Program Associate

Opportunity

The Program Associate position represents the opportunity to work with a world-class team of designers, project managers, and data analysts who together construct StartX's offerings and who aim to be the world’s preeminent provider of experiential entrepreneurship education. Build your design and project management skills and leverage your passion for empowering the Stanford community to solve real-world problems to create opportunities for optimal collaboration, training, and development of 1300+ of Stanford's best entrepreneurs across 650+ companies.

As a Program Associate, you may work on the following objectives:

• Building and refining your experience design, customer development and project management skills in order to constantly improve StartX's experiential educational offerings.
• Thoughtfully delivering key experiences that maximize our entrepreneurs' abilities to collaborate with each other and achieve their entrepreneurship goals.
• Contributing to a team culture centered around transparency, meritocracy, accountability, and personal growth, and one that relies on high-quality process to achieve results.

Responsibilities

Refine your Skillset:

• Proactively expand and refine your customer development and experience design skillset (e.g., reading and applying books such as Power of Moments by Chip & Dan Heath, Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development by Patrick Vlaskovitz, etc.)
• Proactively expand and refine your project management skillset (e.g., reading and applying books such as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld, Getting to Yes by Fisher, Ury and Patton, etc.)
• Utilize your growing skillset to develop, test and measure innovative solutions to StartX and founder challenges.
• Refine foundational professional skills, such as designing and facilitating meetings, measuring impact and influencing others to meet or exceed goals.

Experience Design & Customer Development:

• Contribute to the design, execution and evolution of highly memorable experiences that constantly raise the bar for quality of interactions that our startup founders have at StartX and with each other.
• Empower our community members to be deeply involved in the creation and execution of our product offerings, creating the conditions for them to work harmoniously with StartX teams, complementing each other every step of the way.
• In coordination with your teammates, build an understanding of the needs of entrepreneurs across a broad range of stages, industry, and experience levels, through a combination of structured needs finding and data analysis.
• Understand the reasons why certain metrics are indicators of StartX's long-term success, and utilize a metrics-driven approach toward evaluating products, optimizing for the customer experience and managing projects.

Project Management:

• In coordination with your teammates, maximize StartX outcomes through effective planning, preparation, communication, schedule management, goal setting, forecasting, and contingency planning.
• Proactively facilitate alignment of StartX's core values and organizational objectives with our customers' greatest needs to guide decision-making and execution.
• Ensure the delivery of lasting reusable work across StartX and minimizing the frequency of one-off or one-time results.
• Increase impact and efficacy of StartX by identifying and facilitating collaboration opportunities across the team.

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Learn how and when to listen to staff feedback vs. customer feedback (or vice versa), push for findings vs. insights (or vice versa), and recognize when the unpopular/uncomfortable decision may be the right thing to do.
• Serve as a resident champion for having statistically significant data and representative understandings, as well as encouraging staff members around you to do the same.
• Foster constructive discussion across team members with a wide variety of backgrounds, deliberately separate opinions from evidence, and comfortably deliver critical feedback in constructive ways.

Ideal Candidate Profile

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in aligned fields.
• An understanding of customer development, design thinking and/or project management frameworks.
• The ability and willingness to learn to how to apply the above frameworks in order to determine and meet our founders’ needs.

Characteristics

• Demonstrates the capacity for data-driven strategic planning and hands-on tactical implementation.
• Passionate about both the StartX Mission and entrepreneurship in general.
• Self-starter who could thrive in an ambiguous but collaborative work environment.
• Solid internal and client-facing communication capabilities.
• Team player who earnestly gives and receives feedback.
• Committed to learning about and developing efficient and replicable systems and solutions.
• Operates with a customer service orientation.

Compensation

Compensation will be competitive and commensurate with experience.