Sr. Director, Strategic Readiness Programs

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Job Category
Customer Success

Job Details

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As a senior leader within strategic readiness programs on the CIC Strategic Programs team, this role is accountable for driving the end-to-end definition, deployment, and execution of high-visibility product innovation launches. Operating at the intersection of Technology & Product (T&P) and Cloud Success, this role will partner with Cloud Leaders to ensure operational readiness, advocate for customer success, and mitigate risk associated with launching new innovations at scale.

• Define the Operating Model: Establish and scale the operating model, governance structure, and success metrics for the Strategic Programs Big Bets Team, driving a clear mandate for high-risk, high-visibility New Product Introductions (NPIs).
• Strategic Risk Mitigation: Proactively identify the scope, complexity, and inherent risks of proposed platform, infrastructure, or product changes ("Big Bets"), surfacing implications and business cases for targeted investment scenarios (e.g. ring-fenced resources, hyper-care motions).
• Data-Led Business Decisions: Maintain a deep understanding of the business, impact metrics, Customer Success and corporate priorities, and cross-functional dependencies to make informed, data-led decisions that prioritize the right outcomes for both customers and business objectives.
• Integrated Roadmap Ownership: Develop and own integrated roadmaps for all enablement, documentation, and customer communications, ensuring a successful, coordinated adoption of critical changes.
• Executive Visibility & Accountability: Establish robust governance and provide executive-level visibility of key program aspects, driving data-driven accountability for achieving critical launch and adoption goals.

• E2E Orchestration: Lead the team to drive full end-to-end launch readiness and obtain stakeholder sign-off across all Clouds and supporting business units (including Offers, Account Success, Renewals, GTM, and Training) to reduce organizational noise and misalignment across high-stakes launches.
• Customer-Centric Requirements: Act as the sponsor for Customer Success (CS) requirements (e.g., Serviceability, Success Plans, Purpose-built product enablement) to ensure Technology & Product (T&P) leadership visibility and action, in close partnership with Cloud Success leadership.
• Expertise Building & Enablement: Quickly build technical expertise in new products and features and lead the scalable development and distribution of high-quality enablement content (FAQs, call scripts, knowledge articles, webinars) to the broader Customer Success organization.
• GTM Oversight: Oversee evaluation of Go-to-Market (GTM), Offer implications, and entitlement gaps, ensuring a clear and effective customer journey from product announcement to adoption.

• Quality and Gap Closure: Actively address critical product launch gaps, ensuring Customer Success stakeholder needs are met and closing product quality issues and enablement deficiencies that impede delivery teams.
• Voice of the Customer (VoC) & Advocacy: Represent the customer perspective ensuring adoption challenges and requirements are surfaced through the appropriate channels to influence product roadmap and design decisions.
• Product Feedback Loops: Oversee Pre-GA product feedback loops in partnership with Cloud Success leadership, ensuring bugs, dependencies, feature gaps, and telemetry issues are surfaced to the appropriate Product and Engineering teams to minimize customer-facing issues and escalations at launch.
• Strategic Liaison: Act as a strategic partner and liaison to Cloud Success leadership, ensuring readiness priorities and customer-impact considerations are consistently represented in cross-functional business planning with Product and Engineering (e.g., QBRs) to inform and influence overall Cloud strategy.

• Team Management & Mentorship: Manage, mentor, and inspire a team of subject matter experts (SMEs), guiding them to create holistic Points of View (POVs) and strategic approaches for customer success.
• Executive Stakeholder Management: Cultivate and maintain key executive-level relationships across T&P and Customer Success to garner buy-in, facilitate Success methods on the V2MOM, and drive cross-organizational collaboration.
• Data-Led Approach: Ensure all team activities are data-driven and measurable, continuously monitoring impact and adjusting approaches as needed.
• Measure and Drive Impact: Define, track, and report on key impact metrics related to program success, specifically focusing on:
  
  
  • Proactive case deflection and reduction.
  • Decreasing bugs/escalations at launch (reducing Attrition Risk).
  • Achieving faster internal ramp-up and resolution time (accelerating Time-to-Value, TTV).
• Own Portfolio Prioritization: Own the prioritization of strategic initiatives and readiness work for the overall assigned product portfolio, making recommendations for continuous success plan improvements.

• 10+ years experience in Customer Success or Product Management leadership role in the SaaS industry.
• 5+ years experience leading large, cross-functional teams focused on New Product Introduction (NPI) or Product Launch Management.
• Track record of developing teams of subject matter experts who deliver against strategic business initiatives; proven ability to set a vision, excite and lead cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated success managing teams and collaborating with senior leadership across different functions.
• Proven record of influencing outcomes with both technical and non-technical senior leaders across different functions.
• Deep understanding of the end-to-end customer and internal lifecycle in a cloud environment (e.g., sales, service, enablement, support, operations).
• Proven ability to influence and align Executive Leadership Team (ELT) stakeholders across product, engineering, and sales organizations.

• Executive Presence & Communication: Possesses exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the proven ability to distill complex technical and program information into clear, actionable executive summaries for the C-Suite (GMs, EVPs, and senior leadership). Comfortably presents to and updates internal and external executive stakeholders, anticipating their needs and crafting appropriate, persuasive approaches.
• Strategic Agility & Prioritization: Exhibits a forward-looking perspective, accurately anticipating future consequences and market trends. Possesses the strategic agility to articulate a credible vision of possibilities and the prioritization agility to quickly shift focus and direction to address evolving needs and drive the highest-priority outcomes.
• Organizational Acumen: Knowledgeable about how large, complex organizations work, including navigating both formal and informal networks. Understands organizational culture to effectively drive collaboration and informed decision-making across business units.
• Results-Oriented & Action-Oriented: Demonstrates exceptional operational rigor and a steadfast drive for results, consistently exceeding goals and possessing a strong bottom-line orientation. Exhibits a bias for action, managing through ambiguity to achieve deliverables and impact.
• Critical & Strategic Thinking: Ability to confidently synthesize a broad array of information, identify underlying themes, and develop clear, tactical plans to drive meaningful business changes with executives.
• Decision Quality & Negotiating: Makes sound decisions based on a mixture of analysis, experience, and judgment, particularly when managing competing and evolving priorities. Can negotiate skillfully in complex, tough situations, settling differences with minimum disruption, winning concessions without damaging relationships, and quickly gaining the trust of all parties.
• Influential Leadership: A proven, experienced leader adept at keeping teams motivated, informed, and engaged while effectively communicating the rationale behind complex business decisions. Proven track record of successfully leading teams through significant organizational change.
• Conflict & Stakeholder Management: Effectively steps up to conflicts, employing focused and active listening to quickly read situations and settle disputes equitably. Excels at hammering out tough agreements, finding common ground, and getting cooperation with minimal organizational noise.
• Subject Matter Expertise & Partnership: Ability to apply deep domain and product knowledge to directly influence product leaders' priorities and design decisions. Acts as a trusted partner and influential resource within the Technology & Product organization.