Senior Manager, Innovation & Experience Consulting - Internationally-Based Applicants
About Toptal
Toptal is a global network of top freelance talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote company.
We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.
Position Description
This is a remote position.
Toptal is a hypergrowth organization that is disrupting the global professional services and talent market. In response to our clients’ overwhelming demand for exceptional talent in new areas, we are expanding the breadth and depth of our offerings to further fuel that growth. As a Senior Manager for Toptal’s Innovation & Experience Consulting practice, you will be in a high-impact position to help develop and take new offerings to market and further accelerate our growth. You will shape the details around and deliver go-to-market strategies, lead and support cross-functional pursuit teams, and be empowered to work across organizational lines to strengthen the foundation for Toptal’s Innovation & Experience Consulting offerings to rapidly scale.
Your proven experience helping clients across industries to solve a range of strategic customer experience (CX) and innovation problems will enable you to thrive in this role. The right candidate will be adept at developing digestible solutions to complex client issues, specifically across CX and innovation-related topics. You will also be proficient at conducting user and market research to support ideas and solutions, using data to inform conclusions and create compelling presentations for an executive-level audience. Methodologies such as HCD, design thinking, the double-diamond, and the DVF framework are part of your core toolkit. You love to immerse yourself in customer insights, synthesizing, and ideate solutions to user needs.
We are unable to provide visa sponsorship. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.
Responsibilities:
You will be responsible for driving the growth strategy for Toptal’s Innovation & Experience Consulting practice. This includes:
- Strategy: Which industries/geographies/clients/buyers do we target and what problems do we help them solve? What service offerings would align to these needs?
- Offering Development: Develop attractive and scalable offerings that resonate with specific customer segments.
- Go-to-Market: Take services and offerings to market; first, by leading from the front to establish product-market fit with our clients, and then by working with our Practices Operations team to scale adoption and the commercial impact of offerings.
- Marketing: Develop thought leadership and campaigns that highlight our competitive differentiation, elevate our reputation in the market, attract great talent to our network, and generate leads for sales.
- Sales: Understand current/future demand and enable, educate, and directly support the sales force to best position this practice with Toptal clients and win new business. Lead client conversations, presenting Toptal’s point-of-view related to innovation and experience topics, and asking exploratory questions to better understand client needs.
- Talent: Ensure our talent network is prepared to meet the demands of the market (e.g., the right skills in the right capacities) as well as foster an ongoing sense of community amongst the network of professionals in this practice area. Meet with and connect with new talent, maintain an up-to-date view of top talent across project roles, support demand/supply analysis, and guide prioritization around sourcing.
- Delivery: Defining/executing the “Toptal way” methodologies for key services/solutions for the Innovation & Experience Consulting practice, including building out and maintaining a library of collateral to support delivery and pursuits.
This role is highly collaborative and will work extremely closely with our Sales and Talent Operations teams to fulfill the above responsibilities.
The successful candidate for this role has a demonstrated ability to:
- Execute in a highly collaborative and agile way.
- Operate in a high-growth environment in a market-facing role.
- Be comfortable with rolling up your sleeves to do the work, demonstrate traction, and contribute to the growth of a team over time.
- Make data-informed decisions and define key metrics with which you’ll measure progress.
- Walk in the shoes of your audience in order to understand their problems, develop/execute an approach to solve them, and articulate the solution clearly and compellingly.
In the first week, expect to:
- Onboard and integrate into Toptal; meet your colleagues.
- Learn about Toptal’s history, culture, and vision, with a focus on the state of our industry, and the core messages important to Toptal.
- Shadow critical teams throughout the organization to learn Toptal’s core operations and capabilities.
In the first month, expect to:
- Begin developing relationships with key leaders and stakeholders across the organization.
- Dive deeper into the operations of key teams (e.g., Sales, Talent Operations) across the company.
- Conduct a comprehensive review of the current demand in Innovation & Experience, talent that exists already in the network, and any work we may already be doing / have done.
- Build a detailed understanding of the go-to-market strategies and start to design experiments and execution approaches to implement the strategies.
In the first three months, expect to:
- Be a well-integrated member of the organization with positive relationships in Sales (Enterprise/SMB), Marketing, and Talent Operations.
- Be in front of clients on a regular basis to hear from them firsthand.
- Support the scaling of the consulting practice and begin positively impacting revenue growth.
In the first six months, expect to:
- Be a go-to expert for Innovation & Experience within Toptal.
- Have established initial market traction.
- See a commercial impact from your involvement in early initiatives.
In the first year, expect to:
- Feel like you made the best decision of your career.
- Increase the growth rate of Toptal materially.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience with preferably at least 4+ years in customer experience, design, innovation, strategy, management consulting, and/or professional services.
- Demonstrable experience leading successful project teams and owning executive-level relationships.
- Track record of rapid career progression achieved by taking on challenging assignments and exceeding expectations.
- Experience packaging, pricing, and delivering compelling solutions for clients.
- Refined relationship development & leadership skills with a track record of success building credibility across all levels of an organization. You can develop positive relationships across the business to partner on key initiatives and gain consensus on processes and strategies.
- Confidence in your analysis abilities, with proven success delivering results in ambiguous and sophisticated project efforts.
- Skilled in the art of communicating with both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Ability to take your work, but not yourself, too seriously.
- You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.
