Industry Strategy Manager

At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.

CoLab is the AI platform for driving stronger engineering decisions. Every design review in CoLab builds a knowledge repository of design feedback, decisions, and lessons learned - which AI agents draw from to flag issues on future designs before they compound. The more your team works in CoLab, the smarter it gets and the faster you arrive at the ideal design. Companies like Ford, Komatsu, and Johnson Controls use CoLab to catch issues earlier, eliminate rework cycles, and bring products to market faster.

Founded in St. John’s, Newfoundland, CoLab has grown quickly from our first customer in 2019 to a rapidly scaling company. We’ve recently been recognized on Deloitte’s Fast 50™ and Fast 500™, and named a Canadian company to watch by The Globe and Mail and Financial Post.

Role Summary

This is a senior, high-leverage operator reporting into the Director of Industry Strategy & Transformation, with direct exposure to revenue management and account owners. You own the strategy and execution behind CoLab's most important European enterprise deals, define how we land and expand within the region's most demanding manufacturers, build the repeatable motions that scale wins across the European revenue org, and ensure CoLab maintains product market fit as we grow in the region.

This is a deal-facing, customer-facing, and product-influencing role. You will drive consensus inside complex European manufacturing organizations, where a single buying choice routinely spans engineering, quality, IT, procurement, legal, and finance, and where trust is earned over time rather than won in a single meeting. The right person is part strategist, part operator, part competitor. Someone who can read a room of European executives, build a hyper compelling value case grounded in their world, and map the path to the next step without forcing a close before the room is ready. This is a role you grow into ownership of European industry strategy, not just execute against.

Responsibilities

Enterprise Deal Strategy and Acceleration  (60%)

• Co-own enterprise deal strategy on CoLab's most strategic European opportunities and develop the executive-level deal plays that unblock our highest-value, most complex deals across the regional pipeline.
• Run executive, management, and user workshops that surface transformation goals, expose workflow friction, and build the case for change at the pace European buying groups actually move.
• Multi-thread across the full stakeholder group. Coach buyers, navigate political landscapes, and orchestrate alignment across engineering, manufacturing, quality, procurement, IT, and the C-suite so deals don't stall when one stakeholder is out.
• Build strategic value cases and impact models that quantify engineering transformation and tie CoLab's value to measurable business outcomes, ensuring the cases account teams bring forward hold up to rigorous technical and financial scrutiny.
• Build the executive narratives, critical business cases, and deal decks that translate CoLab's value into language that moves European buying groups forward.

Market Infiltration and Revenue Enablement  (25%)

• Define and build the playbooks for entering new European verticals and accounts, navigating political landscapes, positioning CoLab's value to executives, and driving transformation-based adoption.
• Create repeatable land-and-expand sequences, executive alignment motions, and consensus-building plays the European team can run again and again.
• Partner with enablement to turn winning patterns into content, training, and tools that scale across the revenue organization.
• Translate continuous learnings across European accounts, pulling the best ideas forward.

Cross Functional Strategy and Product Influence  (15%)

• Synthesize signals from strategic European accounts into structured product feedback that helps product owners see which improvements deliver the highest revenue leverage in the region.
• Validate product concepts with key customers and ensure new capabilities align with the transformation outcomes driving the deals.
• Serve as connective tissue across revenue, product, and strategy in Europe, and support the Director of Industry Strategy & Transformation with market trends, competitive dynamics, and customer insights specific to the region.

Who You Are

The ceiling on this role is set by the person, not the title. Stronger operators will earn more deal ownership, more playbook authority, and more leadership exposure. This role is built for someone operating well above a standard individual contributor, with the judgment to own outcomes the way a director would.

• You've been there and done it in European manufacturing. You carry credibility that's earned, not claimed. You can walk a plant floor in Stuttgart or Turin, sit in a design review, and speak the language of engineering teams at any level. In this market, respect comes through experience.
• Proven experience owning enterprise strategy, revenue motions, or transformation programs into complex European organizations, ideally in automotive, industrials, manufacturing, engineering, or product development. You recognize where engineering teams lose hours every week.
• Fluent in how Europe actually buys. Decisions are consensus-driven, cycles run longer than US deals, "trusted by 500 US companies" means little here, and the win comes from mapping the entire stakeholder network rather than charming a single C-suite.
• High emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room of executives in real time. You know when to push, when to pause, when to ask the harder question, and when to take the win and move on. You move fluidly from a board level value conversation to a workflow mapping session, and from the direct to the relationship-first cultures, bringing the right approach to each.
• Competitive by nature and sharp on time value. You play to win, put in the reps, and run at high cadence. You take losses personally enough to learn and not personally enough to slow down. You know which work compounds and which is throwaway, and you make the call and move.
• Strong commercial and operational acumen. You translate technical capability into business outcomes that resonate with VPs of Engineering, CEOs, and CFOs, and you understand how work actually gets done inside complex organizations. You spot process drag, see where reviews break down, and connect workflow friction to business cost, then translate it into a path forward.
• Clear, direct communicator and fluent with AI as a force multiplier. You write concisely, present without filler, and build a clean, compelling deck under pressure, meeting buyers with the precision they expect. You reach for AI to compress research, sharpen messaging, and do more with less.

What Success Looks Like in Year One

• You are owning transformation workshops with our top European enterprise accounts.
• You have shipped impactful playbook work to the broader revenue org that is in use.
• You have meaningfully influenced the outcome of multiple seven figure deals in the region, collaborating regularly with our broader sales team.
• You are trusted to drive customer conversations across Europe without backup.