Staff Engagement Manager
About The Position
Kong is seeking an Engagement Manager to join its growing Professional Services team. The role works across the customer lifecycle to drive prescriptive outcomes and successful delivery of customer engagements and programs. The Engagement Manager helps customers realize value from Kong products and prepares, manages, and delivers strategic engagements across the defined install base. As a primary Professional Services contact and customer ambassador, this is a strategic, long-term, relationship-based, customer-facing role that also supports day-to-day Professional Services operations. The position calls for strong organization and communication, the ability to multitask and context-switch, and skill in managing customer escalations. It offers the opportunity to help customers modernize IT using Cloud Native development principles. The role owns selected concurrent billable engagements, manages customer expectations, and drives outcomes throughout post-sales, delivery, and value realization. It oversees engagement scoping, project management, deliverables, schedules, milestones, risks, escalations, and reporting. The Engagement Manager also supports Professional Services operations, including resourcing, month- and quarter-end processes, employee onboarding, services-revenue processes, reporting, and continuous process improvement.
Requirements
- Strong project or program management and services-delivery experience, with a track record of delivering for strategic customers on time and within budget.
- Deep experience with project financial fundamentals and PSA tools such as FinancialForce, including reporting, forecasting, and tracking operational activities.
- Excellent customer-facing skills and the ability to communicate with executives, customer stakeholders, and cross-functional Kong teams.
- Ability to build relationships internally and externally.
- Exceptional organizational and change-management skills, with the ability to manage competing client demands.
- Excellent presentation skills and a strong understanding of Professional Services business metrics in a SaaS software environment.
- Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to manage critical and political situations with business stakeholders.
- Team-player and team-builder approach, readiness to work hands-on in a fast-growing, dynamic environment, and ability to keep pace with constant change.
Responsibilities
- Own and lead selected, simultaneous billable customer engagements, managing customer expectations and driving prescriptive outcomes throughout the post-sales, delivery, and value-realization lifecycle.
- Work with customers and stakeholders to understand and analyze engagement scope, requirements, timing, costs, and benefits, and drive engagements end to end toward business outcomes.
- Lead project-management activities, including engagement kickoffs, project charters, deliverables, schedules, milestones, and delivery success.
- Prepare customer-facing and internal materials, including solution presentations, blueprints, reusable artifacts, project plans, burndown reports, and status reports.
- Identify, prioritize, and own resolution of internal and customer escalations and project risks across technical, business, and executive stakeholders.
- Use productivity tools such as FinancialForce, Salesforce, Metabase, and Trello to manage multiple onboarding and implementation programs and report on billings, utilization, resource capacity, and forecasting.
- Assist the Services leadership team with resource assignment and management in FinancialForce.
- Ensure timely completion of month- and quarter-end close processes and complete onboarding for new Professional Services employees with role-tailored content.
- Coordinate with cross-functional teams to obtain project-opportunity data and staffing requirements.
- Serve as a subject matter expert for Services personnel on services-revenue processes, including time entry, project-management operations, customer billing, and staff utilization.
- Suggest and implement improvements to business and reporting processes as the organization changes.
- Support Professional Services staff in understanding revenue, hours, and target-attainment goals.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
