Customer Success Manager

Accepting applications until Friday, December 15, 2023.

Knowledge Futures is hiring a customer success manager to help our Community Team serve the needs of our growing number of Members and users of PubPub, our flagship product. We’re looking for someone who has experience with all parts of the customer success stack, from responding to daily support requests to writing documentation and identifying strategic areas to grow our client base and services offering. You’ll get to help a growing organization build its customer success function and make significant contributions to the direction of our services organization. We’ll pay you competitively, let you work a 4-day, 32-hour week from wherever you want, and take you and your ideas seriously. Join us!

Knowledge Futures, founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is a non-profit institution that builds public digital infrastructure that enables communities to publish documents and data more effectively.

PubPub is an open-source publishing tool used by thousands of journals, conferences, books, and other diverse types of communities. At its heart, it features a collaborative document editor with strong support for academic standards. Layered on top are features for discussion and organization. In the works are powerful tools for editorial review and enabling small and large communities to thrive on PubPub. Underlying all of this is a belief that better publishing tools can help researchers focus on doing the best work of their lives, rather than adapting their work to the whims of rent-seekers and gatekeepers.

• Respond to daily customer questions and concerns from email, GitHub, slack, and other channels.
• Work across our Community, Operations, and Product teams to establish service best practices including auto-responses, internal SLAs, regular customer feedback, knowledge base development, and more.
• Proactively reach out to customers when new features become available or bugs are fixed.
• Write (and update) knowledge base articles as needed.
• Working with our Product team, identify opportunities for product development based on top customer priorities.
• Note: to provide weeklong support coverage, this role will work a 32-hour, 4-day week that includes Friday, the day the rest of the team is normally unavailable. You will be able to choose an additional weekday to take off to maintain your 4-day workweek.

• You have significant daily professional experience supporting users of consumer-facing software, preferably a CMS, website builder, social media, or other type of web publishing-oriented software.
• You have some professional experience creating help documentation such as knowledge base content, tutorials, or guides, preferably in written, audio, and visual formats.
• You have excellent written and verbal communication skills and pride yourself on your ability to always keep your core values in mind when communicating, even in stressful situations.
• You have a solid grounding in what’s necessary to build effective customer relationship systems and are interested in implementing your ideas.
• You’re ready to work as part of a small team that will expect you to make and own significant decisions about customer support management and engage with questions about SLAs, processes, contracts, and system design.
• You love helping people make the most out of the tools they use, and can empathize both with their successes and failures to succeed at achieving their goals.
• You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of an active user base and an ambitious roadmap.

• Work 4 days per week with a thoughtfully distributed team: we were a remote team before it was a global necessity, and put a lot of effort into making the remote experience a great one. Learn more about how we work in our Handbook. As it becomes safe to travel and gather again, we are resuming our roughly biannual in-person team retreats at fun locations throughout the U.S., which began with our Vermont retreat in the fall of 2021, NYC “field trip” in spring 2022, and New Orleans retreat in fall 2022.
• Enjoy industry-standard perks: a minimum of 5 weeks off per year that we require you to actually use, best-in-class health benefits with generous company contributions, 401k with generous matching, your own computer of choice, a stipend for setting up your home office.
• Contribute to our larger mission at Knowledge Futures: we’re building a future where the infrastructure to create, access and validate knowledge is controlled by people who serve the public interest, which we apply to our own work. As a KF team member, you’ll be able to contribute to building the company itself and documenting those efforts, as well as engage in larger industry conversations.

You must be legally authorized to work in the United States to apply for this role.

We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds with diverse skillsets. If you have significant personal experience or engagement with low-income communities, international communities, or fields and languages that are underrepresented in academia, scholarly publishing, or open data, we strongly encourage you to apply.

This job description is intended to be a guidepost, not a checklist. If you feel like you could do a great job in this role, even if you don’t exactly meet every qualification, please consider applying. And if you’re still hesitant after reading this bold text, send us a short note anyway with any questions you have about qualifications.

The salary for this position is $99,376 (Community Team, level 3) plus benefits. In late 2022 we implemented a no-negotiation salary system designed to increase fairness and transparency and reduce bias in compensation by paying the same salary in each function/level across the company regardless of location or tenure. We base starting salaries on industry medians in New York City (no matter where you’re based), automatically adjust twice per year to account for cost of living so you don’t need to demand raises or seek offers elsewhere, and provide clear pathways for promotion with large compensation increases (while not requiring you to seek promotion to stay in good standing and keep up with inflation/industry trends). Read our full compensation policy for more details.