Lead Customer Program Manager

**Work Hours: 7:30 PM – 3:30 AM IST, Monday through Friday (aligned with US Eastern business hours)**

Impact in this Role

At Fictiv/MISUMI Americas, we are building the operating system for custom mechanical parts and assembly - enabling Fortune 500 companies to scale production across India, Mexico, China, and the US. We deliver highly complex, high-quality hardware for autonomous vehicles, surgical systems, industrial robots, and beyond.

The Lead Customer Program Manager is a people leader role within the Customer Program Management team. You will build, manage, and grow a team of CPMs who are responsible for owning customer programs and projects end-to-end - from initial scoping and kickoff through delivery, escalation management, and long-term account health.

This role sits at the intersection of three disciplines: customer success, project management, and manufacturing expertise. Your team’s job is to be the trusted partner for our customers - understanding their manufacturing needs deeply, keeping programs on track, and ensuring every commitment we make is one we keep. Your job as Lead CPM is to make sure your team does that exceptionally well, consistently.

You will coach and develop your team, set standards for how programs are run and how customers are managed, resolve escalations, and partner cross-functionally to remove blockers. You bring both the credibility of deep program management and manufacturing experience and the leadership maturity to develop others and elevate the team around you.

You will report to the Manager of Customer Program Management. This role has a hybrid model (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in office, Thursday and Friday remote).

What you will be doing

1. Team Leadership & People Management

• Directly manage a team of Customer Program Managers (Junior to Mid Level), owning their performance, development, and day-to-day effectiveness
• Set clear goals and performance expectations for each direct report; conduct regular 1:1s and formal reviews
• Build structured development plans for each team member, identifying skill gaps, creating growth opportunities, and actively coaching toward them with the goal of accelerating each individual's potential, not just managing their current performance
• Serve as the first line of escalation for your team: step in on complex programs, difficult customer situations, or cross-functional blockers as needed
• Create and maintain onboarding frameworks, training materials, and capability-building resources for new and growing CPMs
• Actively participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new team members as the team scales
• Foster a high-accountability, high-support team environment rooted in the MISUMI Americas values: Not Afraid to Fail, Empowerment, Open to Change, Speed / Bias Toward Action, and Grit

2. Customer Program & Project Oversight

• Maintain visibility across your team’s full portfolio of customer programs and projects - monitoring health, tracking risks, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks
• Set and uphold team standards for how programs are planned, communicated, and executed: scope management, change control, risk identification, and status reporting
• Step in directly on strategic, high-complexity, or at-risk customer accounts to guide recovery, lead customer conversations, or provide senior presence
• Partner with Sales and Account Management to ensure smooth program onboarding, renewals, and escalation resolution
• Champion a consistent customer experience across the team - ensuring customers always have a responsive, knowledgeable, proactive point of contact

3. Customer Success & Relationship Management

• Model and coach a customer success mindset within the team: proactive communication, anticipating needs, building trust, and driving long-term account health
• Ensure the team is measuring the right things - on-time delivery, customer satisfaction, escalation rate, response time - and improving over time
• Guide your team in navigating difficult customer conversations: how to deliver bad news, manage expectations, and turn friction into stronger relationships
• Build relationships with senior customer stakeholders on key accounts; represent the CPM team in strategic customer interactions as needed

4. Supply Chain & Customer Operations

• Maintain a working understanding of supply chain operations - supplier management, lead times, procurement constraints, and fulfillment workflows - to help your team navigate program risks and set accurate customer expectations
• Oversee customer operations health across the portfolio: order management, delivery performance, issue resolution timelines, and escalation response
• Partner with Supply Chain, Operations, and Quality teams to resolve cross-functional blockers affecting customer programs and ensure your team has the right internal connections to act effectively
• Coach your team to think beyond program execution - understanding how supply chain and operational decisions upstream directly impact customer experience downstream
• Identify systemic supply chain or operations issues that recur across programs and work with leadership to address root causes, not just individual incidents

5. Team Effectiveness & Execution Consistency

• Stay close to how standards and tooling are evolving across the CPM team, and make sure your team is aligned, trained, and applying them consistently
• Own adoption. When new processes or tools are introduced, drive uptake within your team - close gaps, address resistance, and follow through until it becomes standard practice
• Coach individuals toward stronger execution habits. Where gaps are recurring, treat them as a development opportunity before escalating
• Keep a pulse on execution quality across your team's programs and bring that ground-level visibility into broader team conversations about what is working and what needs attention

Experience

Required

• 7–13 years of total work experience, with a minimum of 5 years managing customer-facing programs or projects in a fast-paced hardware product development or contract manufacturing environment
• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or a related field 
• Minimum 2 years in a team lead, senior lead, or people management role with direct reports - owning performance reviews, development plans, and day-to-day team management
• Proven track record of running complex, multi-stakeholder customer programs end-to-end, with full accountability for scope, cost, timeline, and customer satisfaction
• Direct experience working with US-based or European-based customers from India on a US business hours schedule

Preferred

• Experience at a contract manufacturer, digital manufacturing platform, or hardware supply chain company
• Exposure to low-volume / prototype builds and high-mix, high-velocity manufacturing environments
• Familiarity with the hardware product development lifecycle: EVT, DVT, PVT, MP
• Experience with CRM/ERP tools (Salesforce, Odoo), project management tools (Jira, Asana), and data platforms like Sigma

Core Skills & Competencies

• People Leadership: Demonstrated ability to build, manage, and grow a team; sets clear expectations, holds accountability, invests in development, and creates a culture of performance and support
• Customer Success Mindset: Deep instinct for what makes customers stay, grow, and refer; coaches the team to be proactive, solutions-oriented, and relationship-driven
• Project & Program Management: Strong command of program fundamentals - scope, risk, timeline, change management - and the ability to set and enforce standards across a team
• Manufacturing Expertise: Enough technical depth to guide the team through complex manufacturing decisions, support difficult customer conversations, and build credibility with engineering and operations
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal English; able to communicate at the right level for the audience - from a customer VP to a junior CPM to an internal engineering team
• Judgment & Escalation: Knows when to delegate, when to coach, and when to step in directly; trusted by the team and by leadership to make the right call
• Agility, Adaptability & Grit: Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; sets the tone for the team when things get hard
• Data-Driven: Use metrics to evaluate team performance, catch risks early, and drive continuous improvement
• Individual Coaching & Development: Goes beyond performance management:  actively invests in helping each team member realize their potential faster; identifies what holds people back, creates the right conditions, and adjusts coaching style per individual
• Agility / Succeeding in the Fictiv Environment: Fictiv moves fast, changes direction often, and rewards people who figure things out without waiting to be told; the right candidate has thrived in environments like this, they do not need certainty to act, do not wait for a perfect process to exist, and are energized rather than frustrated by ambiguity and pace
• People Skills in a Non-Hierarchical Culture: Fictiv's culture is direct, candid, and non-hierarchical; traditional command-and-control or deferential work styles do not fit
• The Lead CPM must be comfortable giving and receiving direct feedback, speaking up in cross-functional settings, pushing back with data, and empowering their team to do the same, regardless of seniority or title in the room
• Urgency & Firefighting Under Pressure: Able to stay effective and keep the team grounded when multiple things are on fire simultaneously; knows how to triage, reprioritize quickly, and help the team navigate constant urgency without burning out or dropping the ball
• Converts chaos into clarity for the people around them

Interested in learning more?  We look forward to hearing from you soon.