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Project Open to Alpha Team

SimplyCodes State-of-Product Memo + Three Bottleneck Problems — Day 30 Phase 0 deliverable for the first SimplyCodes PM

Write the "State of SimplyCodes Product" memo. Five days of customer interviews, five days of trace review and metric analysis, then a single one-page memo that names the three concrete SimplyCodes problems currently bottlenecked on CEO bandwidth and the three measurable 90-day success criteria the candidate would own if hired. The memo is the deliverable. No deck. No 12-page brief. One page.
Project Overview
Discipline
product-manager-simplycodes · founding-product-manager
Duration
1 week
Compensation
Your stated freelance rate
Surface
SimplyCodes · Revenue · Product.ai
Kernels
simplycodes · revenue · productai
Outcomes
sc-traffic · mlp-convert · new-revenue
Tier
Foundational
Alpha Team
Open to alpha members who want to take this on
Tooling
Claude Code or Co-work

Why we want this done

The first PM hire's structural failure mode is well documented: founder cannot delegate, PM imports big-company process, PM gets overwhelmed by multi-surface scope. The mitigation is named in the recruiting-driver §6 and the Phase 3 PM briefing — surface-specialized first hire (SimplyCodes alone) with explicit ownership of the revenue engine. SimplyCodes generates real revenue and serves real merchants; a wrong first PM hire there is existential. The State-of-Product memo is the highest-signal Day-30 artifact a PM can produce. It tests whether the candidate can absorb a surface they did not previously own, identify the three problems that actually block velocity (not the ten that look interesting in a board deck), and commit to measurable success criteria they would defend in 90 days. Practice-layer tacit knowledge shows up here or it doesn't.

Scope

  1. Days 1-3 — five customer interviews (Bri/Elena schedule introductions; the candidate runs the calls)
  2. Days 4-5 — trace review of SimplyCodes consumer traffic, code-verification fleet output, and merchant-side data
  3. Days 6-7 — metric snapshot (sc-traffic, mlp-convert, code accuracy, churn, app store ranking on target keyword cluster)
  4. Days 8-10 — write the one-page memo
  5. The memo must include: (a) state of the surface in 3-5 sentences, (b) three concrete bottlenecked problems with mechanism + cost, (c) three measurable 90-day success criteria the candidate would own, (d) explicit non-ownership of Alloy / Cortex / Truth Graph

What success looks like

  • Memo is one page (this is a hard constraint, not aspirational)
  • Three bottleneck problems are specific (not "improve conversion" — "fix the merchant-side validation lag that produces 18% expired-code surface on landing pages")
  • Each problem includes the mechanism (why it persists) and the cost (in $ or in user-trust terms)
  • Three success criteria are measurable in 90 days, on real metrics, with a clean baseline window
  • The candidate explicitly declines ownership of the other surfaces in writing — does not negotiate scope expansion

References

references.md
PM Phase 3 briefing axiom B1 (Senior PM SimplyCodes, not Head of Product), B2 (Surface-Specialized), B3 (Revenue-Engine Default), C2 (Onboarding Calendar Should Match Cognitive Complexity), C3 (First-PM Failure Modes)
SimplyCodes kernel — verification fleet, monetization architecture
Revenue kernel — pricing physics, sales motion
Existing SimplyCodes metrics dashboards (sc-traffic.md, mlp-convert.md outcome files)
Phase 2 PM briefing Vector 3 — Product.ai-specific verdicts
Linear's Nan Yu first-PM precedent (referenced in PM briefing Phase 1 META-V36-002)

Constraints

  • Claude Code or Co-work as primary substrate
  • One page is one page — text overflow into a "supporting appendix" is a fail
  • Customer interviews must be real customers — five of them — not internal team members
  • Three bottleneck problems must be CEO-bandwidth-bottlenecked specifically (not general product debt)
  • Success criteria must be measurable on existing instrumentation — proposing a new metric and then running on it within 90 days is acceptable; proposing an unmeasurable success criterion is a fail
  • The candidate may not negotiate scope expansion to Alloy / Cortex / Truth Graph during the project
Apply
01

Read the Codex (10 min)

The operating principles we work by. If they resonate, the rest of this will land. Open the Codex →

02

12-minute video screen

Hireflix, async. Questions are calibrated to this project specifically.

03

Chemistry call (30-60 min)

Direct call with the CEO. Strategic alignment and mutual fit. No problem-solving exercise.

04

Project begins within 2-3 weeks

1099 contractor agreement, NDA, paid at your stated rate. Day 1 in Santa Monica.

Alpha Team members can take this project without the screen-and-call sequence. Reach out via the Alpha Team channel.

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