Innovation Engagement Manager

Summary

Join Vonage's Innovation Office as an Innovation Engagement Manager and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the Network API ecosystem. You will identify and unlock new use cases and opportunities with leading customers and partners, driving transformative solutions. Leveraging your consultative acumen and exceptional communication skills, you'll empower customers to embrace innovative products and realize tangible value. This role requires interfacing with customers, leading teams, developing solutions, and fostering partnerships. You will need strong business acumen, consultative selling skills, and experience in solution consulting. The ideal candidate will have a background in management consultancy or a similar customer-facing role.

Requirements

• Experience in Management Consultancy, or a role where you have been front and centre with customers on building out new solutions that aid in driving innovation - this could have been in Customer Success, Solutions Engineer roles as examples
• Customer obsession: Experience in interfacing with customers to extract addressable pain points, co-developing solution concepts, and illustrating path to success
• Consultative Selling: Demonstrated ability to craft compelling narratives and data-driven business cases that secure stakeholder buy-in and illustrate clear value argumentation
• Solution Consulting: Deep expertise in guiding customers on the adoption and customization of products to align with their goals and objectives
• Business and Commercial Acumen: Strong understanding of value-based pricing, revenue models, and developing triple-win scenarios for all stakeholders involved
• Market Introduction and Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy: Experience in supporting market launches and shaping effective GTM motions tailored to customer and business needs
• Partnership Development: Track record of identifying and fostering high-value partnerships to address capability gaps and co-create solutions
• Complex Stakeholder Management: Ability to influence and build strong relationships across diverse internal and external teams to drive alignment and results
• Communication Excellence: Exceptional storytelling, presentation, and negotiation skills to clearly articulate complex ideas and solutions
• Leadership and Influence : Strong leadership presence with the ability to guide cross-functional teams through ideation to industrialization stages
• Results-Oriented Mindset: Focused on delivering measurable outcomes, ensuring both customer success and organizational growth

Responsibilities

• Identify new business opportunities by interfacing with lead customers and partners to maximize end-to-end value creation for both operators and enterprises
• Lead a team and serve as the primary customer interface to drive end to end innovation engagements
• Lead discussions with the customer to map out potential areas to collaborate on; and synthesize and align on the key pain points and eventually the problem statement
• Collaborate and engage in strategic workshops with the customer to develop paper solutions and its key attributes; and articulate and illustrate customer / developer success
• Apply structure to the idea, defining business rationale and value argumentation, and testing for strategic fit, business viability and technical feasibility
• Proceed to engage with product teams, solution engineers, and technical subject matter experts to conduct a thorough technical feasibility assessment
• Identify innovative partnership opportunities with existing and new partners to address any capability gaps to bring idea / solution to fruition
• Assist in defining commercial and GTM flows to drive triple-win scenarios for Vonage, partners, and customers
• Develop new innovative business / commercial models that drives value-based pricing for maximum value creation
• Provide solution consulting to customers on how to best utilize and customize products
• Act as business consultants from initiation through industrialization stages
• Help to define the path to launch and eventually illustrate path to scale
• Prepare detailed handover material for the BUs

Preferred Qualifications

Familiarity with the Network API landscape, including emerging trends, technological capabilities, and market drivers - but any experience in the CPaaS / Communication API space would also be hugely advantageous