Lifecycle Manager

• You have run lifecycle for a usage-based or PLG B2B SaaS, where revenue comes from seats and usage, not cart recovery. You know why that difference changes everything.

• Hands-on Customer.io (or an equivalent you can prove), including segments, campaigns, webhooks, and event-triggered flows you built yourself.

• Data fluency: you write SQL, you live in product analytics, and you pull your own segments instead of filing a ticket.

• You can put numbers on your best work: what the activation or retention metric was, what you did, what it became.

• AI-native, for real. We use Viktor to build Viktor, and you will use it to run lifecycle from day one.

• Owner energy: vague goal in, shipped system out, without being managed through it.

• You have owned lifecycle at a Series A or B company through exactly this stage: a rebuilt or inherited system, first holdouts, first segmentation roadmap.

• You have deliverability scar tissue: a domain you warmed, a blocklist you got off, a sender reputation you rescued.

• You have run referral or advocacy comms and know how to promote a program without burning the list.

• You have been the marketing-side owner of a CDP, event pipeline, or ESP migration.

Top-of-the-market salary and the kind of ownership that only exists at this stage.

The best work happens when you're in the room. Munich, New York, Dublin, and Warsaw. Remote for some roles.

You own the lifecycle machine: every email and nudge that turns a signup into a daily user, a single user into a team, and a lapsed workspace into a returning one. An agency is rebuilding the system right now. In mid-August it becomes yours, and everything about where it goes next is your call. First dedicated lifecycle owner, hands-on in Customer.io daily, judged on activation, net revenue retention, and reactivated revenue. You ship every week.

Tens of thousands of people sign up, and what happens after signup is decided largely by lifecycle: the emails and messages that turn a curious signup into a daily user, a single user into a team, and a lapsed workspace into a returning one. In May 2026 we closed a $75M Series A led by Accel, with Slack's founders co-investing. The product works and the market is pulling. Lifecycle is the least-owned lever we have.

Today it is run by the Head of Growth as a side quest. An agency is rebuilding the system through mid-August: ten tracks, 20 flows, structured A/B testing with holdouts, and personalisation off survey attributes, all on Customer.io with a dedicated sending domain. When their engagement ends, that system needs an owner who treats it as their number, not a vendor relationship.

That is this hire. First dedicated lifecycle owner. No team above you, no legacy spaghetti to untangle. You inherit a freshly rebuilt machine and the interesting work starts on day one.

• You inherit a freshly rebuilt system with structured testing already wired in. Most lifecycle hires spend a year untangling before they get to this starting line.

• Lifecycle here reports into growth with a direct line to the founders. It is a revenue lever, not a service desk taking briefs.

• Tight feedback loops most lifecycle marketers never get: the product is used daily, events flow into the ESP, and your holdouts tell you the truth in weeks.

• You run the channel with an AI employee at your side. Viktor drafts, audits, monitors, and pulls data with you from day one.

• Activation. Our biggest leak is between a user's first message to Viktor and their first scheduled task. You own the email and in-channel nudge side of closing it. (In-product activation belongs to Product; you two will be joined at the hip.)

• Expansion. Half of paying workspaces still have only one active human. Seat expansion and usage expansion are open headroom, and the motion is dormant. You build it.

• Retention and reactivation. Churn here is mostly voluntary and win-back is brand new. You own it and iterate on real revenue numbers.

• The advocacy engine. Lifecycle comms for referrals, creators, and implementation specialists: one pitch per person per cycle, credits-led, never spammy. The programs have owners; the email layer is yours.

• Segmentation and data. You define the segmentation roadmap (buyer vs end-user, team size, usage stage) and drive the data dependencies with engineering. Reach and person-attribute coverage in our ESP is a live engineering conversation, not a solved problem: you are the internal customer who keeps it moving.

• The channel itself. Deliverability, sending domains, send hygiene, frequency capping, and the quality bar on every email that leaves the building. High touch and human, never mass and lazy.

Judged on activation rate, net revenue retention, and reactivated revenue, not on sends shipped or campaign count. "The calendar was full" is not the bar. "More signups become teams, and more teams stay and grow" is. "I'd brief an agency to build that" is an instant no-hire. You are the builder.

• 30 days. Full command of the inherited system: every track, flow, segment, suppression rule, and dashboard. The test program runs under your hand, not the agency's.

• 60 days. Handoff complete and invisible. First test reads actioned: losers killed or rewritten, winners scaled. First segmentation win shipped with engineering.

• 90 days. Activation, expansion, and reactivation each have a north-star number, a live campaign system behind it, and a trend you can defend in a growth review.

• Your lifecycle experience is DTC ecommerce: replenishment, AOV, cart recovery. Great craft, different motion.

• You grew a newsletter and call it lifecycle.

• Your default mode is briefing an agency or a team to do the building.

• You need the data team to pull every segment before you can start.