Customer Success Operations

Overview

You're the operational backbone of Watershed's Customer Success team, working on retention strategy, customer data architecture, and systems automation. You partner with leaders across Revenue, Customer, Product, and Finance to build scalable processes for managing enterprise sustainability accounts. You're not managing customers directly - you're building the infrastructure, analytics, and operating model that helps CS scale.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage growth (599 employees, enterprise customer base)

Size: 599 employees

Growth: Hiring for foundational CS Ops role indicates scaling phase with established enterprise customers (Airbnb, Carlyle, FedEx, Visa, Dr. Martens)

Market Position: Category leader in enterprise sustainability/ESG platform space - selling to Fortune 500 companies and large private equity firms

GTM Reality

Customer Base:

• Enterprise customers with complex ESG/sustainability data needs
• Multiple stakeholders per account (sustainability teams, finance, operations)
• Long implementation cycles, high retention importance
• Expansion opportunities tied to product adoption and use case expansion

CS Team Structure: You're building the CS Ops function as they scale - this is a foundational hire, not joining an established 10-person ops team

Cross-functional Dependencies: Heavy collaboration with Revenue Ops, Product, Finance, and CS leadership - lots of alignment meetings and stakeholder management

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Data/Analytics (30%) | Systems & Automation (25%) | Strategy & Planning (25%) | Cross-functional Projects (20%)

Key Activities

• Customer Data Modeling: Build and maintain data models for retention, expansion, health scores, and forecasting. Pull data from Salesforce, product usage tools, support systems - create unified views of customer health and pipeline.
• Systems Architecture: Design and implement workflows across CS tech stack (likely Gainsight or similar CS platform, Salesforce, BI tools). Build automation for customer lifecycle stages, renewal tracking, escalation workflows.
• Retention & Expansion Strategy: Analyze customer cohorts, identify churn risk patterns, model expansion opportunities. Work with CS and Revenue leaders to build playbooks and test retention initiatives.
• Operating Model Design: Define CS team structure, territory planning, account segmentation. Figure out how CSMs should spend their time, what gets automated, where Product-Led Growth motion fits.
• Reporting & Forecasting: Build executive dashboards for customer health, renewal forecasts, expansion pipeline, CS productivity metrics. Prepare board-level reporting on customer metrics.
• Process Documentation: Create and maintain operational processes, CS playbooks, and workflow documentation as the function scales.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're building this function from scratch - there's no playbook to follow, you're creating it. Lots of ambiguity and changing priorities.
• Enterprise sustainability data is complex - customers have messy data across facilities, supply chains, products. CS challenges are technical, not just relational.
• Heavy cross-functional dependency - you need buy-in from Revenue, Product, Finance, and CS leadership to get anything done. Lots of alignment meetings and consensus-building.
• CS Ops can feel invisible - when things work smoothly, nobody notices. When forecasts are off or systems break, everyone notices.
• You're in the office (NY or SF) - not a remote role. This limits your talent pool and requires geographic commitment.
• Balancing quick wins with long-term infrastructure - leadership wants both, you can't always deliver both simultaneously.

What Success Looks Like

• Net retention rate improves and becomes more predictable - you can forecast renewals and expansion accurately
• CS team spends less time on admin and more time with customers - automation and systems reduce operational overhead
• Customer health scores actually predict churn and expansion - your models work and teams trust them
• CS leadership has clear visibility into the business - dashboards and reporting become the source of truth for customer decisions
• Organizational planning becomes data-driven - territory design, hiring plans, and resource allocation based on your models

Who You're Supporting

Internal Stakeholders:

• CS Leadership (your main partner - defining strategy and priorities)
• Revenue Operations (alignment on customer lifecycle, handoffs, forecasting)
• Product teams (usage data, adoption metrics, feature requests from customers)
• Finance (renewal forecasting, revenue recognition, customer economics)

Indirect Impact:

• CSMs managing enterprise accounts (you make their jobs easier and more effective)
• Implementation teams (you design workflows for onboarding and deployment)
• Executive team (you provide visibility into customer health and retention)

What They Care About:

• Can we predict renewals accurately? (Finance, Revenue, Executives)
• Are we retaining and expanding customers efficiently? (CS Leadership)
• What customers are at risk and why? (CS team, Executives)
• How should we structure the CS team as we scale? (CS Leadership, HR)
• What's the ROI of CS investments? (Finance, Executives)

Requirements

• 3-5+ years in Revenue Operations, CS Operations, or Sales Operations at a B2B SaaS company
• Strong analytical skills - SQL, data modeling, building forecasts and cohort analyses
• Systems experience with CS platforms (Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero), Salesforce, BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Mode)
• Cross-functional project management - you've led initiatives across Revenue, Product, and Finance
• Experience with customer lifecycle operations - renewal processes, expansion motions, health scoring
• Comfortable with ambiguity - this is a foundational role, you're defining the function
• Based in or willing to relocate to New York or San Francisco (office-based role)