Director of Customer Success

Responsibilities

Own retention and consumption

• Drive gross retention, expansion, and credit consumption, and lead customers onto the Backstory platform

• Give leadership a weekly view of renewal risk, and run save motions with direct executive engagement

Run segmented customer motions

• Run three coverage models: high-touch strategic, time-boxed emerging, and scaled, moving emerging accounts into strategic coverage within their renewal cycle

• Own account alignment, book economics, capacity planning, and the playbooks that take accounts from data platform adoption to deployed use cases

Deliver value through solution-based thinking

• Understand each strategic customer's business, technical environment, and what our product can become for them

• Trace every request to an agreed problem statement and measurable outcome, and own the value realization framework (success plans, executive readouts, EBRs)

Build a high-performing team

• Hire, develop, and retain managers and CSMs, with a bench ready for larger books and new segments

• Build solution instinct across the team: spot the architecture under a request, gather context before engaging technical teams, and see it through

• Own onboarding and ramp, career paths, and performance standards

Run the CS operating rhythm

• Own weekly renewal reviews, segment account reviews, monthly business reviews, and quarterly planning

• Maintain the metrics and dashboards behind them, and manage budget, staffing, and process

Be our best customer

• Run CS on Backstory, from account plans and health signals to renewal reviews and customer prep

• Lead forums where CSMs share their platform workflows, and turn daily use into product input

Lead cross-functional partnerships

• Own the Sales to CS relationship, from handoff standards to joint renewal and expansion planning

• Coordinate with Professional Services, Technical Support, and Studio on strategic accounts

• Bring the customer's voice into product and go-to-market planning, and support references, stories, and Marketing's advisory programs

Qualifications

• 12+ years in Customer Success, Account Management, or post-sales leadership, including 5+ years leading teams and developing managers

• A track record of owning retention and expansion outcomes in B2B SaaS

• Experience building segmentation, capacity models, playbooks, and metrics that scale, and running a function from data in Salesforce, Gainsight, or similar

• Hands-on experience designing success planning, EBR, and value frameworks for enterprise customers, and translating product usage into outcomes executives care about

• The ability to find the problem beneath a feature request, build from existing capabilities, and know when to say no, scope down, or escalate with a recommendation

• Strong product intuition: you learn a product quickly, spot patterns across customers, and turn them into credible product demand

• Executive presence with C-level customer stakeholders and senior internal leaders, including negotiating and influencing on high-stakes decisions

• A proven partnership record with Sales, Services, Support, and Product

• You use Claude and other leading AI tools in your own work, understand agentic workflows and MCP-based integrations, and have a clear point of view on how AI is changing the CS role

• You learn a system before you change it, take feedback well, and can disagree and commit