Customer Experience & Retention Manager

About the Role 

Harness is growing its Digital and Commercial customer base, and we will not scale it by adding people in proportion. This role owns customer experience and retention for a large book of Digital and Commercial customers, and its main job is to build and run the tech-touch engine that serves them. 

You will design automated journeys, health signals, in-product and email programs, and self-service resources that deliver onboarding, adoption, risk detection, renewal and expansion without a person in every interaction. You will use human time on the moments that matter: a customer stuck on a technical blocker, an at-risk account, a renewal negotiation. You will also feed what you learn back into the automation so those moments become rarer. 

Operating principle: Automate by default, involve a human by exception. Every manual touch should either solve a high-value problem or teach us what to automate next. 

What You'll Own 

1. Tech-Touch Customer Experience Engine 

• Design, scale and optimize automated lifecycle programs: onboarding, activation, adoption, renewal and win-back. Run them through the CRM, the CS platform, email and in-product channels. Build triggered plays driven by product usage, milestones, health score, support signals and contract events. 
• Own the segmentation and coverage model: which customers get automation only, automation plus on-demand human help, or direct engagement. 
• Build the self-service layer: guides, templates, pipeline examples, office hours, webinars, community content and a knowledge base. Measure what gets used and fill the gaps. 
• Run experiments (A/B tests on messaging, timing and channel) and report on what changes adoption and retention. 
• Use AI-assisted workflows for summarisation, content personalisation, ticket and usage insight, and outreach drafting to raise throughput without losing quality. 

1. Data-Driven Health, Risk & Prioritisation 

• Own the customer health model: define, validate and tune the signals (usage depth, feature adoption, engagement, support trends, sentiment and commercial indicators). 
• Turn the data into automated risk and opportunity alerts, and route them to the right play or person. Build dashboards that show portfolio health, coverage efficiency, adoption funnels and renewal risk. Run recovery plans for at-risk accounts, then capture the pattern as a repeatable, automated play. 

1. Technical Enablement & Hands-On Support 

• Guide customers through product configuration, integrations (GitHub, GitLab, cloud platforms, CI/CD tools) and common pipeline issues when automation and self-service are not enough.
• Join technical discovery and proof-of-value work with Solutions Engineering and forward-deployed teams. 
• Reproduce common issues, gather logs and configuration details, and escalate cleanly to Support and Engineering. 
• Convert every recurring technical question into reusable enablement: a guide, template, in-product prompt or automated play. 
• Turn recurring customer challenges into product feedback and prioritised requests. 

1. Renewals, Retention & Commercial Ownership 

• Own renewal execution end to end: automated renewal journeys and reminders, risk assessment, commercial discussion and close, with human involvement focused on at-risk and strategic renewals. Identify expansion, cross-sell and right-sizing opportunities from usage signals, and trigger plays and handoffs to Account Executives. 
• Coordinate quotes, Order Forms, approvals and procurement with internal stakeholders. Keep renewal forecasts, customer records and risk assessments accurate and current. Work with Account Executives and Revenue Operations to improve gross revenue retention and reduce preventable churn. 

1. Continuous Improvement & Cross-Functional Partnership 

• Work with Sales, Support, Product, Engineering, Marketing and Revenue Operations to connect data, systems and messaging across the customer journey. 
• Find manual, repetitive tasks and remove them through automation, integrations and tooling. Document playbooks and share best practices so the model scales across teams and segments. 

Required Qualifications 

• 3+ years required (5+ years preferred) in Customer Success, Customer Experience, Technical Account Management, Digital/Scaled CS, Solutions Consulting or a similar SaaS role. Experience managing a high-volume B2B SaaS portfolio, ideally in a digital, SMB, mid-market or commercial segment. 
• Hands-on experience building automation in a CRM or CS platform (Salesforce, Gainsight, HubSpot, Totango or similar), including journeys, triggers and health scoring. 
• Strong analytical skills: comfortable with usage and engagement data, dashboards, funnels and cohort or segment analysis. 
• Working knowledge of DevOps fundamentals: Git, CI/CD pipelines, APIs and cloud platforms. Experience with SaaS renewals, retention and commercial discussions, and an understanding of subscription, licensing and billing models. 
• Strong communication, troubleshooting and prioritisation skills in a high-volume environment. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with digital CS tooling: in-app guidance, email and marketing automation, community platforms and knowledge-base or content systems. 
• Experience using SQL, BI tools, scripting or low-code automation to build and improve workflows. Experience applying AI or LLM-assisted workflows to customer communication, support or insight. Hands-on exposure to Harness, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins or similar CI/CD platforms. Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure or GCP; REST APIs, webhooks, SSO and YAML configuration.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code, Terraform or DevSecOps concepts. 
• Experience working alongside Forward Deployed Engineers, Solutions Architects or implementation teams. 

What Success Looks Like 

Area	Outcomes
Scale & efficiency	Higher customers-per-manager coverage with stable or improving satisfaction. A growing share of lifecycle touches and renewals handled through automation. Fewer repeat manual tasks.
Adoption &  experience	Faster onboarding and time to value, higher activation and feature adoption, and measurable use of self-service content.
Retention &  commercial	Improved gross revenue retention, lower preventable churn, accurate renewal forecasts and expansion opportunities identified from signals.
Risk & health	Earlier risk detection through a validated health model, and more recoveries run from standard plays.
Technical	Routine technical questions resolved through self-service or by you, and less reliance on Engineering for them.

 

Ideal Candidate 

You think in systems, not accounts. You are as comfortable building a triggered journey and reading a usage cohort as you are leading a renewal conversation or debugging a CI/CD workflow with a developer. You do not need to be a software developer, but you are curious about how customers build and ship software, and you ask what a repeated touch tells you about what to automate or fix in the product.