Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Customer Success Manager role stands out in SaaS because it sits at the intersection of product adoption and executive stakeholder management, a core lever in subscription businesses where retention and expansion depend on realized outcomes. The remit spans complex customer environments and ties directly to how an operations platform is embedded across IT, engineering, and support functions, reflecting the enterprise-grade, multi-team nature of modern SaaS deployments.
From a career perspective, the position builds durable SaaS capability in translating technical value into business impact. Experience creating adoption paths, quantifying ROI, and navigating change management maps closely to how leading SaaS companies run post-sales. The emphasis on forecasting risk, renewals, and expansion also develops commercial judgment that transfers across customer success leadership tracks, including roles that partner closely with sales and product.
This role is best suited to professionals who prefer consultative work with senior customer stakeholders and who are comfortable coordinating cross-functional internal teams to deliver outcomes. It will fit someone who enjoys combining platform fluency with structured account planning, and who wants responsibility for shaping customer narratives that influence both renewals and what the product team prioritizes next.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
The Principal Customer Success Manager is aligned at the customers' key stakeholder level, building and fostering strong relationships to help customers accelerate their digital journey. Customer Success Managers are working directly with customers that can vary in their market segment, size, solution complexity and life cycle, depending on the customers needs.
Responsibilities:
- Build and foster executive-level trusted advisor relationships with the customer’s IT, Engineering and Support organizations.
- Demonstrates hands-on PagerDuty Product knowledge by applying it to the customer's business priorities.
- Guide a customer on process, people and change management best practices to drive customers adoption of real time operations.
- Proactively identify risks to the customer achieving their stated business goals and work with the sales team to build a risk mitigation plan.
- Produce and execute a comprehensive adoption path of PagerDuty products, showing the current state, target future state with timeline.
- Deliver business value and innovation to a customer’s business by understanding the customers’ opportunity to reduce cost and drive growth.
- When appropriate, recommend additional expert services needed to drive success.
- Proactively communicate technical product changes, degradations, outages, end of life and other relevant updates.
- Represent the voice of the customer to inform our sales process or product roadmap.
- Lead the cross functional post sales team at PagerDuty, delivering a seamless experience on behalf of the customer.
- Prepare and facilitate business review meetings, training sessions, webinars, demos, and other strategic and supportive interactions.
- Predict and forecast risk, renewal and expansion within the customer portfolio.
Basic Qualifications:
- Experienced professional with 5-10 years relevant industry expertise.
- Experience building business value ROI models.
- Working knowledge in a SaaS business model.
- Strong knowledge of PagerDuty product and platform features and capabilities is highly desired.
- Strong understanding of IT enterprise architecture, DevOps principles and modern IT monitoring
- Ability to travel to client sites as necessary
Preferred Qualifications:
- Strong consulting skills and proven results working as a trusted advisor to drive business value for customers.
- Thrive in a collaborative fast pace environment and as a part of a results oriented team.
- Ability to drive effective and influencing conversations at the C-level; facilitation of difficult discussions and adept at handling objections.
- Worked in a DevOps environment or with a company going through a transition to DevOps.
