Director of Launch

Key Responsibilities: 1. Strategic Leadership

• Define and own the implementation strategy, roadmap, and operating model to support company growth and product evolution.
• Establish best practices, playbooks, and standardized deployment frameworks that reduce time-to-go-live without sacrificing quality.
• Partner with Sales leadership to influence deal structuring, scoping, and implementation pricing to protect margin and set realistic customer expectations.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to provide implementation feedback loops that inform roadmap decisions and reduce recurring technical friction.

2. Team Management

• Recruit, coach, mentor, and develop a team of Implementation Managers and Implementation Specialists across varying complexity tiers (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise).
• Conduct regular performance reviews, set individual KPIs aligned to team and company-level SaaS metrics, and manage resource allocation across the project portfolio.
• Build career development pathways within the Implementation function and foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and customer empathy.
• Manage team capacity planning in alignment with sales pipeline forecasts to ensure headcount and bandwidth scale with new business volume.

3. Project Delivery

• Act as the senior escalation point for complex, high-value, or at-risk implementations, removing blockers and realigning stakeholders to keep projects on track.
• Ensure all implementations are delivered on time, within scope, and within budget, with clear milestones, risk registers, and executive status reporting.
• Oversee portfolio-level project health — monitoring implementation velocity, identifying systemic delays, and driving corrective action across the team.
• Enforce quality gates at key project milestones to ensure customers are fully activated and positioned for long-term product adoption before handoff to Customer Success.

4. Client Relations & Stakeholder Coordination

• Serve as an executive sponsor and primary escalation contact for strategic or high-complexity customer implementations.
• Manage stakeholder expectations proactively, ensuring customers have full visibility into project timelines, dependencies, and risks.
• Partner closely with Sales during pre-sales to provide scoping guidance, solution design input, and realistic implementation timelines.
• Coordinate seamlessly with Customer Success to execute warm handoffs, ensuring customer health scores, adoption benchmarks, and success plans are in place at go-live.

5. Process Improvement & Operational Excellence

• Identify bottlenecks across the implementation lifecycle and lead initiatives to eliminate manual effort, reduce cycle time, and scale delivery capacity.
• Build and maintain dashboards and reporting frameworks that surface real-time visibility into project status, team performance, and SaaS health metrics.
• Evaluate and implement tooling (PSA software, CRM integrations, onboarding automation platforms) to improve operational efficiency and data accuracy.
• Drive the development of self-serve and tech-touch onboarding options to support scaled segments without sacrificing customer outcomes.

Key Qualifications:

• Experience: 7+ years in implementation, professional services, or client onboarding roles within a SaaS or technology environment, with at least 3 years in a people management or team leadership capacity. Demonstrated experience managing enterprise-level implementations with six- or seven-figure ACV.
• Technical Proficiency: Deep understanding of SaaS software architectures, API-based integrations, data migration workflows, and complex system deployments. Ability to engage credibly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• SaaS Business Acumen: Strong command of SaaS business models and the downstream impact of implementation outcomes on metrics including NRR, churn, expansion revenue, and time-to-value. Experience influencing revenue recognition timelines through efficient project delivery.
• Leadership & Communication: Exceptional ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, influence without authority, and communicate clearly at all levels — from individual contributors to C-suite executives.
• Project Management: Proficiency with project management methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, hybrid) and tools such as Salesforce, Gainsight, Asana, Smartsheet, or similar platforms.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical, business, or operations field. MBA or equivalent advanced degree is a plus.

Performance Metrics: 1. Delivery & Velocity

• Time-to-go-live / Implementation velocity — average days from contract signature to customer go-live, segmented by customer tier and product
• On-time delivery rate — percentage of implementations completed within the originally scoped timeline
• Implementation capacity utilization — ratio of active projects to team capacity, used to guide hiring and resource planning

2. Customer Outcomes & SaaS Health

• Time-to-value (TTV) — time from go-live to the customer achieving their first defined success milestone or meaningful product adoption threshold
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) / Implementation NPS — post-implementation survey scores measuring the quality of the onboarding experience
• Early churn / post-implementation churn rate — percentage of customers who churn within 90–180 days of go-live, a leading indicator of onboarding quality
• Product adoption rate at handoff — percentage of contracted features or seats actively used at the point of Customer Success handoff
• Expansion influence — implementations that result in upsell or cross-sell opportunities identified and passed to Account Management

3. Financial & Business Impact

• Revenue recognition timing — average lag between contract signing and first recognized revenue, directly tied to implementation speed
• Renewal rate for implementation cohorts — NRR and GRR tracked for customers by the implementation team, providing a longitudinal view of onboarding quality's impact on retention

4. Team Performance

• Milestone attainment rate — percentage of project milestones hit on schedule across the active portfolio
• Team ramp time — average time for new Implementation Managers to reach full productivity