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