Sr. Director, Strategic Readiness Programs

Sr. Director, Strategic Readiness Programs

Senior leader within the Strategic Readiness Programs on the CIC Strategic Programs team, accountable for driving the end-to-end definition, deployment, and execution of high-visibility product innovation launches. Operating at the intersection of Technology & Product (T&P) and Cloud Success, this role partners with Cloud Leaders to ensure operational readiness, advocate for customer success, and mitigate risk associated with launching new innovations at scale. The role orchestrates internal and customer readiness across large-scale product launches, ensuring stakeholder alignment, product quality, communication clarity, and field preparedness. A key responsibility is to represent the customer voice, surface critical insights, and advocate for solutions that proactively improve the customer experience and reduce attrition risks.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Program Governance

Define the operating model : Establish and scale the operating model, governance structure, and success metrics for the Strategic Programs Big Bets Team, driving a clear mandate for high-risk, high-visibility New Product Introductions (NPIs).

Strategic risk mitigation : Proactively identify the scope, complexity, and inherent risks of proposed platform, infrastructure, or product changes and surfacing implications and business cases for targeted investment scenarios.

Data-Led Business Decisions : Maintain a deep understanding of the business, impact metrics, Customer Success and corporate priorities, and cross-functional dependencies to make informed, data-led decisions that prioritize the right outcomes for both customers and business objectives.

Integrated roadmap ownership : Develop and own integrated roadmaps for enablement, documentation, and customer communications, ensuring a successful, coordinated adoption of critical changes.

Executive visibility & accountability : Establish robust governance and provide executive-level visibility of key program aspects, driving data-driven accountability for achieving critical launch and adoption goals.

End-to-End Launch Readiness

E2E orchestration : Lead the team to drive full end-to-end launch readiness and obtain stakeholder sign-off across all Clouds and supporting business units to reduce organizational noise and misalignment.

Customer-centric requirements : Act as the sponsor for Customer Success (CS) requirements (e.g., serviceability, success plans, purpose-built product enablement) to ensure T&P leadership visibility and action, in close partnership with Cloud Success leadership.

Expertise building & enablement : Quickly build technical expertise in new products and features and lead the scalable development and distribution of high-quality enablement content to the broader CS organization.

GTM oversight : Oversee evaluation of go-to-market, offer implications, and entitlement gaps, ensuring a clear and effective customer journey from product announcement to adoption.

Cross-Functional Influence & Quality

Quality and gap closure : Actively address critical product launch gaps, ensuring CS stakeholder needs are met and closing product quality issues and enablement deficiencies that impede delivery teams.

Voice of the customer & advocacy : Represent the customer perspective ensuring adoption challenges and requirements are surfaced through the appropriate channels.

Product feedback loops : Oversee pre-GA product feedback loops with Cloud Success leadership, ensuring bugs, dependencies, feature gaps, and telemetry issues are surfaced to the appropriate product and engineering teams.

Strategic liaison : Act as a strategic partner and liaison to Cloud Success leadership, ensuring readiness priorities are consistently represented in cross-functional business planning.

Team Leadership & Impact

Team management & mentorship : Manage, mentor, and inspire a team of subject matter experts (SMEs).

Executive stakeholder management : Cultivate and maintain key executive-level relationships across T&P and CS.

Data-led approach : Ensure all team activities are data-driven and measurable, continuously monitoring impact and adjusting approaches as needed.

Measure and drive impact : Define, track, and report on key impact metrics, focusing on proactive case deflection, reducing bugs / escalations, and accelerating time-to-value.

Own portfolio prioritization : Own the prioritization of strategic initiatives and readiness work for the overall product portfolio.

Experience

10+ years experience in Customer Success or Product Management leadership in the SaaS industry.

5+ years experience leading large, cross-functional teams focused on New Product Introduction (NPI) or Product Launch Management.

Track record of developing teams of SME who deliver against strategic business initiatives.

Demonstrated success managing teams and collaborating with senior leadership across different functions.

Proven record of influencing outcomes with both technical and non-technical senior leaders.

Deep understanding of the end-to-end customer and internal lifecycle in a cloud environment.

Proven ability to influence and align Executive Leadership Team (ELT) stakeholders across product, engineering, and sales.

Skills & Expertise

Executive presence & communication : Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, able to distill complex technical and program information into clear, actionable executive summaries.

Strategic agility & prioritization : Forward-looking perspective, accurately anticipating future consequences and market trends.

Organizational acumen : Knowledgeable about how large, complex organizations work, navigating formal and informal networks.

Results-oriented & action-oriented : Demonstrates operational rigor and a bias for action, managing through ambiguity to achieve deliverables and impact.

Critical & strategic thinking : Synthesizes a broad array of information, identifies underlying themes, and develops clear tactical plans.

Decision quality & negotiating : Makes sound decisions based on analysis, experience, and judgment, negotiating skillfully in complex situations.

Influential leadership : Proven track record of leading teams through significant organizational change.

Conflict & stakeholder management : Employs focused listening to resolve disputes equitably.

Subject matter expertise & partnership : Applies deep domain knowledge to influence product leaders and design decisions.

Accommodations

If you require assistance due to a disability applying for open positions please submit a request via the Accommodations Request Form.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal-opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence, and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, performance assessment, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit.

Benefits

Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well, including time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program . More details are available at https : / / www.salesforcebenefits.com .

Compensation

For Washington-based roles, the base salary hiring range for this position is $207,100 to $315,900.

For Illinois-based roles, the base salary hiring range for this position is $207,100 to $315,900.

For Massachusetts-based roles, the base salary hiring range for this position is $207,100 to $315,900.

J-18808-Ljbffr