Strategic Customer Success Manager - Aerospace and Defence

About CoLab

At CoLab, we help engineering teams bring life-changing products to the world years sooner. Our platform is the world’s first Design Engagement System (DES) - a category defining product that Engineering teams use to engage in meaningful, productive design conversations, catch preventable mistakes, and get to market faster. Our customers include the largest engineering organizations in the world spanning from industrial equipment, consumer products, automotive, aerospace & defense, and shipbuilding industries.

About the role

As a Strategic Customer Success Manager focused on Aerospace and Defence, you will serve as a trusted advisor to our most complex, global enterprise customers. You will lead the post-sale customer journey, driving business transformation and ensuring customers effectively adopt CoLab to achieve measurable ROI with large A&D companies. You’ll drive executive alignment, identify and mitigate risks, surface expansion opportunities, and collaborate cross-functionally to maximize customer value.

You will collaborate with Sales partners to support growth and retention and work closely with a team of Customer Engineering Advisors to enable customer teams on CoLab’s capabilities. Your role is to execute a customer success strategy that drives retention, value realization, and long-term growth.

In-person customer engagement is a key part of this role’s success.  On-site visits have consistently driven higher adoption, deeper relationships, and better business outcomes for our customers. We recognize personal travel constraints may arise and we expect Strategic CSMs to proactively plan for and prioritize in-person opportunities. 

Twice annually we bring together all CoLabers at our HQ in St. John’s, Newfoundland (typically in June and December), to participate in company Team Week.

What you’ll do

• Own gross revenue retention (GRR) across your book of business in aerospace and defence, with strong influence over NRR and account growth
• Define and communicate a clear customer success strategy aligned to their goals and CoLab’s expansion motion
• Lead executive engagement, stakeholder mapping, and success planning to drive measurable outcomes
• Lead structured executive business reviews that translate CoLab usage to measurable outcomes and business impact
• Coach customers to take ownership of their outcomes and proactively challenge the status quo to unlock ROI
• Manage project timelines, stakeholders, and implementation milestones in a structured way to maximize product adoption & customer value
• Drive outcomes with a bias for urgency, balancing quality execution with time-to-value
• Collaborate with Sales on growth strategy, account planning, and renewal execution
• Identify risks early, define and execute action plans, escalate with urgency
• Leverage usage data, customer feedback, and adoption insights to inform strategy and measure success
• Support champions in building internal case studies and advocacy to accelerate adoption and expansion
• Partner with champions to drive change management, optimize engineering workflows, and accelerate time-to-value
• Partner with Sales in late-stage deals to shape rollout plans and success metrics
• Drive internal CS maturity by contributing to playbooks, onboarding assets, and scalable frameworks
• Act as a leader across the GTM org, modeling cross-functional alignment, ownership, and high performance

What we’re looking for 

• 7+ years in Customer Success, Strategic Consulting, or Enterprise Account Management
• Proven success driving enterprise transformation and value realization across global Fortune 1000 accounts
• Experience with customer journey orchestration and success planning in a high-ACV SaaS environment
• Track record of partnering with Sales to shape and execute multi-threaded expansion strategies in large, complex organizations
• Familiarity with navigating complex procurement, security, and compliance processes in enterprise accounts
• Strong executive presence and communication skills
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, high-growth environments
• Highly organized, data-driven, and accountable
• Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time
  
  

Nice to have

• Experience supporting engineering or manufacturing customers (CAD, PLM, or technical tools) in Aerospace and Defence
• Familiarity with land-and-expand SaaS motions
• Background in vertical SaaS (e.g., construction tech, industrial IoT, logistics)

You’ll thrive at CoLab if you:

• Excel at translating product functionality into customer value in a technical domain
• Take ownership of customer outcomes and internal clarity
• Thrive in a fast-paced, evolving environment where processes are still being shaped
• Are energized by solving complex customer challenges
• Lead strategic conversations with confidence and clarity
• Excel at cross-functional collaboration, even in ambiguous territory
• Operate with urgency and proactively mitigate risk
• Translate product signals into actionable customer strategy