Senior manager, customer support

About the role

We need a strong leader, doer and systems thinker to run Dockwa's customer support function, one of the most highly cited aspects of Dockwa that keep our customers thriving on the platform. This is not a pure management role - we are on track to add 40% more customers and several complex new products on a staffing plan that does not grow at the same rate. As such, we need the leader of this team to shore up our Support people, processes, and product to absorb customer and complexity growth while delivering the same excellent customer experience the boating community has come to expect.

This role reports to the VP of Customer Operations and will manage a team of five reps covering our diverse customer base SMB marina operators, enterprise-level corporations, and on-the-go boaters.

Core responsibilities

• 45% Team leadership. Manage, coach, and develop the support team. Own the weekly cadence, the quality bar, coverage and scheduling through a season that runs seven days a week from May to September, hiring, and performance.
• 35% Operating systems and deflection. Own tiering, routing, SLAs, the knowledge base, the AI answer layer, macros, and reporting. Your job is to make the next 500 marinas cost less to support than the last 500.
• 20% Incidents, escalations, and the seams. Run critical incidents end to end. Own the escalation path so it does not land on the VP. Carry what tickets are telling us into Product and Implementation with enough specificity that they act on it.

You will be in the queue, but you will not be in the queue most of the time. Any manager at Dockwa spending more than 60% of their week on individual contributor work has a system problem to fix, and we hold this seat to that.

What we're looking for

Required

• 6+ years in customer support, with 3+ years managing support teams of five or more, including hiring, scheduling, performance, and comp conversations.
• You have moved a ticket-per-customer or deflection number and can give the before, the after, and the mechanism.
• Hands-on with a modern support stack: HubSpot Service Hub, Intercom, Jira, (or similar stack) and an AI answer layer. Experience deploying AI deflection.
• You have owned an SLA in a seasonal or spiky business and staffed for the peak without carrying peak cost all year.
• You have run critical incidents as the person in charge of the room, not the person reporting into it.
• You build your own reporting.

Preferred

• Vertical SaaS with embedded payments and a fragmented SMB operator base.
• You have run support for two different audiences at once. A business operator who loses money when the product is down, and a consumer with a booking problem; we need different things from the same team.
• You have folded another company's support queue and customers into yours after an acquisition.
• Marketplace or two-sided support, operator plus consumer, with the mess that sits between them.

We will teach you marinas, boating, and our product. We are not going to teach you how to run a team or how to build a support system.