Engagement Manager

GRIDSIGHT•Austin, TX

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Entering into a multi-year technology partnership is a major buying decision for utility executives. These are significant investments, usually with CEO and Board oversight. Gridsight’s implementation creates the first impression, validates their investment, and sets the tone for the rest of our relationship. Smooth, successful implementations are increasingly a point of difference for Gridsight and we’ve become renowned for delivering enterprise software on-time, on-budget and with no surprises. These high standards also drive commercial opportunities for expansion and other sales, giving executives confidence to accelerate and deepen their relationship with us, and refer us to their peers. As an Engagement Manager, you will be accountable for ensuring each implementation is smooth and successful. You will own and coordinate the process from when a customer signs, to the day they go live, through into business as usual. We expect to be running 2-4 implementations at any one time, all on different tracks. A key measure of success in the role will be reducing the time from signature to value realization for each customer and scaling from pilots to full-scale subscriptions. You will blend commercial acumen, technical depth and project management expertise to devise and deliver each plan, including the resourcing, dependencies and risks, all while building the stakeholder relationships with customers’ project team and executives. Across each implementation you will coordinate a dedicated cross-functional team of Gridsight’s SMEs, including Sales, Power Engineering, Data Engineering, Analytics, and Product. You’ll also be the fulcrum between Gridsight and the customer - liaising with their project lead and engaging the SMEs on their side. Your ability to represent the Gridsight product and tech stack will build trust with customers and protect our Product squads from constant disruption. This is both an ownership and a coordination role. Utility implementations are complex, with diverse stakeholders on both sides, and multiple work streams running parallel. We have a playbook, but each customer and each implementation is different. You will be the person who keeps the big picture front-of-mind, solves for the strategic outcome, and is able to see around corners, mitigate, adapt and problem solve when things wobble. This role reports to the Head of North America.

Requirements

Proven experience running multiple, 7-figure enterprise-grade projects, implementations or integrations end to end with accountability for the outcome.
Experience coordinating a team of resources across functions, teams and time zones.
Ability to prioritize, juggle and execute at pace - ruthlessly prioritizing what really matters.
Thoughtful, structured relationship management skills that build rapport with customers from ICs to senior executives, paired with the emotional intelligence to hold them to their commitments and have difficult conversations.
Technical fluency to learn, understand and represent our platform and stack, and offer credible guidance on data, integrations and system architecture.
Proven ability to excel in ambiguity, within a fast-growing company where we are always building and refining the processes live.

Nice To Haves

energy, utilities or grid domain experience
exposure to utility data platforms
enterprise software implementations
experience in a scaling startup

Responsibilities

Success of each implementation
Manage multiple complex implementations concurrently.
Own the end-to-end delivery plan for each customer, including scope, milestones, dependencies, resourcing, customer responsibilities and critical path.
Identify and understand what truly matters for a customer, and ensure we deliver.
Maintain a live view of status, forecast go-live and risk across your projects, and communicate effectively internally and to customers
Manage change when scope, data or timelines move, re-plan, re-baseline and get the decision made.
Coordination across Gridsight
Manage a cross-functional team of resources, coordinating Sales, Customer Data, Product, and Engineering.
Thoughtfully engage SMEs at the right time with a clear ask, clear inputs and a clear definition of done.
Sequence work across teams so the critical path is protected and specialists are not blocked waiting on each other or on the customer.
Make ownership explicit where it is ambiguous, and resolve it rather than letting it sit.
Escalate early, with a recommendation.
The customer relationship through delivery
Act as the face of Gridsight to the customer and primary point of contact throughout delivery: steering committees, working groups, and executive stakeholder updates to share progress and value. You should be a trusted, safe pair of hands in the eyes of our customer.
Set and manage expectations honestly: establish and communicate a clear plan with specificity, asks and deadlines; and foresee and surface potential problems.
Drive the customer side: engage proactively across formal and informal channels to help avoid the pitfalls. This means unblocking their internal approvals, managing their stakeholders and holding them to their commitments, without damaging the relationship.
Build and improve on the process
Feed every lesson back into subsequent implementations, so we are faster and smoother next time - with improved templates, tooling, processes and communications.
Identify the recurring friction that should become product, tooling or automation, and make the case for it with evidence from real projects.
Utilize existing methodology, playbooks and standards and push to improve them where they exist, build them where they don’t.