Senior Manager, Product Quality & Customer Experience

Role Summary

McAfee is seeking a Senior Manager of Customer Experience Validation & Product Quality to establish and lead a new function within Customer Services. This role will serve as the independent customer advocate throughout the product lifecycle, ensuring that releases are validated from the customer's perspective and that customer experience issues are identified and addressed before broad market impact.

The successful candidate will build and lead a small, highly leveraged team responsible for customer journey validation, real-world environment testing, launch readiness assessments, post-launch quality monitoring, and customer-impact analysis. The leader will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, Customer Support, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, and Customer Services Tools & Innovation teams to improve product quality, reduce customer effort, and lower support demand.

• Establish the vision, strategy, operating model, and governance for Customer Experience Validation & Product Quality.
• Build a scalable team focused on customer-centric quality assessment and release validation.
• Create launch-readiness standards and customer experience certification processes.
• Develop scorecards and executive reporting on quality, customer impact, and launch readiness.

• Own end-to-end customer journey assessments across onboarding, activation, installation, renewal, account creation, device protection, VPN, and identity experiences.
• Evaluate customer friction, confusion, abandonment points, and effort throughout key customer journeys.
• Conduct pre-launch experience reviews and provide release recommendations.
• Identify opportunities to improve product usability, adoption, and retention.
• Act as true “Voice of the Customer” while vetting product enhancements and maintenance to ensure they make sense and provide incremental product value

• Lead customer-focused testing of new releases, updates, and new customer experiences.
• Develop test plans covering real-world customer environments, physical devices, operating systems, browsers, OEM experiences, and account configurations.
• Validate product quality prior to launch and recommend go/no-go decisions based on customer readiness.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to ensure customer-impacting issues are addressed.

• Leverage customer support contacts, VOC insights, surveys, escalations, and analytics to identify emerging issues.
• Recreate customer defects and degraded experiences reported through support channels.
• Quantify customer impact and prioritize improvements based on business value.
• Develop mechanisms to ensure customer feedback directly influences product decisions.

• Serve as the primary liaison between Customer Services, Product Management, Engineering, CX Lab, VOC, Analytics, and Support Operations.
• Drive executive discussions regarding product quality, customer impact, and release risk.
• Influence roadmaps and prioritization through data-driven customer insights.
• Build strong partnerships across the company to improve customer outcomes.

The Senior Manager will be accountable for measurable business and customer outcomes, including:

• Reduced customer effort across key journeys
• Improved onboarding and activation success rates
• Improved customer sentiment and satisfaction
• Reduced customer friction and abandonment

• Reduction in customer-impacting defects escaping to production
• Increase in defect detection before launch
• Improved launch readiness scores
• Increased percentage of releases meeting "clean release" criteria

• Reduced customer contact volume attributable to product issues
• Improved self-service and containment opportunities
• Improved product adoption and retention
• Demonstrated financial return exceeding investment in the function

• 100% review of major product releases
• 80%+ coverage of prioritized customer environments and device types
• Timely reproduction and validation of customer-reported issues
• Executive reporting visibility into quality and customer experience trends

• 8+ years of leadership experience in Product Quality, Customer Experience, Technical Support, Quality Engineering, Product Operations, or related fields.
• Experience leading cross-functional initiatives involving Product and Engineering organizations.
• Strong understanding of software release processes and quality methodologies.
• Experience utilizing customer feedback, analytics, and operational data to drive improvements.
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders and drive organizational change.
• Demonstrated success leading technical and customer-focused teams.

• Experience with in cybersecurity, SaaS, consumer software, or technology industries.
• Knowledge of customer journey…