The person who makes a sleep company run while everyone else sleeps better
Every fast-growing company has someone whose job is hard to put on a business card and impossible to do without. At Hatch, that person is Jillian Locks.
As Vice President and Chief of Staff to the CEO, Locks sits at the center of one of consumer technology's quieter success stories. Hatch makes smart sleep products - the Restore clock that lives on a nightstand, the Hatch Baby sound machine that has become standard issue in nurseries, the portable Hatch Go for kids. The company's premise is simple and stubborn: sleep is not a luxury, it is a foundation, and it can be designed for. Turning that premise into a business that ships hardware, runs a subscription content library, and reaches homes across the country takes more than a good idea. It takes operations. That is Locks's domain.
The chief-of-staff role is often misunderstood. It is not an assistant and it is not a deputy. At its best it is connective tissue - the person who translates a founder's vision into decisions, priorities, and a schedule that teams can actually execute against. Locks works directly with Hatch co-founder and CEO Ann Crady Weiss, which means she is close to nearly every consequential call the company makes, from product roadmap to organizational rhythm. When a company is scaling, the difference between chaos and momentum is frequently a single well-organized operator. Locks is Hatch's.
Rest isn't a reward, it's a foundation.
A career built on everyday objects
What makes Locks unusual is not the title. It is the throughline. Look across her career and you find a consistent interest in the products people touch every day, and in the companies mission-driven enough to sweat the details. She began in communications at Edelman, one of the world's largest PR firms, where the job is to understand a story before you can tell it. She moved into consumer retail at Williams-Sonoma, the kind of place where the gap between a good product and a beloved one is measured in small, obsessive decisions.
From there she went smaller and scrappier. She joined Kiwi Crate, now known as KiwiCo, the subscription company that ships science and art projects to curious kids. Then The Orange Chef, an early connected-kitchen startup working at the awkward, exciting intersection of hardware and software. Each move traded scale for proximity - to the product, to the customer, to the messy reality of building something new. By the time she arrived at Hatch, she had assembled a rare toolkit: the storytelling instincts of communications, the taste of high-end retail, and the operational grit of early-stage startups.
Named on the patents
Here is the detail that surprises people. For someone whose career has lived mostly in strategy and operations, Locks's name shows up somewhere unexpected: the patents. She is a co-inventor on several of Hatch's early devices, including a smart changing pad with built-in weight sensors that could measure an infant - a patent granted in 2018 in the company's Hatch Baby era. Being listed as an inventor is not a courtesy. It means she was in the room where the product was actually being figured out, not just the room where it was being sold.
That fact says a lot about how she works. Operators who understand the product are worth more than operators who only manage the calendar around it. Locks has spent enough time close to the hardware to know why decisions matter, not just that they need to be made. It is one reason the operations chair she sits in has real weight at Hatch rather than being a support function bolted on the side.
Recognition, and what it points to
The Silicon Valley Business Journal named Locks a Women of Influence honoree, a recognition that in the Bay Area tends to go to people who build rather than promote. It is a fitting nod for someone whose contribution is felt more than it is announced. Chiefs of staff rarely give the keynote. They make sure the keynote is worth giving. The award is a rare public marker for a kind of work that is, by design, mostly invisible.
That invisibility is worth dwelling on, because it is the whole point of the job. When operations are working, nobody notices them. Product ships on schedule. Meetings have agendas and outcomes. The CEO spends time on the decisions only a CEO can make, because someone else has cleared the runway. The measure of a great chief of staff is not a moment of visible heroics but a long stretch of things simply working. Locks's track record at Hatch is that stretch.
The Berkeley thread
Locks earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and even her college years carried the pattern that would define her career. She served as treasurer of her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma - a first, unglamorous taste of the operational responsibility she would later make a profession of - and mentored Berkeley High School students through the YMCA. The habits were there early: take on the work that keeps a group functioning, and do it for people, not applause.
There is a neat symmetry to a career that started with a college treasurer's ledger and arrived at the right hand of a CEO. Both jobs are about the same thing at different scales: making sure a group of people can do what they set out to do. Locks appears to have understood, earlier than most, that this is a craft worth mastering - that the person who organizes the work is as essential as the person who imagines it.
Why sleep, and why now
Of all the products Locks could have ended up building, sleep is a fitting final entry on the list so far. It is universal, it is neglected, and it is quietly being reinvented by companies willing to treat it as a design problem rather than an afterthought. Hatch sits at the front of that shift, turning the bedside table into a small piece of considered technology - light, sound, and routine engineered to help people wind down and wake up. The category is growing, and the company is scaling into it.
Scaling is exactly the phase where operators earn their keep. Early on, a startup can run on the founder's energy and a handful of people who do everything. Growth breaks that. Suddenly there are more teams, more decisions, more places for momentum to leak away. The companies that make the jump usually have someone whose entire job is to keep the machine coherent as it gets bigger. At Hatch, that someone is Jillian Locks - the operator behind the founder, the name on the early patents, and the reason a company built on rest never seems to slow down.
One operator, five industries
Relative time and focus across her career, illustrative.