Vice President, Global Incentives Strategy & Operations

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a Vice President, Global Incentives Strategy & Operations to lead the strategy, design support, governance, and operational delivery of incentive programs across its global revenue organization. This leader will own the incentive operating model for a broad and complex set of populations, including Sales Leadership, quota-carrying sellers, sales support teams such as Presales, Value Management, and Customer Success, as well as the partner organization. The role sits at the center of company strategy, field behavior, financial rigor, and operational execution, shaping how Workday motivates growth, balances company priorities, supports different go-to-market motions, and executes incentive programs at global scale. This is a senior leadership role requiring strong business judgment, deep compensation expertise, operational precision, and the ability to influence across Revenue, Finance, People & Purpose, Accounting, Legal, and systems teams. The function serves as the primary architect and executor of a comprehensive compensation framework designed to align go-to-market priorities with the performance of all revenue-facing roles. This includes overseeing the entire annual lifecycle—from financial modeling and goal sheet automation to global rollout and change management—ensuring incentive structures are scalable, effective, and geographically nuanced. The mandate includes driving operational excellence through systems integration and rigorous reporting while maintaining a robust governance model for policy interpretation and exceptions. Ultimately, the role fosters field trust through transparent communication and modern support tools, leading a high-performing team dedicated to transforming incentives into a strategic lever for predictable, high-quality revenue growth.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in sales compensation, incentive strategy, revenue operations, finance, or a related field, with substantial senior leadership experience.
Proven success leading complex global incentive programs across multiple role types, including sales, sales leadership, overlays, support teams, customer-facing post-sales roles, and partner organizations.
Deep expertise in compensation design, goal setting, crediting, governance, exception management, and operational execution.
Strong executive presence and the ability to influence senior stakeholders across Revenue, Finance, HR, Accounting, and Legal.
Exceptional analytical and strategic problem-solving skills, with the ability to connect incentive design to business performance and field behavior.
Strong operating discipline and experience leading large-scale annual cycles with high accuracy and tight timelines.
Experience building scalable processes, strong controls, and high-performing teams in a complex enterprise SaaS environment.
Excellent communication skills, especially the ability to explain complex compensation topics in a clear and credible way to executives and field teams.
Ability to handle ambiguity, complexity, and competing stakeholder priorities without losing rigor.
Direct experience across both direct and indirect go-to-market models.
Experience with compensation for partner organizations and channel-related crediting complexity.
Familiarity with systems such as Xactly, Salesforce, Clari, and enterprise reporting platforms.
Experience leading compensation governance boards, escalation forums, and executive review processes.
Background spanning both strategy and operations, rather than narrow plan administration.

Responsibilities

Develop and support incentive strategies across a wide range of field roles with different objectives, sales motions, and success measures.
Ensure plans are aligned to Workday’s business priorities, financially sound, behaviorally effective, and operationally scalable.
Partner with senior leaders to calibrate measures, mix, weightings, accelerators, gates, crediting frameworks, and role-specific mechanics.
Balance consistency and fairness with the realities of different field roles, from direct sellers to overlays, leaders, support teams, and partner motions.
Own the incentive strategy and plan support for Sales Leadership roles, ensuring leadership measures reinforce enterprise priorities including revenue outcomes, renewal performance, pipeline quality, product focus, and organizational execution.
Help senior leaders understand tradeoffs and implications of leadership plan design decisions.
Oversee incentive support for quota-carrying sales roles across segments, territories, and go-to-market motions, ensuring plans are understandable, executable, and aligned to desired field behaviors.
Support annual and in-year plan changes with appropriate modeling, controls, communications, and readiness.
Lead the incentive strategy and operational framework for Presales, Value Management, Customer Success, and other supporting field teams where variable compensation is used, building role-appropriate plan approaches that reflect business impact, partnership with sales, customer outcomes, and operational realities.
Ensure support roles are treated with rigor and consistency rather than as exceptions to the broader compensation framework.
Oversee incentive frameworks and operational support for partner-facing roles and organizations including GPO, helping to define clear principles for crediting, role clarity, channel alignment, and compensation treatment in partner-influenced and partner-led motions.
Partner with leadership to manage complexity where direct and indirect motions intersect.
Lead all activities required for a successful annual launch, including planning, design support, testing, documentation, goal sheet generation, and deployment.
Reduce operational risk and improve execution quality across one of the most visible annual processes in the revenue organization.
Establish disciplined operating plans, milestones, controls, and contingency measures.
Build and run strong governance processes for plan interpretation, compensation policy, exception requests, escalations, and executive decision-making.
Partner with Finance, Accounting, People & Purpose, and Legal to ensure sound policy application, compliance, and auditability.
Drive consistency and discipline in how compensation issues are reviewed and resolved.
Improve the way incentive plans are communicated to leaders, sellers, and support teams.
Oversee the development of field-facing materials such as plan guides, FAQs, calculators, enablement sessions, and office hours.
Raise trust in the incentives function through greater clarity, responsiveness, and consistency.
Strengthen the systems and processes that support incentive execution, including integration with platforms such as Xactly, Salesforce, Clari, and related reporting tools.
Improve reporting on plan performance, payout patterns, field behavior, exceptions, and operational health.
Simplify workflows, reduce manual interventions, and increase data quality and transparency.