Merchant Lifecycle Strategy Lead

Design, test, and scale merchant lifecycle strategies that increase activation velocity, reduce early churn, and maximize merchant Net Revenue Retention (NRR). This role will own the full engagement journey—from onboarding to reactivation—using behavioral data, experimentation, and tailored communication to ensure merchants get value fast, stay active, and grow with Addi.

What you will do

• Move the activation rate from 61% to 67% within 12 months by diagnosing where the post-approval funnel leaks, sizing each leak, and shipping against the largest ones every sprint.

• Deliver the activation portfolio's full incremental GMV plan. The last cycle closed at $1M against a $1.4M plan. Close that variance within two quarters and hold the number in every quarter after.

• Rebuild the first 30 days after approval as an automated multi-channel journey in Braze (push, WhatsApp, email, in-app) that moves a newly approved user to first purchase without manual campaign work, with a measured incremental lift over the current experience.

• Run a weekly experiment cadence with clean incrementality reads across the active portfolio: at least one test live per week, holdout groups on everything that matters, and a monthly readout that separates real lift from noise and states what to scale, adjust, or stop.

What we’re looking for

Owns a number and drives it (MUST HAVE)

• Has personally owned a funnel or lifecycle metric, can state its starting value, its ending value, and the specific interventions that moved it.

• Prioritizes by size of prize rather than by ease or by what is already in flight. Kills work that is not paying.

• Takes a position on what to do next and defends it with data.

Designs lifecycle journeys end to end (MUST HAVE)

• Has built automated, multi-channel customer journeys in Braze or a comparable Tier-1 CRM: onboarding, activation, and early retention.

• Understands multi-channel orchestration across push, WhatsApp, email, and in-app, including frequency capping and fatigue management.

• Knows the difference between a friction problem and an intent problem, and treats them differently.

• Can launch a campaign directly from a brief when Marketing Operations is at capacity, without needing supervision.

Works with data independently (MUST HAVE)

• Writes SQL without help: joins, aggregations, window functions, and cohort construction against a warehouse (Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, or comparable).

• Builds and monitors activation cohorts and retention curves. Reads a funnel and identifies the drop-off that matters.

• Uses data to tell a story that leads to a decision, not to fill a slide.

Understands incrementality and business impact (MUST HAVE)

• Designs tests with holdouts and knows why. Separates incremental lift from what would have happened anyway.

• Runs ROI analysis on campaigns and incentives: cost per incremental user, payback, and return by segment.

• Connects every decision to GMV and to unit economics.

Manages and develops people (MUST HAVE)

• Has managed at least one direct report, or has clear evidence of leading a workstream and growing the people on it without formal authority.

• Sets expectations in advance, gives feedback continuously, and does not use a formal process as a substitute for a conversation that should have happened earlier.

Influences Product and Brand without authority (MUST HAVE)

• Has won prioritization from a product team by building the case, not by escalating.

• Keeps Brand, Operations, Product, and business-unit teams aligned on scope, timelines, and dependencies from kickoff to launch.

• Escalates rarely, and always with a recommendation attached rather than a problem.

Uses AI tools to work faster and better (MUST HAVE, minimum AI-L3)

• Operates at AI-L3 (Builder) or above on Addi's AI Fluency Ladder: builds reusable workflows, playbooks, or automations that other people adopt, not just personal prompting.

• Uses Claude, ChatGPT, or comparable tools as a daily working layer for analysis, briefs, segmentation logic, and reporting.

• Identifies where AI removes meaningful work from the team's week and implements it without being asked. Does not use AI as a substitute for thinking.