areas with authority.
• Track key performance metrics of the business on monthly basis and ensure that our business roadmap meets the metrics we set for them.
• Hire and manage freelancers, consultants and business operators to facilitate implementation of strategic roadmaps both internally and externally.

Working at Manufactured:

We’re a remote first company, based in Los Angeles. Our team is around forty-five people, and growing quickly. 

Manufactured is a small, fast growing startup. Which means we deal with ambiguity and require a sense of ownership from all our team members. This is reflected in our core values. 

Our core values are: 

Urgency: Always act like an owner, seek help in case of delays beyond 48 hours, move quickly when you have enough information (usually 70-75%), know when to dive in if there’s a crisis, and hold true to the best possible timelines without compromising on quality, value or process.

Authenticity:  Be Authentic, be real, be respectful both, in front of and behind a person’s back. If you are frustrated, you’re frustrated. If you’re stuck, you’re stuck. If you’re worried, you’re worried. Let's support each other in resolving these issues. Be upfront and respectful in your conversation. We are a multi cultural, distributed, global team. Respectful authenticity in communication is critical.

Contextual Ownership: Our business is as much about people and relationships as it is about technology and process. We take time to build relationships and understand the needs of our internal and external partners. Context and empathy helps us understand the “why”. We set goals and drive outcomes based on context and realities, rather than tasks and process alone.

Effectiveness: Did it work? Did it solve the problem? Was it a short term hack? or a long term process solution that benefits everyone? Was it something we can use to grow / move forward or was it a defensive solution. Did we meet our stakeholders’ expectations, did we exceed them? Did our stakeholders all win? Are you using your time correctly? Are you helping your team members use their time well? Are you contributing to the growth of the company?

Critical path thinking:  "What is the shortest risk-mitigated route to the Best Potential Outcome?"

Our CEO and Founder, Pranay Srinivasan, writes often on LinkedIn about our culture and operating principles. We recommend these articles in particular: 

Our core values: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6993599543976099840/

Our operating framework: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pranaysrinivasan_08312022-a-big-part-of-our-work-at-manufactured-activity-6970875309470494720--bfv/