Manager - Product Support

• Customer Empathy: Understanding customer needs, pain points, and expectations, and ensuring the team delivers a positive support experience that balances customer satisfaction with business objectives.
• Customer Advocacy with Business Alignment: Representing the voice of the customer internally while considering the tradeoffs between customer needs, operational constraints, and business priorities.
• Excellent Communication Skills: Clear and concise written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, and influence cross-functional stakeholders when needed.
• Active Listening: Paying close attention to customer issues and concerns to understand the root cause and respond with care and relevance.
• Problem-Solving & Decision-Making: Ability to analyze complex support issues, identify solutions, and make timely, sound decisions—even amid ambiguity or incomplete data.
• Creativity & Innovation: Thinking beyond current practices to discover new ways to address recurring issues, automate workflows, or improve support delivery.
• Escalation Management & Prevention: Knowing when and how to escalate complex or critical issues, and proactively identifying patterns or gaps to reduce unnecessary escalations in the future.

People

• Team Leadership & Motivation: Ability to inspire, guide, and motivate a team of support engineers to achieve high levels of performance and customer satisfaction.
• Coaching, Development & Quality Assurance: Identifying individual strengths and weaknesses within the team, providing coaching and mentoring, and ensuring consistently high-quality customer interactions.
• Performance Management: Setting clear expectations, providing regular feedback, and conducting performance reviews to support employee growth and accountability.
• Delegation & Empowerment: Effectively assigning tasks and responsibilities while empowering team members to take ownership and make decisions.
• Conflict Resolution & Emotional Intelligence: Skillfully mediating and resolving conflicts within the team or across departments, while demonstrating empathy and self-awareness.
• Recruitment, Interviewing & Onboarding: Identifying talent needs, evaluating candidates effectively, and ensuring new team members are ramped up quickly and effectively.
• Impact & Influence: Establishing credibility with peers and leadership, and persuading others to support ideas or decisions that improve team performance and customer outcomes.

Product

• Deep Product Understanding: A thorough grasp of the software product(s) the team supports, including its architecture, functionalities, and common use cases.
• Technical Troubleshooting Skills: While not directly solving every issue, the manager needs to understand technical concepts and guide the team in effective troubleshooting methodologies.
• Hands-on Solution Testing: Ability to independently research and test potential solutions to common issues before escalating or providing guidance to the team.
• Hands-on Information Gathering: Ability to gather comprehensive information and context before escalating issues to ensure engineering or other teams have all the necessary details.
• Subject Matter Leadership: Demonstrating functional or technical expertise in at least one core area of the product, and providing informal mentorship or guidance to more junior team members.

Process

• Process Improvement: Identifying areas for improvement in support processes and implementing solutions to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction.
• Data Analysis & Reporting: Monitoring key support metrics (e.g., resolution time, CSAT, backlog), interpreting trends, and driving action based on insights.
• Operational Planning & Goal Alignment: Setting team-level goals (OKRs), aligning them with broader organizational priorities, and tracking execution against targets.
• Adaptability, Resilience & Change Management: Navigating product updates, shifts in support volume, or process changes with a calm, solutions-oriented approach.
• Time & Queue Management: Ensuring timely coverage of shifts and channels, prioritizing workloads effectively, and balancing resources across high- and low-volume queues.

Tools

• Understanding of Support Tools & Systems: Familiarity with CRM systems, ticketing platforms, knowledge bases, live chat, remote access tools, and other technologies used in support operations.
• Tool Optimization & Process Automation: Identifying opportunities to improve tool usage, automate repetitive tasks, or reduce agent effort through smart configuration or integrations. Stays current on changes from vendors of existing tools.