Vice President - Customer Operations

• Strategy and leadership

• Define and execute the multi‑year Customer Operations strategy covering onboarding, UAT, go‑live, hypercare, steady‑state operations, and continuous value realization for enterprise procurement customers.
• Build and lead a 200–300 member team (frontline managers, operations, UAT leads, release/readiness, TAMs, L2/L3, analytics, and tooling) from Mumbai; establish clear org design, operating cadence, and succession plans.
• Partner with Product and Engineering on roadmap, release readiness, incident prevention, and customer feedback loops; champion operational requirements and automation at roadmap level.
• Operational excellence and KPIs

• Own UAT and Production scorecards: UAT pass rate, defect density and severity mix, first‑time‑right deployments, change failure rate, MTTR/MTTD, incident and problem SLAs, release predictability, and deployment frequency.
• Drive standardization via playbooks, runbooks, and control plans across customers and regions; institutionalize QA gates, canary/blue‑green cutovers, rollback strategies, and post‑incident RCAs with action tracking.
• Implement a robust capacity and workforce model (forecasting, staffing, utilization, skills matrix, location strategy) to ensure on‑time customer outcomes at optimal cost-to-serve.
• Customer outcomes and value realization

• Ensure onboarding throughput, time‑to‑value, adoption of core procurement modules (eSourcing, CLM, P2P, Supplier Mgmt, Analytics), and measurable business impact (cycle times, compliance, savings, touchless rates).
• Establish executive business reviews, health scoring, and early‑warning signals; lead complex escalations and executive communications through to durable resolution.
• Align Customer Operations motions with expansion/renewal plays; partner with Customer Success and Sales to influence NRR, reduce churn, and grow ARR.
• Data, analytics, and tooling

• Build a “super analytical” operating model: instrument end‑to‑end telemetry across environments; define canonical KPIs/OKRs and dashboards; lead predictive/leading‑indicator analytics for risk, adoption, and stability.
• Own the Customer Operations tool stack (ITSM/ITIL, observability/APM, test management, release orchestration, knowledge base, RPA/AI assistants); drive automation to reduce toil and improve MTTR and quality.
• Institute data governance and hygiene across incident/problem/change records, UAT defects, and config/integration catalogs to enable high‑fidelity reporting and forecasting.
• Governance, compliance, and quality

• Enforce change, release, and incident governance aligned to SOC 2/ISO 27001 and customer requirements; ensure audit readiness and disciplined documentation.
• Run operational QBRs/MBRs, release go/no‑go boards, and cross‑functional readiness reviews; track corrective/preventive actions to closure.
• Manage partner and vendor delivery quality where work is co‑sourced; define SLAs, SLOs, and performance levers.
• Financial and portfolio management

• Own cost and productivity levers for Customer Operations; manage operating budgets, vendor spend, and efficiency programs tied to automation and right‑shoring.
• Report on ARR under operations stewardship, install base health, and customer cohort performance; articulate outcomes in business terms to the executive team.

• Education: Top‑tier MBA preferred (IIM/IIT) with strong academic performance; bachelor’s in engineering or computer science required.
• Experience: 10+ years in software/SaaS with progressive leadership in Customer Operations, Services/Support, or Site Reliability/Production Operations; prior hands‑on engineering or technical leadership experience is required.
• Domain: Procurement technology experience strongly preferred (eSourcing, CLM, P2P, Supplier/Commodity/Risk, Procure Analytics), or adjacent enterprise back‑office platforms (ERP/Finance/Supply Chain).
• Scale: Proven ability to build and lead 200–300 person multi‑disciplinary teams in a hub location, including managers and senior managers; experience operating in global, cross‑time‑zone environments.
• Analytics: Advanced analytical mindset with mastery of operational metrics, cohort/health modeling, root cause and statistical problem solving, and executive‑ready insights; comfort with SQL/BI is a plus.
• Process and quality: Deep familiarity with ITIL/ITSM, incident/problem/change management, release engineering, UAT governance, and agile/DevOps practices; track record improving MTTR, change failure rate, and deployment quality.
• Stakeholder management: Executive presence and communication skills for CXO‑level interactions with enterprise customers; adept at managing complex escalations and influencing roadmaps.
• Tooling: Experience with enterprise observability (e.g., Datadog/New Relic), ITSM (e.g., ServiceNow/Jira Service Management), test management (e.g., Zephyr/Xray), release orchestration/feature flags, and knowledge platforms.

• ARR portfolio handled: e.g., cumulative ARR under Customer Operations stewardship, such as $50M–$200M+.
• Customer scale: number of enterprise customers/accounts and their regional distribution (e.g., 100–300 enterprise logos, or marquee global accounts).
• Operational improvements: quantifiable gains such as MTTR reduction, UAT pass‑rate improvement, change failure rate reduction, deployment frequency increase, or deflection/automation rates.
• Team scale and mix: prior leadership of 200–300+ team with onshore/offshore mix, automation/AI leverage, and manager‑of‑managers span.

GEP