Senior Customer Advocacy Program Manager

Role Summary

Temporal has something most companies spend years trying to earn: developers who build their careers on the product, and enterprises running mission-critical systems on it. What we haven’t built yet is the system that turns that trust into advocacy at scale. Stories get sourced one at a time under deadline pressure. Reference requests become fire drills. The same recognizable customers get asked again and again. Strong customer experiences don’t reliably become field proof, press, keynote moments or product insight.

As the first hire on the Customer Advocacy team, you’ll be the Director’s partner in building the foundations of our Advocacy Systems and making it work day to day. You’ll earn the trust of the customers who advocate for us and the Sales teams who depend on them: knowing who our advocates are, what each is open to, and where the field needs proof. You’ll help set up the operating machinery and then run it: how we find and nurture advocates, how references are matched and tracked, how customer evidence is created and kept current, and how Sales, PMM, PR, DevRel and Product put it to work. Advocacy here is not a content service. It is a growth system built on trust, and the best version of it invests in customers before there is an ask.

The Director sets the strategy for the advocacy system, including its priorities, operating model and measures of success, and owns executive and advisory relationships (the Executive Advisory Board and our partnership on the Customer Advisory Board). You’ll bring what you learn from customers and the field back into that strategy, shape how it’s put into practice, own the day-to-day programs and processes.

Run the day to day advocacy and reference system

• Be the trusted point of contact. Become the person advocates and Sales both go to. Know each advocate’s story, relationship owner and comfort level, and know what the field needs next, so the right customer is matched to the right moment and nobody is asked cold.
• Run the reference program. Help shape how references are requested, matched to opportunities, tracked, prepared and thanked. Operate the day to day, so Sales can get the right customer in front of a prospect quickly and customers aren’t over-asked.
• Source, nurture and track advocates. Identify champions across Sales, Tech Services, DevRel, Product and the community, and maintain a clear record of who they are, their relationship owner, what they’ve done for us, what they’re open to, and how healthy the relationship is.
• Help build the intake and consent model. Partner with the Director to put a clear process in place for intake, prioritization, approvals and customer permissions, and work with Legal and account teams early so approvals stop surfacing at the last minute.

Create a usable evidence and storytelling engine

• Reconcile before you migrate. Audit the stories, quotes, use cases and proof points scattered across Notion, Drive, Slack and individual relationships. Decide what is current, what is prior art and what should be retired, then propose and stand up one trusted source of truth with owners, permissions and last-validated dates.
• Partner across Marketing to activate the right customers at the right moments. Manage a pipeline of advocate customers and work with Product Marketing, Content, Creative and PR to decide when each is best placed to contribute, whether as a launch quote, case study, technical deep dive, video, or event and keynote narrative.Help stories travel across formats while keeping the customer’s own voice and technical truth intact.
• Partner with PR, Analyst Relations and Events. Make sure Communications always knows who is ready and willing for press, speaking, analyst and awards opportunities, and that no one is pitched before the relationship is ready.
• Bridge developer and customer advocacy. Work with DevRel and community leaders (including Constellation and DevDays) to move engaged developers and internal champions toward the senior engineering leaders who can advocate for Temporal and help carry adoption from open source to Cloud. The developer stays the hero of the story.

Make the impact measurable

• Support advocacy reporting. Track references, stories and evidence to deals, pipeline, retention and expansion, and track advocate health, reference readiness, field usage and story range against the measures the Director sets. Prepare regular reporting for leadership. The volume of case studies is not the measure of success.
• Feed customer insight back. Create a simple loop so what we learn from advocates reaches Product, PMM, Sales and leadership.
• Use AI to scale. Build, or partner with teams who can build, agents that match references to prospects, surface advocates we haven’t tapped yet and speed up story drafting, with human judgment on every customer-facing output.

Required

• Builder’s track record. 7+ years in customer advocacy, customer marketing, product marketing, or related program management, including experience creating a program or function from scratch rather than only running one that already existed. [Calibrate years to P4 band with HR.]
• Reference program experience. You have built or run a reference program with deal matching and tracking, and you know how to serve Sales while protecting customer relationships and avoiding over-asking.
• Both craft and operations. You can direct or write a strong, metrics-backed customer story, and you can run the tracker, process and project plan behind it.
• Evidence and enablement. You’ve built and maintained a customer evidence library and driven real adoption by Sales and other GTM teams.
• Data and systems fluency. You’re comfortable in a CRM (we use Salesforce) and reporting tools, and can show advocacy’s influence on pipeline and revenue.
• Cross-functional influence. You get results across Sales, Marketing, Product, PR, Content and community teams without direct authority.
• Applied AI. You use AI and automation to scale your work and have built or shipped agents or workflows that save other teams time.
• Curiosity about technology. You’re willing to learn how durable execution works and why developers and enterprises care, well enough to recognize a strong Temporal story and tell it accurately. You ask questions rather than pretend to know.

Nice to have

• Experience with a developer, infrastructure, security or other deeply technical product and audience.
• Experience running or supporting a Customer Advisory Board, champions program or executive advisory group.
• Experience with Gong or other conversation intelligence, and with advocacy or reference platforms.
• Experience partnering with PR on press, analyst and speaking programs, or running an awards program.
• PMP, Six Sigma or similar program management credential.

How we work

Temporal is a remote-first, engineering-led, developer-obsessed company with a missionary rather than mercenary culture. Customers and developers can tell immediately when a story has been over-polished or stripped of its technical truth, so the strongest advocacy sounds like the person who lived the experience, not like Temporal speaking through them. We are figuring some things out in real time, and part of this job is creating clarity rather than waiting for it. Expect occasional travel, including company offsites and Replay.

Temporal Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Temporal Technologies does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We embrace and celebrate differences and diversity.

Temporal is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. If you need to request a reasonable accommodation, please let your Recruiter know so we can assist.