Description
As a Readiness Architect within the CIC Strategic Programs team, you ensure internal and external launch readiness for high-impact, cross-cloud product innovations spanning the entire Salesforce Cloud ecosystem. Your focus is to drive customer success— reducing operational and adoption risk—ensuring launch-readiness on Day One.
You orchestrate cross-functional readiness activities—partnering with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Support, and Enablement teams—to close gaps in product quality, field preparedness, stakeholder alignment, and operational workflows. You document Customer Success requirements, codify readiness insights, and embed them into launch plans, enablement materials, and product feedback loops.
You act as the connective thread across teams, representing the voice of the customer and field by surfacing critical feedback and advocating for solutions that reduce friction and accelerate time-to-value. Through strong business acumen, product knowledge, and cross-functional collaboration, you help scale readiness and customer enablement for high-priority product launches.
Key Responsibilities
Proactively identify the scope, complexity, and risks of prioritized, high-impact product innovation (or “Big Bets”) across clouds — assessing upstream and downstream impacts to customers, operations, and internal teams.
Lead Cross-Cloud Impact Assessment efforts, documenting criticality and scope to help calibrate readiness efforts, establish (and track) key dates and milestones, and align stakeholders across Customer Success teams.
Assess the broader business impact of each launch, including implications for go-to-market strategy, pricing and packaging decisions, in addition to Success Plan coverage, offers and related entitlements.
Aggregate program data, feedback, and business insights across teams to identify emerging risks, inform cross-functional decision-making, and ensure a holistic understanding of the end-to-end launch landscape.
Co-Develop integrated plans for enablement, documentation, and customer communications, maximizing the effectiveness of every touchpoint required for successful adoption of high-risk launches.
Align efforts to established standards and best practices to ensure effective cross-functional collaboration, executive visibility, and accountability for achieving launch goals.
Partner with Cloud Success to represent the customer perspective by ensuring all launch readiness requirements—including operational needs, enablement gaps, and adoption considerations—are captured, validated, and addressed in accordance with the launch timeline.
Establish clear milestones, risks, and success measures for strategic program motions, driving accountability, ensuring early escalation of issues, and enabling data-driven readiness decisions
Experience
5+ years of experience in a Customer Success or Product Management individual contributor role in the SaaS industry.
Hands-on experience working across high-complexity Salesforce products, including deep understanding of Success Plans, Core product suite and emerging AI capabilities and mapping them to operational launch readiness needs. Understanding of competitor products and landscape a plus.
Experience conducting structured business analysis — identifying customer adoption challenges, process gaps, and operational impacts, and translating findings into clear, actionable recommendations.
Demonstrated end-to-end experience driving release or readiness motions, ideally in a product, operations or customer-facing environment.
Track record of collaborating within a team of subject matter experts who deliver against strategic business initiatives.
Has held positions requiring interaction with both technical and non-technical stakeholders across different functions. Understands and can translate customer use cases to technical and functional requirements.
Skills & Expertise
Executive Communication: Strong oral and written communication skills. Proven record of presenting to and updating internal and external stakeholders, including executive personas.
Prioritization Agility: Approach work with a ‘beginner’s mind’ and shift focus and direction when needed to drive higher priority outcomes.
Drive for Results: Can be counted on to exceed goals successfully; is constantly and consistently one of the top performers; very bottom-line oriented; steadfastly pushes self and others for results.
Critical & Strategic Thinking: Ability to synthesize a broad array of information—including data and insights across the Salesforce ecosystem—identify themes and trends, and translate findings into actionable plans that drive meaningful business outcomes, and inform executive and cross-functional decision-making.
Subject Matter Expertise: Can apply domain and product knowledge to influence product leaders’ priorities and design decisions. Build relationships as a trusted partner with the Technology & Product organization.
Conflict Management: Steps up to conflicts, seeing them as opportunities. Is good at focused listening and reads situations quickly. Can hammer out tough agreements and settle disputes equitably, finding common ground and getting cooperation with minimal noise.
Decision Quality: Makes good decisions based upon a mixture of analysis, experience, and judgment. Has ability to manage competing and evolving priorities. There will always be more than can be done in a day, so having the right priorities and focus is required.
Negotiating: Can negotiate skillfully in tough situations with both internal and external groups; can settle differences with minimum noise; can win concessions without damaging relationships; can be both direct and forceful as well as diplomatic; gains trust of other parties quickly during negotiations; has a good sense of timing.
Action Oriented: Has a bias for action and can manage through ambiguity to drive collaboration and informed decision making to achieve goals and deliverables.
Data-Informed Decision Making: Ability to aggregate and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data, identify trends and insights, and draw actionable conclusions that consider downstream impacts to customers, internal teams, and business outcomes.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Ability to partner across multiple teams (Customer Success, T&P, GTM, Operations) to align priorities, ensure readiness, and drive coordinated execution of high-visibility launches.
Business Acumen & GTM Understanding: Understands broader business implications of product launches, including Success Plans, pricing & packaging, and overall customer impact.