People & Ops

CommandBar is a platform for helping software companies make their software easier to use (aka a “user assistance platform”).

How many times have you been frustrated by software?

Maybe you didn’t know how to make the software do what you wanted, so you had to wade through pages and pages of support documentation to figure it out. Or suffer through a sassy chatbot. Or worst of all, maybe you were bombarded by a bunch of unhelpful pop-ups prompting you to TAKE A TOUR and CHECK OUT WHATS NEW.

These unhelpful experiences (the help center, the chatbot, the popups) are trying to solve a real problem — we use so many tools today that it’s hard to master every one. But sadly these techniques for helping users are ineffective and annoying.

CommandBar makes any software product simpler, faster, and personalized.

We do this by embedding experiences in our customers’ products that that actually guide and assist users. Some of these work by capturing the users’ input directly and responding with personalized results (like a custom walkthrough or a clip from a training video). Others work by proactively nudging users (but only when we think they’re likely to find it helpful).

Today, CommandBar serves over 15M end users from forward-thinking SaaS companies like Gusto, Hashicorp, Netlify, Freshworks, and AngelList.

Despite that big number, we're a small team of 25 today that's just beginning to grow, which means tons of opportunities to do trajectory-altering work (for the company’s trajectory and your own). If you're inspired to upgrade how humans use software, come join!

You’re probably really talented. Why should you take your talents to CommandBar? Here are reasons we think working with us is uniquely high impact — on the world and your career.

• Our ratio of impact on the world is high (and we intend to keep it that way).

• There is a lot of room to grow and lead teams (if you’re into that) as we scale. A lot of the roles that we are hiring for are the first in the function so you’ll need to bring 0 to 1 energy.

• We're on the forefront of new technologies, including new developments in AI (which we use heavily to power our product).

• The team we’ve assembled so far is world-class — talented, curious, kind, and obsessed with building delightful, fast, simple software.

The main reasons for joining CommandBar are belief in our product and the opportunities for growth described above. That said, our benefits are pretty sweet 🙂  Overall, we believe in benefits that respect individual choice and reflect the fact that optimizing your life outside of work leads to better performance at work.

The salary range for this role is $105,000 to $130,000

Our benefits include:

• Flexible PTO with a 3 week minimum

• Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for you, and 50% for your dependents

• 12 weeks parental leave for all parents

• 401k with matching

• A learning and development budget

• A generous 'Make Your Life Easier' stipend

• A home office budget

• 3x/year all together including 2 onsites at our office in San Francisco and 1 offsite at a fun 🌴 location!

Before diving into the role, here are some things we believe about our team and how to grow it. We want to make sure the person who does this role is enthusiastically aligned with this framework:

• We keep our team (almost) as small as possible. We believe smaller teams of motivated, accountable people with just-a-little-more-scope-than-they’re-comfortable-with do better work than teams 2-3x the size. We hire when (a) something is clearly breaking and (b) there is a clear opportunity to accelerate our business but no one to own it. So far, this strategy has allowed us to grow much faster than teams much bigger than us (but with less pep in their step).

• We win because we have insanely good people. The “keep the team small” strategy only works if you have excellent people. Every single company says they hire great people, but we must hire great people for our model to work. So we have to continue to back it up with: a high-performance culture that rewards growth and impact, above-market compensation, thoughtful benefits, and team rituals that support excellent output.

• We are remote-first. We were born in 2020 when remote was the only option. We have an office in SF and deeply value spending time together in the same physical space (at conferences, ad hoc for certain projects, and 3x per year at our onsites and offsites as a whole team). But 90% of our work is as a remote team. That means we hire in multiple places and use async-friendly collaboration tactics.

Ok, enough philosophy. You want to know whether you’re inheriting a total mess and will be asked to build a people practice from scratch.

Our company was founded in 2020, launched in 2021, but we’ve only recently (late 2022 through early 2023) started to intentionally build “people infrastructure”. In other words, we recently went 0 —> 1, but have much more to do from here.

Some specifics of what we’ve accomplished so far:

• Values: defined values commandments that reflect the behaviors that we believe have made us successful and will continue to make us successful.

• Benefits: designed a benefits program that respects individual choice and makes our team’s life easier.

• Performance Management: a first stab at a performance review cadence and evaluation criteria (oriented around our commandments)

• Compensation Philosophy:

  • Created bands for our biggest team (engineering) and benchmarked each team member to ensure consistency

  • 2022 was also the first year of commission plans and payments (for the sales team)

• On/offboarding processes:

  • Began standardizing onboarding including both (a) role-specific onboarding materials to get team members ramped quickly and (b) logistical onboarding (security training, equity early exercise, etc)

• First iteration of an employee handbook

We’re looking for an experienced and passionate People person to help take our people infrastructure to the next level and ensure we remain 5* place to work as we grow our team.

You’ll be the first point of contact for our team for any people issues/questions and will own people workstreams end-to-end: that means planning, executing, and evaluating what’s working and what isn’t. There is a long list of projects we have in mind, but we aren’t looking for someone to just heads-down execute on that list — we want someone to bring independent POV on what people infrastructure we should prioritize, as well as notice opportunities (small and large) to make our team better.

And that’s not all — in addition to people work, you’ll also work on other operations workstreams to ensure all our teams are set up to thrive and help more customers and users.

This isn’t everything, but it’s most of the chunky stuff.

Benefits Management

• Implement and renew new and existing benefit plans (health insurance, 401k, etc), including helping us tweak our benefits as we scale (in response to team feedback and your own ideas).

• Troubleshoot benefit issues (401k overpayment, HSA issues, etc).

• Serve as the internal authority on benefits (able to speak to Scouts and candidates about our offered benefits).

Recruiting

• Partner with hiring managers to build hiring plans and spec new roles (JD, comp range, etc).

• Own the initial interview stages of our hiring process including application review and initial screens.

• Coordinate interviews and help maintain an exceptional candidate experience (answer questions, make sure they’re getting timely feedback, etc)

Onboarding and Exits

• Support new hires from offer to start date, ensuring a smooth transition from candidate to new hire.

• Support hiring managers and help develop onboarding plans for new hires.

• Check in with new hires to makes sure they are on the path to thriving.

• Partner with Ops for access management (getting people into the tools they need).

Performance Management & Compensation Strategy

• Manage policies and work with team on training and implementation.

• Oversee our annual performance evaluations and partner with leadership to foster a high-performance culture where everyone on the team is incentivized appropriately for growth and impact.

• Review compensation strategy and update numbers as needed (include re-benchmarking team to make sure we haven’t drifted from the above-market rates we target).

What will help you succeed?

• Experience with recruiting, especially at a tech company

• Extreme empathy and compassion

• HR certifications and a passion for the craft of people ops and infrastructure.

• Demonstrated experience in multi-state payroll and/or benefits administration

• Experience with HR Compliance work is a plus.

• Excitement about joining an early stage start-up and wearing multiple hats. This is not a good role for someone looking for extreme clarity on what they will be working on one quarter from now 😁

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