Product Adoption Manager, OpenCounter

OpenCounter is Accela’s pre-application front door, helping residents and business owners understand permit requirements, costs, and next steps before they apply. Adoption is critical—if staff do not use it and residents cannot find it, agencies may not realize its value, and renewal will be challenged.

The Product Adoption Manager owns the post-implementation window where adoption is critical. You will guide each agency through its first six to nine months, including training staff broadly, confirming guides are published where residents start, and maintaining a cadence until adoption is sustained. You will work with three customer groups, each with distinct purposes, and serve as Product’s direct observer of how agency staff use OpenCounter daily. Insights on user pain points will inform the roadmap. This position reports to the Director of Product, OpenCounter.

Specific Responsibilities

Adoption

• Own adoption across the full OpenCounter customer lifecycle to ensure agencies launch successfully, keep staff engaged, stay current with product evolution, and demonstrate ongoing value for renewal.
• Launch new agencies with training, placement, and early follow-up to establish adoption.
• Re-engage recently launched agencies to deepen staff usage, close training gaps, and prepare for renewal.
• Monitor mature accounts for renewal risk, usage signals, and opportunities to reinforce product value.

Pre-release Product Review

• Review new features and changes before production from the perspective of agency staff and residents who will use them.
• Identify potential confusion, support load, or training challenges, distinguishing defects from design concerns.
• Ensure new capabilities are explainable to agency audiences and identify required training or enablement materials.
• Provide direct feedback to engineering teams in their own tracker and review cycle, and be available during release weeks.

Product Feedback and Enablement

• Carry field observations of agency staff usage back into the roadmap, including workflow abandonment points.
• Partner with Product Marketing on adoption and enablement materials for the installed base.
• Tag each agency with its launch cohort and log adoption and risk signals per account, building an early-warning system.
• Travel to customer sites for launch training and business reviews. 10-20% travel required.

Success Metrics

• Launch and Public Usage: Ensure Permit Guides are easily found by the public and advertised across multiple channels.
• Staff Usage and Adoption: Train staff on features, conduct regular meetings in the first 6-9 months to ensure proper usage, and set adoption standards for specific features.
• Improve first-year retention rate by ensuring agencies launched in this program are more likely to renew than previous years’ first-year customers. Monitor renewal risk and track at-risk accounts.
• Customer satisfaction: Capture agency staff satisfaction after go-live training and at the annual business review. Establish this measurement in your first year.

Required Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of experience taking government or enterprise SaaS customers live and through adoption, in roles such as professional services, implementation, training, solution consulting, or customer success.
• Exceptional training and facilitation skills, including designing and delivering effective materials, engaging diverse agency audiences, assessing user comprehension, and building internal champions for future training.
• Experience driving voluntary adoption of a product or process within an organization, including influencing users who are not required to change behavior.
• Experience working inside a city, county, or state agency.
• Experience launching a new product or module into an existing customer base.
• Subject matter expertise in municipal permitting, planning, or licensing, including the ability to judge guide accuracy, credibility with building officials or planning directors, and understanding of conditional logic, eligibility rules, and fee calculations.
• Comfort using product and usage data to assess adoption, explain trends, and diagnose common launch barriers, including online accessibility of Permit Guides.

Desired Qualifications

• Background in customer support or QA, with the ability to differentiate between product defects, configuration gaps, and training gaps.
• Experience configuring or administering a permitting, licensing, or land management system.
• Familiarity with Accela Civic Platform, Public Portal, or ACA, including how records move between guidance layers and systems of record, and identifying handoff breakdowns.
• Experience driving adoption of an AI-enabled product.
• Ability to communicate product value to executive audiences by translating agency usage data into clear recommendations and renewal-supporting business outcomes.