Head of Customer Experience

Ello•San Francisco, CA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Ello is seeking a Head of Customer Experience to own the entire feedback loop from families to the product team. This role involves building and managing a system to collect, synthesize, and prioritize insights from various sources like support, surveys, parent calls, session reviews, and playtests. The goal is to ensure that family feedback directly influences product development and that families are informed when their input leads to action. This is not a traditional support or research role, but rather focuses on the operational machine that connects user feedback to product iteration. The position reports to the co-founder and Chief Experience Officer and will work closely with the product lead. The role also includes managing a team in Nairobi, Kenya, and contributing to understanding families in new markets like Rwanda.

Requirements

Have built and run an operational process that kept working after you stepped away: research ops, support ops, a customer program with a real cadence. You can tell us what it did and what broke.
Have spent a lot of time with actual customers, ideally parents or families, and it shows in how you talk about them. Interviews, support, research, community. Not just the reports.
Have turned messy qualitative and quantitative input into a decision someone else made. You can point to a time your synthesis changed what a team built.
Have managed people, including remotely and across cultures. You give clear feedback and can break a vague question into work someone can run on their own from another time zone.
Use AI seriously in your own work, hands-on rather than overseeing others, and can show us something you've built with it and what it got wrong.
Write well. Most of this job is writing things other people will act on.
Are comfortable in a room with a five-year-old and their parent, and you don't get thrown when the kid ignores the script.

Nice To Haves

Background in child development, education, or edtech, or consumer products where the person paying isn't the person using it
Experience in emerging markets, especially East Africa, or on a team split across continents
Experience with support tooling (Intercom or similar), survey and research tools, and product analytics
Have stood up a community, ambassador, or early-access program
Exposure to trust and safety or child safety operations

Responsibilities

Own how Ello learns from families: the survey program in the US and Kenya, parent research calls, session reviews, in-office and remote playtests with kids, and the bi-weekly synthesis that goes to product
Build the system that makes all of that repeatable through launch and beyond: clear owners, cadences, tooling, and automation, with AI doing as much of the heavy lifting as it responsibly can
Run the rituals that keep the whole company close to users: the weekly session review pool, listening parties in San Francisco and Nairobi, and real parent and kid moments in every all-hands
Own customer support in both markets over time, and make it a source of insight rather than a queue to clear
Design and run our early-access parent program: the families who get new features first, tell us what they think, and hear back when we act on it
Manage our user research and operations team in Nairobi, and work with our Kenya Growth Lead and Rwanda partners to understand families in each market on their own terms
Partner with our safety team so that support is a reliable first line on safety-adjacent issues, and so the product insight our safety reviewers see every day reaches the people building the product
Grow a small, AI-native team as the work outgrows the people we have