Customer Lifecycle Manager

Austin, Texas;
Charlotte, North Carolina;
Reston, Virginia

At Solar Winds, we’re a people-first company. Our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve—including our employees, customers, shareholders, partners, and communities. Join us in our mission to help customers accelerate business transformation with simple, powerful, and secure solutions.

This is not a campaign-execution role. It is a business-ownership role accountable for outcomes such as gross revenue retention (GRR), net revenue retention (NRR), churn reduction, activation, and customer experience metrics such as net promoter score (NPS). Communications and automation are the means to achieve those outcomes.

You will design, own, and continuously improve scalable post-sale programs that help customers realize value quickly, remain healthy, renew, and grow. The role combines lifecycle strategy, operational execution, customer data analysis, and cross-functional orchestration across Customer Success, Renewals, Product, Product Marketing, Support, and Sales.

In practice, you will serve as the single accountable owner for digital lifecycle performance while leveraging partner teams and subject-matter experts for messaging, systems configuration, product insights, renewal motions, and sales follow-up.

• Experience designing and optimizing customer lifecycle, customer marketing, customer success, growth, retention, or renewal programs.
• A strong understanding of post-sale customer journeys, lifecycle stages, behavioral triggers, and digital engagement programs.
• Analytical depth and the ability to interpret CRM data, product telemetry, customer health signals, and program performance.
• Technical fluency to understand product friction, systems dependencies, data quality, and automation requirements.
• Business judgment to prioritize revenue, retention, and customer outcomes over activity metrics.
• Strong cross-functional leadership skills and the ability to mobilize subject-matter experts without relying on direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex ideas into clear programs, plays, and recommendations.
• A curious, inventive, and improvement-oriented mindset, with the ability to execute with urgency and adapt to changing priorities.

Own Onboarding Communications and Activation

Web and manual onboarding are owned by another function. You will own the communications component of onboarding and activation by:

Identifying where customers get stuck after purchase by analyzing onboarding friction in Pendo, support trends, product usage, and handoff gaps.

Building and improving onboarding communication journeys that reduce time to first value and increase activation rates.

Using behavioral signals to guide customers toward the next best action.

Design the Post-Sale Lifecycle

Define post-sale lifecycle stages and the entry and exit criteria for each stage, typically including onboarding, activation, adoption, retention, expansion, renewal, advocacy, and win-back where relevant.

Translate the lifecycle into clear plays, triggers, events, handoffs, and success criteria for each customer segment.

Tailor lifecycle design to customer archetype, complexity, product line, deployment model, and engagement model rather than relying on one-size-fits-all motions.

Improve Retention and Prevent Churn and Downsell

Monitor lifecycle time-series events to identify churn and downsell risk early.

Trigger the right intervention to correct the customer journey and address emerging risk.

Create scalable nurture and engagement programs that keep customers progressing between renewal events rather than treating renewal as a last-minute transaction.

Coordinate with Customer Success, Technical Support, Onboarding, Product, Engineering, and Renewals to ensure risk, health, and value signals are acted on consistently.

Drive Expansion and Growth

Detect expansion signals from adoption patterns, feature usage, account maturity, and customer behavior.

Drive digital expansion motions directly or surface qualified opportunities to Sales and account teams.

Ensure lifecycle programs support revenue…