Founding Customer Operations Lead

## The Role We’re hiring a Customer Operations Lead to own the operating layer between customers, product, and engineering. This is not a passive customer success role. You will run customer check-ins, ask good questions, identify what matters, translate customer pain into product requirements, and make sure follow-ups happen without the founder chasing them. You should be fast, organized, curious, and comfortable with ambiguity. You should be able to talk to a retailer, understand what they are really asking for, separate urgent from noisy, and turn the signal into clear internal next steps. The goal is simple: customers feel deeply understood, product learns faster, and nothing important gets dropped. ## What You’ll Do ### Own customer conversations You will run customer check-ins and make them useful. That means coming prepared, asking specific questions, pushing for examples, clarifying business impact, and ending every call with clear next steps. You will not simply say yes to every request. You will learn how to understand the underlying problem, identify whether it is a product gap, data issue, workflow issue, training issue, or one-off request, and route it appropriately. ### Translate customer needs into product and engineering work You will turn customer conversations into clear Linear tickets for the product and engineering team. Tickets should include the customer context, business problem, expected behavior, examples, urgency, and suggested priority. You should be able to distinguish between: * a bug * a data quality issue * a customer education issue * a workflow gap * a product feature * a manual workaround that should not become permanent ### Prevent operational chaos You will own follow-through. If a customer asks for something, it gets logged. If engineering needs more context, you get it. If something is blocked, you escalate it. If a customer is waiting, they hear from us before they have to ask. You will create lightweight systems that make the company more organized: customer notes, account trackers, recurring check-in agendas, open issue lists, implementation plans, and follow-up cadences. ### Support implementations You will help onboard new customers, track data access, coordinate setup steps, document workflows, and make sure customers reach value quickly. You will also help identify repeatable implementation patterns so we can move from founder-led onboarding to a scalable process. ### Surface product signal You will help the team understand what customers actually need, not just what they say they want. You should be able to spot repeated pain points, identify high-ROI workflows, and help the founder and product team decide what is worth building. ## What Success Looks Like In your first 30 days: * Every active customer has a clean account tracker with open issues, next steps, owners, and dates. * Customer calls have agendas, notes, and clear follow-ups. * Important customer requests are translated into clear Linear tickets. * No customer issue is floating around in Slack, email, or someone’s memory without an owner. In your first 60 days: * Customer check-ins become more productive. * Implementations have a repeatable checklist. * Product and engineering have better customer context. * Customers feel like Scout is responsive, organized, and understands their business. * The team has a clearer view of which requests are urgent, repeated, and revenue-critical. In your first 90 days: * You are running the customer operating system. * We have a repeatable customer feedback loop from call → insight → Linear → product decision → customer update. * Manual workarounds are visible and being converted into product where appropriate. ## Who You Are You are unusually organized. You do not need to be reminded three times. You are fast. You would rather send a good follow-up today than a perfect one next week. You ask good questions. When a customer says, “Can you add this report?” you ask what decision they are trying to make, how they do it today, what happens if they get it wrong, and how often it matters. You are comfortable with messy data, messy customers, and messy early-stage company reality. You can write clearly. Your notes, tickets, and customer updates are specific enough that other people can act on them. You have good judgment. You know when to say “yes,” when to say “not yet,” when to ask for more context, and when to escalate. You like being close to customers. You are energized by understanding how real businesses operate. You are not precious about the work. Sometimes the job is running a strategic customer conversation. Sometimes it is cleaning up a tracker, chasing a missing data file, or writing a clear Linear ticket. Both matter. ## Ideal Background You may be a fit if you have experience in one or more of the following: * Customer success or implementation at a B2B SaaS company * Product operations * Business operations * Consulting, especially with operationally complex businesses * Retail, grocery, supply chain, inventory, merchandising, or category management * Early-stage startups where you had to create structure from chaos Retail or supply chain experience is a plus, but not required. The bigger requirement is strong operating judgment. ## This Role Is Not For You If * You need a lot of structure before you can start. * You wait for someone else to tell you every next step. * You treat customer requests as a task list instead of trying to understand the underlying problem. * You are uncomfortable pushing back politely. * You write vague notes. * You drop balls when things get busy. * You think customer success means being agreeable. At Scout, customer success means helping customers get value while protecting product focus. * You’re not willing to work 6 days a week. ## Why Join You will work directly with the founder and customers at a very early stage. You will see how product, sales, implementation, and customer success get built from the ground up. This is a high-agency role with a lot of leverage. If you are excellent, you will become one of the most important people in the company because you will own the system that turns customer reality into product velocity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.