Founding Customer & Operations Manager

Location: London Bridge

Working pattern: Mon-Thursday in the office, working from home on Fridays

Reporting to: Sanjay Sood-Smith, COO

Hey, we’re Pesto

We’re building the AI-first operating platform for food and drink brands.

Growing a brilliant brand is hard enough. Running it shouldn’t mean wrestling with endless spreadsheets, disconnected systems and manual processes.

Pesto connects the tools a brand already uses - Shopify, Xero, 3PL software and the wholesaler EDI layer - and takes a good chunk of the operational faff off their plate.

Purchase orders. Stock. COGS and bills of materials. Invoicing. Production and demand planning. All connected in one place.

That gives challenger brands the data, visibility and automation they need to scale - without having to build huge teams to hold everything together.

Now we’re looking for a Founding Customer & Operations Manager to help our customers get the very best from Pesto and shape what we build next.

As our customer base grows, we’re looking for someone to take real ownership of the customer journey - helping us onboard more brands while continuing to deliver a brilliant experience for every customer.

You’ll manage the onboarding process for new brands, get their integrations live, help their teams feel confident using Pesto and make sure they’re getting real value from it.

This isn’t a traditional customer success role. A good chunk of what Pesto does today exists because customers told us what was getting in their way. You’ll be the person closest to those conversations - spotting what’s broken, understanding the real problem underneath each request and helping us decide what to build next.

You’ll also shape how our customer function works as we grow including onboarding, support, escalations and customer health. We have a view on all of it, but we want yours too.

• Own the onboarding of new brands, from getting their integrations live to training their teams and helping them get value from Pesto quickly
• Manage the ongoing relationship with a portfolio of customers, including regular check-ins
• Build the way we approach onboarding, support and customer success as we grow
• Work out how we measure whether a brand is genuinely thriving with Pesto
• Be the first port of call for day-to-day customer questions before they reach an engineer
• Work closely with our Customer Success Engineer, combining your food and drink operations know-how with their software engineering expertise
• Create customer communications, including regular newsletters
• Develop user guides and videos that help customers get the most from Pesto

• Work directly with our COO & CTO, on product and roadmap priorities
• Own the customer input into those decisions - not as a note-taker, but as the person who understands what’s getting in our customers’ way
• Run discovery with customers to test ideas, pressure-test our assumptions and work out what’s worth building before we build it
• Ask the questions that uncover the real problem, rather than simply accepting the requested feature
  
  Turn what you hear into a clear, structured and prioritised view of what can help customers most
• Push back constructively on customers and engineering when needed
• Test new features and tell us what works, what doesn’t and how we can make them better

• Support product demos and pre-sales conversations with hands-on product knowledge
• Spot expansion and referral opportunities within our existing customer base
• Help keep our commercial operations running properly, including CRM hygiene, pipeline reporting, renewals and processes
• Develop new workflows and AI automations to make the way we work at Pesto faster and…