Senior Manager, Strategic Customer Success

About the Job:

The Senior Manager of Strategic Customer Success will report to the Director of Customer Success, Americas, and lead a team of Strategic CSMs who serve as the primary point of contact for LaunchDarkly’s largest and most critical customers post-sale. The ideal candidate is a people-first leader who is passionate about delivering an exceptional customer experience, brings an innovative approach to Customer Success, and thrives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. This role is a unique opportunity to shape and lead a team in a growing market at LaunchDarkly, driving both customer success and organizational growth.

Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership and Development: Recruit, lead, and develop a high-performing team of CSMs. Provide ongoing coaching, support, and feedback to help the team grow their skills, deliver strong customer outcomes, and consistently meet or exceed expectations.
• Strategic Strategy and Execution: Partner closely with the GTM ecosystem and other CS teams to build and operationalize Customer Success programs and playbooks tailored to the Strategic customer segment, ensuring alignment with our global CS frameworks.
• Proactive Customer Insight: Enable the team to understand and act early on leading indicators such as onboarding progress, product adoption, risk signals, and expansion potential, in order to reduce churn and drive growth.
• Operational Execution: Bring operational rigor to the team by organizing around key performance metrics, including NDR and expansion, and running regular forecast and pipeline reviews to ensure we deliver against both short- and long-term goals.
• Customer Engagement: Serve as the senior advocate for strategic and high-impact customers. Oversee critical engagements and escalations, and ensure customer needs and insights inform internal decisions. LaunchDarkly is a startup environment, and everyone stays close to customers - one of our core values is “Customers On Speedial.”

About You:

• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead and develop high-performing teams.
• Entrepreneurial Spirit: Driven, proactive, and comfortable operating in a highly ambiguous, startup environment.
• Passion for Growth (your own, and your teams): Enthusiastic about continuous learning and personal development. Actively seeks and provides feedback. You consider promoting a team member the best deal you could possibly close! 
• Analytical: Enjoys identifying trends in data and making informed decisions about team and customer outcomes.
• Program Builder: Passionate about building high-impact, customer focused programs. Able to build and execute a project plan, holding stakeholders accountable to a timeline. 
• Sales oriented: You have experience owning a number and want to continue to do so. Customer Success at LaunchDarkly is a commercial function, you should be excited about having commercial responsibility. 
• Problem Solver: Strong critical thinking skills and enjoys solving complex customer problems.
• Team Player: Collaborates well with others, knows when to involve other stakeholders, and proactively keeps others informed.

Qualifications:

• Experience: Minimum of 12 years in a customer-facing role, with at least 3 years in a leadership or team lead position within customer success, account management, or a similar field. 
• Commercial Acumen: Experience owning the renewal process and being accountable for a retention quota. Strong discovery, qualification, and sales skills; training in Command of the Message, MEDDIC, or similar methodologies is preferred.
• Data Orientation: Experience leveraging data to make decisions about talent, team effectiveness, customer programs, etc. 
• Technical Knowledge: Experience working with technical products, preferably within the DevOps space, and interacting with developers or technical personas.
• Project Management: Strong project management sk