Principal Support Operations Strategist

About the role

This role serves as the operating intelligence layer of Q2’s global Customer Support organization—a 300-person, globally distributed team delivering world-class support experiences to banks, credit unions, and fintechs across the U.S. and internationally.

Responsibilities

• Own and govern the full cadence of business reviews—weekly ops reviews, monthly leadership reviews, and QBRs—designing structure, holding owners to the agenda, and ensuring every session produces decisions with clear owners and timelines.

• Develop pre-read packages, situation analyses, and decision frameworks that sharpen leadership discussions and accelerate time-to-resolution on complex issues.

• Continuously evaluate how the leadership team allocates its collective time—protecting capacity for the work that drives the most organizational value.

• Maintain and govern the organization-wide action tracker—every commitment from reviews, leadership discussions, and cross-functional forums tracked in one system with one owner.

• Identify stalled items, missed deadlines, and patterns of delay; surface these without political softening so the leadership team can intervene before slippage becomes systemic drift.

• Hold Directors and Managers to their commitments—with consistent follow-through that makes avoidance uncomfortable and accountability the cultural norm.

• Distinguish between items that need time and items that need intervention; escalate the latter before they become crises.

• Own cross-functional commitment tracking: what the support org promised Product, Engineering, Finance, and HR—and whether it was delivered on time and at quality.

• Run demand-based capacity modeling across support queues—forecast volume, flag gaps, and translate projections into headcount requirements with enough lead time to act.

• Own the hiring pipeline in partnership with HR and Talent Acquisition—track requisition status, interview velocity, and offer stage with precision, removing bottlenecks before they stall progress.

• Connect workforce data to operational outcomes—translating coverage gaps, attrition signals, and hiring lag into risk assessments with clear recommendations.

• Partner with Workforce Management to align capacity models with scheduling actuals and real-time queue behavior.

• Dig into performance data and find non-obvious signals: where variation lives, which teams mask underperformance behind strong averages, and where outliers represent emerging risk.

• Convert data into a “so what” narrative—pointed insights that drive prioritization, investment, and intervention decisions, not dashboards for the sake of dashboards.

• Track leading indicators, not just lag—surface problems when they’re still correctable, not after they’ve hardened into trends.

• Own budget variance tracking: flag overspend, identify reallocation opportunities, and translate financial data into operational decisions.

• Conduct periodic effectiveness reads—manager performance signals, team sentiment, and structural inefficiencies that don’t surface in ticket metrics.

• Own the portfolio of strategic initiatives—track progress, remove blockers, and ensure programs sustain momentum well past their launch date.

• Serve as the connective tissue between cross-functional partners—Product, Engineering, HR, Finance, and Workforce Management—and the support leadership team.

• Ensure improvements stick: not just launched, but adopted, reinforced, and measured through disciplined change management and outcome tracking.

• Manage vendor performance where relevant—track SLAs, flag delivery gaps, and surface contract risks before they create operational exposure.

• Accelerate onboarding for new leaders—orienting them to the operating model, key relationships, and decisions they’ll need to make fast.

• Own the executive escalation program—own end-to-end design and governance of Q2’s executive escalation program, from problem definition through pilot execution and operational handoff.

• Define the problem with data — quantify escalation volume, resolution patterns, repeat-escalator segments, and the cost of unstructured handling to build a defensible case for program investment.

• Develop solution options — develop 2–3 program models with resource requirements, risk profiles, and expected outcomes so leadership can make a tradeoff-informed decision.

• Run a structured pilot — define scope, success metrics, and exit criteria upfront; execute with rigor; document results to drive the full-rollout decision.

• Execute a clean handoff — build the playbooks, SLAs, escalation criteria, and governance model the escalation team needs to operate independently.

• Maintain strategic oversight — post-handoff, track trends, assess outcomes against retention and resolution targets, and feed pattern analysis upstream into product, process, and training.

• Surface organizational health signals absent from operational data: manager effectiveness gaps, structural friction points, and team dynamics quietly limiting performance.

• Translate observations into actionable org design recommendations—identifying where structure, span, or role clarity constrains performance, and bringing solutions, not just observations.

• Develop decision packages on complex organizational matters—people decisions, structural changes, cross-functional tensions—so the leadership team can act with speed and confidence.

• Own communication strategy for the support organization: leadership messaging, all-hands content, executive updates, and cross-functional briefings that keep a 300-person org aligned.

• Own the change management architecture for major transformations—from AI workflow adoption to operating model changes—ensuring programs land as real behavioral change, not surface compliance.

• Develop stakeholder and resistance maps for high-impact changes, identifying adoption risk before rollout and designing mitigation strategies that address root cause.

• Build adoption measurement frameworks that track whether new ways of working are sticking at 30, 60, and 90 days post-launch—and adjust rollout strategies based on what the data shows.

• Treat change management as a continuous feedback loop, not a launch-day checklist.

• Own the design and outcomes of leadership team forums—quarterly offsites, annual planning sessions, working sessions—with structured pre-work, clear objectives, and documented outputs the team is held to.

• Avoidance of misalignment, communication gaps, or trust deficits limiting collective performance, and driving targeted interventions before dysfunction surfaces in results.

• Design and oversee engagement programs that build cohesion and reinforce operating norms—partnering with the org EA and culture leads for execution while maintaining strategic ownership.

• Track leadership team development as an operational priority—coaching needs, team dynamic friction, and collective capability gaps that are the binding constraint on organizational performance.

• Coaching needs, team dynamic friction, and collective capability gaps that are the binding constraint on organizational performance.

• Design and oversee engagement programs that build cohesion and reinforce operating norms—partnering with the org EA and culture leads for execution while maintaining strategic ownership.

• Track leadership team development as an operational priority—coaching needs, team dynamic friction, and collective capability gaps that are the binding constraint on organizational performance.

• Experience in enterprise SaaS, technology, or similarly complex B2B environments.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree with 15+ years of related experience; advanced degree with 12+ years; or equivalent professional experience in lieu of a degree.

7+ years of progressive experience in business operations, strategy, or program management within a large, complex organization.

Demonstrated ability to build and govern operating systems—business reviews, accountability frameworks, initiative portfolios—from the ground up.

Strong analytical capability: workforce, financial, and operational performance data converted into insight and decisions, not just reporting.

Pennsic track record holding senior stakeholders accountable without formal authority—effective through trust, precision, and consistency.

Fluency in change management principles and adoption measurement—able to design the system that makes transformation land, not just communicate it.

Exceptional communication skills: crisp written memos, sharp verbal synthesis, sound judgment on what escalates and what can wait.

High tolerance for complexity and ambiguity; able to carry multiple high-priority workstreams simultaneously without losing depth on any of them.

Experience in customer support, customer success, or professional services environments.