Director, Scaled Customer Success

About the role

You will define and lead the long-term Scaled Customer Success strategy for Newsela's SMB and Schools customer segments, owning the end-to-end experience from adoption through renewal and expansion. You will design and optimize a scalable coverage model that balances digital engagement and automation with high-impact human account management to drive predictable growth. In this pivotal people leadership role, you will lead frontline managers and establish a proactive culture of whitespace penetration, upsell, and account expansion across high-volume segments. You will ensure teams are delivering strong customer outcomes by connecting adoption, retention, renewal readiness, and long-term account health to concrete business results. This position requires deep collaboration across cross-functional partners to synthesize customer feedback and translate it into scalable processes and strategies. You will own core revenue and retention targets, including NRR and GRR, by coaching managers to systematically map accounts and identify growth opportunities. Ultimately, you will build a data-driven engine that maximizes support at the right moments in the customer journey while maintaining clarity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define and execute the long-term Scaled Customer Success strategy across Newsela's SMB and Schools customer segments, determining how customers are segmented, where digital or tech-touch engagement is appropriate, and where human intervention is critical to driving adoption, retention, and customer value.

Own the expansion and retention strategy across high-volume SMB and Schools segments, converting adoption and customer health into predictable account growth while equipping managers and their teams to systematically map accounts, identify cross-sell and upsell signals, and proactively pitch additional solutions.

Lead, coach, and develop frontline managers responsible for the day-to-day execution of scaled customer success motions, ensuring they are equipped to lead their teams effectively, coach toward key business outcomes, and create a culture of accountability, clarity, and growth.

Establish strong management rhythms, including regular 1:1s, performance conversations, career development, team health monitoring, and leadership coaching to build a scalable and high-performing management layer.

Own the scaled coverage model and partner closely with CS Operations to ensure the model is supported by the right data, systems, workflows, reporting, and capacity planning.

Be accountable for identifying what the business needs, defining the desired customer and team experience, and partnering cross-functionally to bring that experience to life in a way that scales efficiently.

Maintain accountability for core business outcomes across scaled customer segments, including NRR, GRR, product adoption, customer health, renewal readiness, and engagement.

Use customer data, team insights, lifecycle trends, and business performance metrics to identify risks and opportunities, make strategic recommendations, and adjust the scaled CS strategy as needed to sustain growth.

Build the team's ability to identify and influence growth opportunities across the scaled customer base by coaching managers and CSMs on recognizing upsell signals, surfacing customer needs, and partnering effectively with Sales and SDR teams.

Design and improve the scaled customer journey, ensuring customers advance through the right lifecycle moments from onboarding through adoption, renewal, and expansion readiness.

Partner with Customer Experience on scaled onboarding, adoption campaigns, customer education, webinars, playbooks, and digital programs that drive meaningful customer outcomes at scale.

Build strong cross-functional partnerships with Sales, CS Operations, Product, Marketing, Enablement, and Customer Experience to advocate for the needs of scaled customers.

Synthesize feedback and trends from the field and ensure the voice of the customer is represented in broader business decisions, creating clear feedback loops so that insights from SMB and Schools customers inform product, process, enablement, and go-to-market strategy.

Serve as a senior leader within the Customer Success organization, helping shape how Newsela continues to evolve its customer coverage model, identifying gaps, proposing solutions, and influencing change.

Help managers and teams successfully adopt new processes, systems, and ways of working by bringing clarity to what the Scaled CS team owns and how the team operates.

Define roles and responsibilities, establish success metrics, improve team operating rhythms, and ensure that managers and CSMs understand how their work connects to broader customer and business outcomes.

Requirements

Demonstrate experience defining and executing scalable customer success strategies for high-volume customer segments such as SMB and Schools.

Show a proven ability to lead and develop frontline managers who manage large volumes of accounts and translate business strategy into team execution.

Have strong ownership of revenue outcomes, including experience driving NRR and GRR in a scaled customer success environment.

Possess the ability to design and optimize scaled coverage models that balance digital engagement, automation, and human account management.

Exhibit advanced skills in using customer data and lifecycle trends to identify risks, opportunities, and areas for strategic intervention.

Bring experience partnering cross-functionally with Sales, CS Operations, Product, Marketing, and Enablement to align customer insights with business decisions.

Show capability in coaching managers and CSMs on growth motions, including upsell signal recognition, needs surfacing, and alignment with customer goals.

Have a track record of establishing management rhythms, performance conversations, career development, and team health monitoring within customer success teams.