Director of Product Management, Heroku, Customer Experience

Are you an innovative product leader who thrives in a fast-paced collaborative environment and loves working with the best technology teams in the world? Do you have a strong focus in the pursuit of delivering developer experiences that enable developers to do the best work of their careers? If so, this amazing role in our Heroku Product team could be for you!

A customer experience goes beyond interacting with our products. It encompasses the experiences, feelings, and impressions a customer has during every phase of their customer journey with us, including the sales, onboarding, implementation, and renewal milestones. Key to this role is understanding, quantifying, and qualifying the customer journey and ensuring that the milestones in this process are reliable, consistent, and meet or exceed customer expectations.

This role is directly tied to identifying revenue, growth, and retention drivers. The leader in this role will be expected to identify key milestones in the customer journey, and elaborate on and optimize them to meet and exceed expectations. This leader will also be responsible for humanizing our customer’s pain points and broadly telling our customer’s stories from their point of view to our leadership and other service leaders to justify and enable investment as needed.

A successful leader in this role will put the customer at the center of the decision-making process, will elicit empathy for the customer, and will build consensus across stakeholders with a customer-first perspective. Heroku is taking a big step forward this year with a significant investment in hiring, roadmap and new technologies. You can help shape this exciting future! Read more at https://blog.heroku.com/

Responsibilities

• Develop a customer-centric strategy to promote customer engagement excellence with related metrics. Enhance and ensure consistently valued experiences throughout the customer experience. Gather insights and feedback, and relay customer stories that build internal and external awareness of the power of Heroku.
• Develop reliability metrics for crucial touch points in the sales, support, professional services, and product experiences. Promote product experience enhancements and priorities, by sharing insights with leadership for data-driven proactive action and investment.
• Have a close relationship with key customers, partners, and analysts that you leverage from product direction through beta-driven validation. You drive customer-centricity throughout your org. Have a clear 12-18 month vision and high-level backlog that you can present at the executive level.
• Drive modern and agile processes throughout your org and manage the product release process (pricing, packaging, enablement, launch). You’re an experienced partner with and advocate for UX and content teams.
• Lead and present to a 100+ audience at a major industry event. Communicate product strategy via presentation or written communication to executives, including presenting at internal and external product summits. Build and deliver a release briefing to an industry analyst. Script and build a killer demo for a keynote, analyst, or management offsite.
• Know your stakeholders and key customers across the business and have a trusted relationship with open lines of communication about roadmap, strategy, and risks. Resolve conflicts both for yourself and your team. Your Salesforce network is strong - up, down, and sideways. Know your risks and manage them proactively.
• Take a longterm view, providing direction for your products and your teams. Your plans demonstrate an understanding of company strategy and where your products fit. Make early decisions with an eye on pricing and packaging recommendations, including SKUs and editions, and position your products to beat the competition.
• When required, you become a manager, proficient at hiring, managing your direct reports, and providing clear and timely feedback to your team and colleagues. Meet with each member of your team weekly and provide them the support they need to succeed, with a focus on team development and training. Delegate accordingly with your team. You are a steward of your team members’ careers, and you actively work to help them succeed.
• Be fluent with your customer base and their needs, using data and relationships to drive decisions. Regular customer meetings and discussions allow you to share ideas. Lead customer meetings and event sessions, independently creating relevant content. Deliver resources to support adoption through various channels, training, Trailhead, blogs, open source, and internal proof of concepts.
• Have measures in your annual goals around diversity and inclusivity. You not only live those values, but also coach your direct reports and serve as a role model for others. You act as a cultural ambassador externally.

Qualifications

• Desired are BS or MS in Engineering, Computer Science, or related disciplines or equivalent experience in technical leadership roles.
• Minimum of 5+ years’ leadership experience in one or more of the following: customer support, sales, professional services, engineering, or product management, with expertise in enterprise / PaaS environments.
• Proven ability and experience in building customer-centric strategies and metrics, with a proven record of delivering change in complex environments with multiple dependencies and considerations.
• Proven ability to influence and coordinate cross-functional teams to execute against a plan.
• Well-developed leadership, management, and strategic-thinking skills, with the ability to excite and lead others.
• Understanding of the Salesforce Platform and other enterprise PaaS products, customers, partners, and competitors.
• Excellent organization and communications skills, with experience communicating across groups with varying degrees of technical background.
• Experience presenting to executive leadership, participating in the sales cycle, and handling sensitive customer escalations.