Head of Product Support

Application Deadline: 20 August 2026

Department: IT

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Home United States

Compensation: $60,000 - $150,000 / year

Description

The Head of Product Support will establish and lead a global, standardised Product Support function within Enterprise IT, consolidating currently fragmented application support teams into a single accountable capability. This function will act as the first point of engagement for all product-related incidents and requests, ensuring effective triage, resolution, and routing across Product Support, Service Operations, and Product Engineering.

The role is critical to closing a structural gap in application-layer accountability, improving service clarity, and enabling a scalable, efficient global support model aligned to Enterprise IT strategy.

Operating Model Positioning

• Product Support = First-line for application issues (incidents & requests)
• Service Desk (Service Operations) = first-line for end-user IT issues
• Service Operations = owns major incident management and infrastructure/platform recovery
• Product Teams = own restoration of applications into functioning business services
• Product Support = triage, coordination, and resolution at application layer (not engineering ownership)

Key Responsibilities

1. Establish and Lead the Product Support Function
   • Consolidate all LoB application support teams into Enterprise IT
   • Build a globally consistent operating model across regions and divisions
   • Define roles, capability expectations, and team structures
   • Lead a follow-the-sun support model (location strategy to be defined separately)
2. Own Application-Layer Triage and Routing
   • Ensure all product incidents and requests are routed through Product Support as the single entry point for applications
   • Drive consistent triage outcomes:
     • Resolved within Product Support
     • Escalated to Service Operations (infrastructure/platform)
     • Escalated to Product Engineering (defects / change backlog)
   • Ensure high-quality classification of issues to reduce misrouting and delays
3. Standardise Processes, Tooling, and Ways of Working
   • Define and enforce standard triage, escalation, and problem management processes
   • Align all workflows to ServiceNow as the enterprise ITSM platform
   • Eliminate fragmented tooling and inconsistent practices across divisions
   • Establish standard:
     • SLAs and OLAs
     • Ticket taxonomy and categorisation
     • Knowledge capture and reuse
4. Drive End-to-End Visibility of Product Stability
   • Implement reporting across the full product support lifecycle:
     • Incident volumes and trends
     • Recurring defects and technical debt
     • Product-level stability and reliability
     • Recurring incident patterns and operational risks
   • Provide Enterprise IT leadership with clear insight into application health service stability, recurring incidents trends, and systemic issues
5. Enable Continuous Improvement via Product Feedback Loops
   • Ensure all recurring and material issues are translated into:
     • Product backlog items
     • Problem records and root cause analysis
   • Work with Product Teams to:
     • Reduce incident demand
     • Eliminate recurring defects
     • Improve product stability and service reliability
   • Drive shift from incident resolution → issue prevention
6. Lead Transformation and Optimisation
   • Assess existing teams across capability, scale, and duplication
   • Support identification of shadow IT operations and bring into scope of transformation and optimisation
   • Define and execute a future-state Product Support strategy, including:
     • Standardisation of roles and processes
     • Tooling convergence
     • Organisational optimisation
     • Automation and self-serve reduction
   • Deliver measurable improvements in:
     • Cost efficiency
     • Service quality
     • Scalability
   • Develop high-levels of automation to accelerate resolution times and reduce dependency on manual effort.
   • Develop and promote self-service capabilities for known incidents and requests.
   • Assess and plan the integration impact of M&A activity on Product Support capabilities, ensuring rapid alignment to the target operating model without service disruption.
7. Stakeholder and Executive Leadership
   • Act as a senior interface to:
     • Divisional CIOs
     • Business leadership
     • Product and Engineering teams
   • Manage transition to centralised model while maintaining business confidence and service continuity
   • Enforce standards with authority, in collaboration with Enterprise IT leadership

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Essential

• Proven leadership of application / product support at scale (multi-region preferred)
• Strong understanding of:
  • Incident, request, and problem management (ITIL-aligned)
  • Triage models and escalation frameworks
• Experience standardising fragmented support models across multiple teams
• Experience implementing or operating ServiceNow (or equivalent ITSM platform)
• Strong stakeholder management at senior and executive level
• Demonstrated ability to lead organisational consolidation and transformation

Desirable

• Experience across both:
  • Infrastructure / Service Operations
  • Product / application support or engineering
• Experience in federated organisations moving to centralised models
• Exposure to global operating models and cost optimisation initiatives

Leadership Profile

• Strong ownership of end-to-end application service outcomes
• Comfortable enforcing standards across diverse teams and regions
• Pragmatic and execution-focused (not theoretical transformation)
• Data-driven, with focus on measurable improvement
• High credibility across both technical and business stakeholders

Success Measures (Indicative KPIs)

• % of product support teams consolidated under Enterprise IT
• Reduction in duplicated tooling and processes
• Improvement in:
  • First-time fix rate
  • SLA adherence
  • Time to triage and correct routing
• Reduction in recurring incidents
• Improved product stability and up-time.
• Increased visibility of product-level performance
• Contribution to overall cost-to-serve reduction
• % of automated (including self-service) incidents and requests
• End user and business satisfaction, including CSAT