Associate Director, Commercialization

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company that tackles cities' greatest challenges. We create products and solutions, invest in new companies, and help developers build more sustainable, innovative, and equitable places around the world. Our ambitious vision requires us to push ourselves beyond conventional thinking, and we work hard in pursuit of our mission. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

Our urban innovations include Delve (a generative design product that empowers real estate teams to design better, faster, with less risk), Mesa (an easy-install kit for commercial buildings that cuts energy costs, improves tenant comfort, and simplifies building operations), Pebble (a low-cost vehicle sensor to help manage parking and curb space), and Affordable Electrification (a new way to manage home energy use to meet a customer’s monthly budget). We're also developing an offsite construction company that can deliver high-quality mass timber buildings for more sustainable living and working.

With the potential to radically improve quality of life in cities for all, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

Our Incubations team develops new products with the potential to help cities tackle their greatest challenges. The Incubations process involves researching pressing issues facing cities, identifying original solutions, evaluating market potential, and advancing the most promising ideas toward commercialization. Successful incubations are staffed with a lean go-to-market team (involving sales, eng, product, design), with the goal of eventually becoming a new product or business. Across all stages, we take a cross-disciplinary approach that leverages Sidewalk expertise in sustainability, mobility, real estate development, and other key areas of urban life. The incubations team values prototyping, empathy, and entrepreneurial thinking.

This Commercialization Lead role (Associate Director level) will report into our Director of Commercialization, with the goal of developing the research and commercial concept development for our new ventures from inception through full lifecycle. This entrepreneurial role works closely with the Design Leads and subject matter experts to define the scope of market opportunity, and use their business, go-to-market, and operational experiences to commercialize new products and businesses that align with our mission and vision. As project leaders, they manage new innovations from ideation to product launch, including recruiting the execution teams who take these new businesses to market.

In this role you will:

• Lead the business strategy for early stage urban innovation ideas, collaborating with a multidisciplinary team to deliver market research, competitive intelligence, concepts, prototypes, and business plans.
• Be curious and drive research and experimentation that can validate or challenge existing assumptions, while uncovering latent market needs, creative solutions and business model innovations that address pain points from target customers.
• Synthesize trends, forecasts, emerging technology and urban innovation exemplars, and market research to form unique insights about where the world is going and how Sidewalk can have the greatest impact.
• Plan and deliver new ventures, products and services by defining the target commercial construct, success criteria, value propositions, key team roles and responsibilities, and the investment business case, with the opportunity to continue on to become part of the founding team of a new business.

What we expect:

• Strong early stage product / business launch experience
  • You have 6+ years of experience in launching products or venture studio organizations in a Commercial/Business Development, Venture Architect, or Strategy Development role.
  • You have strong quantitative and economic modelling expertise. Preferred if you also have product development experience.
  • You have experience in a fast-growing start-up environment with exposure to multidisciplinary teams.
  • Bonus: Experience with product launches, specifically in pre-seed/seed/series A ventures; experience with enterprise/B2B technology; and experience with real estate/property tech.
• Putting market and customer-needs first
  • You have a deep focus on the market and customer needs, focusing on the user problems to be solved rather than a focus on the tech or the solution itself.
• Ability to execute with commercial and operational excellence
  • You have a strong base in business plan creation and execution, including financial modeling and forecasting, project and stakeholder management.
  • You have worked across physical and digital products. For example, you have experience with software, hardware, and services, particularly in B2B or B2B2C businesses.
  • Experience building businesses from the ground up, and creating pilots, sales materials, and prototypes necessary to validate new business concepts.
  • You constantly assess internal capabilities and capacities to develop a clear sourcing strategy for filling skill or knowledge gaps.
  • Facilitate the build and testing of operational processes, systems and reporting capabilities.
• Bias towards action
  • Foster an environment of innovation and customer centricity, institutionalizing agile innovation practices and a customer insight to action culture.
  • Ability to scope and lead end-to-end market research process, from concept ideation and boundary concept creation, to recruiting, to interview facilitation.
  • You take initiative and are adept with changing priorities and quick turnarounds to launch products for customers in a lean start-up approach with agile go-to-market strategies.
• Solve problems, together
  • You can articulate the product’s vision and your ideas in a compelling manner, as well as the rationale and tradeoffs behind various choices.
  • You embrace the intellectual challenge of constantly reacting to and synthesizing new ideas related to the future of urban experience and technology.
  • You have strong stakeholder management skills to collaborate and work across different departments and skill sets,
  • You ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.
• Passionate about cities and people
  • You care deeply about cities and improving the lives of people in them, while committing to data privacy, as well as equitable and inclusive outcomes both in the workplace and in the work you do.

What you have to achieve:

• Within the first month, you’ve onboarded onto the Incubations team, and absorbed the R&D work done to date. You’ve completed a starter project that gets your feet wet on the journey of taking an initial hypothesis and defining a set of opportunity areas.
• Within the first two months, you’ve worked with the Design Leads to define the parameters for a robust market research and problem validation test, which includes defining the hypotheses to test and metrics for evaluating those hypotheses.
• By the end of month three, you’ve worked closely with Design Leads to refine the business model and plan for an idea through cycles of market research and go-to-market testing.
• Beyond the first 6 months, you’ve helped to develop an initial concept into a business with a go-to-market plan, maintaining the voice of the customer even as the team around the emerging business grows and scales. You continually reflect on your experience to improve our incubations approach, particularly how commercialization efforts can best be used as a tool to build conviction around new business ideas.

We are very excited to hear from you.

Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We actively seek applicants from underrepresented communities. Even if you are not 100% sure you are right for the role, please apply and we will be happy to consider your application. All employment is based on merit and business need, and we respond to each application we receive.