Senior Staff Product Manager, Customer Insight & Strategy

About This Role 
 
This role reports to the SVP, Growth & Product Strategy, within the CTO's organization. This is a hands-on role for a senior user researcher, product manager, or strategist with range — someone who can architect the system and personally run discovery when the question demands it, and who moves from a feature-level detail to the strategic landscape. It's a rare seat: a new capability with executive sponsorship and the room to build it from the ground up.  

This role will build and own a scalable, rapid voice-of-customer engine for Growth & Product Strategy and will define who we talk to, how quickly we can reach them, and how what we learn feeds the company's most important product and growth decisions. This person establishes the methods, customer access, toolkit, and operating cadence that get the team to trustworthy answers in days and weeks rather than months. 
 
This role runs discovery interviews for priority segments while building the process, codifying what works into playbooks, and raising the bar on rigor across the Product org. Rather than standing up an expensive, heavyweight research function, they find fast, creative ways to surface insight, leveraging disparate sources across the company, from sales and customer success to support tickets. 
 
A core part of the mandate is partnership across Product and Go-To-Market. This role brings user insight into product discovery early and often, partnering with Product to ensure that roadmap bets are grounded in real customer need rather than opinion. With GTM teams (marketing, sales, and customer success) they help turn customer truth into sharper positioning, messaging, and segmentation, and tap those teams as a fast channel to customers already in the field. Across both, this role operates credibly at senior levels, translating research into strategic direction leaders can act on. 
 
Key Responsibilities

• Build the rapid voice-of-customer engine. Leveraging existing and new customer feedback channels, design and stand up a repeatable process for reaching not just today’s customers but prospects and new segments in days and weeks, not months — defining who we talk to, how we reach them fast, which method fits each question, and how findings flow into product, GTM, and segment decisions. Own the research stack and budget, investing where the questions justify it.  

• Own creative, fast customer access. Build and maintain the panels and channels that reach the right MSP and Direct IT customers and end users on short notice, spanning quick calls, discovery and usability interviews, expert networks, in-product experiences, win/loss reviews, and events like webinars and Product Councils, and mobilize the people already talking to customers every day, from sales to customer success.  

• Partner with Product and GTM to drive the decisions that matter. Embed user insight in product discovery, pressure-test roadmap bets against real customer needs, and give teams the evidence to prioritize with confidence, so the org builds and goes to market on what matters, not what shouts loudest.  

• Turn raw input into decision-ready insight and strategy. Synthesize what customers say and do into clear, honest findings on unmet needs, usage friction, buying behavior, churn drivers, and expansion opportunities, framed to inform a specific decision, not to sit in a report. Bring that point of view directly into strategy conversations with senior leaders, and challenge assumptions when the evidence warrants.  

• Make the capability scalable. Create the frameworks, playbooks, templates, and best practices that let others across Product and GTM run good customer research without this role in the room.  

Key Requirements 

• A product manager's mindset, whether or not you've carried the title. You frame research around the decision it serves, think in terms of outcomes and prioritization, and have the product judgment to help teams decide what to build, not just report what you heard.  

• 8+ years in Product Management, Strategy, Customer or User Research, or Insights, or a comparable role centered on getting to customer truth and putting it to work, including demonstrated experience embedding in product discovery, informing roadmap prioritization, and building or scaling a research capability rather than only running individual studies.  

• Range across altitude and context. You move fluidly from a feature-level detail to the strategic and competitive landscape, and you've seen enough different businesses and models to bring pattern recognition rather than a single playbook.  

• Fluent across a broad method set, qualitative and quantitative, including discovery and usability interviews, surveys, expert networks, in-product research and experimentation, win/loss, and behavioral or product data, with the judgment to match method to question and make the right speed-versus-rigor call.  

• A builder who shapes strategy, not just findings. Track record of building or scaling a research process, function, or panel — and the tools and vendor relationships behind it — paired with the ability to connect customer truth to where the business should play and how it wins, moving product and GTM strategy rather than only informing it.  

• A persuasive communicator who changes minds. You structure a case so the recommendation leads and the logic underneath it holds (top-down, decision-first) and you hold your own with a skeptical senior audience, even when the evidence challenges what people want to hear.  

What Success Looks Like

• A standing voice-of-customer engine reliably answers the team's priority questions in days and weeks rather than months.  

• The right MSP and Direct IT customers are reachable on short notice, with panels, expert networks, and research tools live and in regular use.  

• Customer insight consistently shows up in real decisions, informing product priorities, GTM choices, and customer segmentation.  

• Customer truth shows up in strategy, not just execution, shaping where the business chooses to play and how it wins, and changing at least some senior bets that would otherwise have gone on instinct.  

• The process is repeatable and documented, quality holds as volume grows, and others run research well using the frameworks and playbooks this role creates.  
• Speed and rigor stay balanced: useful answers land quickly and sharpen as more evidence comes in.  

This is a rare opportunity to build the customer-truth engine at the heart of a new strategic capability, with direct exposure to senior leadership, a hand in the company's most important growth questions, and the room to build it your way.