Sr Manager - Customer Program

The Customer Program Sr Manager (CPM) plays a critical leadership role in enabling the successful deployment, adoption, and scaling of Digital Retail Solutions (DRS) with strategic customers. This position leads customer-centric programs that span opportunity qualification, solution development, deployment planning, integrations, operational readiness, implementation, stabilization, and transition to steady-state operations.

This role serves as the single accountable leader across highly matrixed teams, driving alignment, execution, and accountability across Product Development, Product Technology, Engineering, Architecture, Global IT, Operations, Commercial, Finance, Customer Experience, PTLs, and market organizations to deliver customer commitments.

The CPM serves as the single accountable leader for strategic customer deployments, providing end-to-end ownership across organizational boundaries while defining what must be true for successful customer execution, deployment readiness, customer adoption, and operational success across complex and strategically significant customer programs.

The ideal candidate combines strong program management expertise with customer-facing leadership experience and has a proven ability to influence without authority, drive accountability across functions, and lead complex customer deployments from concept through operational stabilization.

RESPONSIBILITIES INCLUDE (but are not limited to):

Customer Program Leadership

• Lead strategic customer deployments from opportunity qualification through deployment, stabilization, and operational handoff.
• Serve as the single accountable owner for strategic customer deployments, ensuring end-to-end ownership across participating functions and eliminating execution gaps between organizational handoffs.
• Lead and coordinate commercial, technical, and operational teams during solution design, proposal development, implementation planning, deployment, and stabilization activities to assess feasibility, implementation readiness, customer dependencies, operational impacts, and program risks.
• Maintain highly professional customer communications while ensuring internal transparency regarding program status, risks, decisions, dependencies, and required actions.
• Establish governance forums with customer stakeholders and internal leadership teams to drive alignment, accountability, and timely decision-making.
• Ensure customer expectations, commitments, requirements, assumptions, and success criteria are documented, aligned, and actively managed throughout the program lifecycle.

Deployment & Operational Readiness

• Drive deployment readiness planning across Product Development, Product Technology, Engineering, Architecture, Operations, Logistics, Global IT, Finance, and country teams.
• Lead readiness reviews to ensure installation, integration, operational, training, support, logistics, and customer readiness requirements are met prior to deployment.
• Challenge and pressure-test deployment plans, implementation approaches, support models, and transition plans to proactively identify risks, bottlenecks, and execution gaps.
• Identify and resolve handoff failures, ownership ambiguities, and execution risks that could impact deployment success or customer commitments.
• Lead deployment, go-live, and stabilization activities to ensure successful customer adoption, operational transition, and fulfillment of customer commitments.

Integration & Solution Delivery

• Lead customer integration activities, technical dependencies, architecture reviews, data mapping activities, interface specifications, testing activities, and implementation planning.
• Ensure customer integration requirements, dependencies, responsibilities, and milestones are identified, aligned, and initiated early in the program lifecycle.
• Drive customer engagement and accountability for integration reviews, testing activities, and deliverables required to support successful deployment execution.
• Ensure customer requirements, assumptions, dependencies, constraints, and success criteria are documented, validated, approved, and managed throughout execution.
• Drive evaluation and resolution of scope changes and ensure impacts to schedule, readiness, customer commitments, and delivery objectives are properly assessed and communicated.

Governance & Program Execution

• Build and maintain integrated program plans that align teams, establish accountability, drive delivery against customer commitments, and provide leadership visibility into strategic deployment performance.
• Define and continuously improve customer deployment standards, governance practices, readiness requirements, and execution frameworks to improve consistency, scalability, and customer outcomes across strategic programs.
• Establish and maintain stage-gate governance and customer sign-off processes to ensure readiness criteria are met throughout the program lifecycle.
• Drive resolution of program risks, issues, dependencies, escalations, and change requests.
• Provide executive-level reporting on scope, schedule, readiness, customer risks, deployment status, financial impacts, revenue realization risks, and key program decisions.
• Ensure program information is maintained in the appropriate tools, including Monday.com, Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Project and other Brink's systems.
• Partner with Finance to monitor enterprise investment performance and escalate to leadership when recovery actions are required.
• Exercise delegated authority to initiate corrective actions, mobilize resources, and mitigate deployment risks to protect customer commitments and program objectives.

Continuous Improvement & Delivery Excellence

• Capture lessons learned, customer feedback, and implementation insights to improve future customer deployments and delivery performance.
• Partner with PMO leadership to define and mature customer deployment methodologies, readiness frameworks, governance models, customer onboarding practices, and implementation standards across DRS.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives that increase deployment predictability, operational readiness, customer adoption, and time-to-revenue.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education & Experience

• 10+ years of experience leading strategic customer programs, enterprise deployments, large-scale implementations, or cross-functional business transformations, including responsibility for executive stakeholder management, customer commitments, organizational influence, and business value delivery.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Business, Engineering, Technology, Operations, Project Management, or related discipline.
• PMP, PgMP, PRINCE2, Agile, SAFe, or similar certification preferred.
• Experience managing enterprise customer implementations from planning through deployment, stabilization, and operational handoff.
• Experience working in highly matrixed organizations with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Operations, Technology, Commercial, Finance, and customer-facing teams.
• Experience managing complex multi-workstream deployments, digital transformation initiatives, or strategic customer programs.
• Experience working in global or multi-country environments preferred.

Skills & Competencies

• Executive presence and ability to influence strategic decisions across customers, partners, and senior leaders in highly matrixed environments.
• Strong customer-facing leadership and stakeholder management capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence and mobilize cross-functional teams to deliver customer commitments.
• Exceptional program planning, governance, deployment management, and execution discipline.
• Ability to influence without authority and drive accountability across organizational boundaries.
• Strong executive communication, facilitation, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Strong customer expectation management and relationship management capabilities.
• Ability to identify operational, deployment, integration, commercial, and customer risks early and drive effective mitigation and resolution.
• Strong business acumen with focus on customer satisfaction, operational excellence, revenue realization, and measurable business results.
• Critical thinking, sound judgment, and data-driven problem-solving skills.