General Manager

📋 Description

• • As the General Manager, Product (Lifecycle Automation) at Scale Army Careers, you will be entrusted with the ultimate responsibility for an entire software business line, encompassing product strategy, revenue generation, and profitability. This pivotal role is designed to take ownership of an existing lifecycle automation software product and transform it into a standalone, thriving business unit. Your accountability will span across critical metrics including revenue growth, profit margins, EBITDA, and the long-term viability of the product. This is not a role focused on product coordination; it is a true P&L ownership position, reporting directly to the CEO. Your performance, career progression, and continued tenure will be directly evaluated based on the financial success of this business unit.
• • From day one, you will assume immediate ownership and management of a dedicated team, including a Backend Engineer, a Frontend Engineer, a Client Success Manager, and an Account Operations Manager. Your direct responsibilities will cover the entire product roadmap and prioritization, the strategic development of pricing, packaging, and expansion initiatives, customer retention and upsell strategies, and the meticulous management of cost structures, margin discipline, and monthly/quarterly P&L performance. You will operate with significant autonomy, thinking and acting like a CEO and an owner of this business.
• • You will collaborate closely with the CEO on overarching strategy, capital allocation, and performance reviews. Partnerships with the Sales team will be crucial for deal support, identifying upsell opportunities, and establishing robust feedback loops. Input into marketing positioning will be vital, though the ultimate accountability for the product's success and market reception will remain with you. This is a distinct business unit, not merely a feature team within a larger organization.
• • Core Responsibilities will revolve around P&L Ownership, which is non-negotiable. You will be fully accountable for the lifecycle automation product's Profit and Loss statement, including revenue, gross margin, operating costs, and monthly profitability (EBITDA). This involves making critical decisions regarding investment and cost-cutting measures, building effective upsell and expansion pathways within the product, and ensuring the business grows in profitability over time, not just in size. Your performance will be measured monthly on tangible financial output, not on effort expended.
• • Product Vision & Roadmap will be built with revenue as a primary driver. You will set and own the product vision, prioritizing roadmap items based on their impact on retention, expansion potential, sales velocity, and cost-to-build versus return. Features that do not contribute to adoption or revenue will be critically evaluated and potentially removed. Product decisions must directly support profitability, with the understanding that the product exists to serve the business objectives, not the other way around.
• • Revenue Growth & Expansion strategies will be designed and owned by you. This includes developing upsell paths, add-ons, and tiered packaging. You will partner with Sales on strategic deals and enterprise upsells, and handle objections tied to the product roadmap. You will translate revenue friction points into actionable product or pricing changes. Your role is not to support revenue; it is to own it.
• • Customer Success & Retention are revenue-critical functions. You will manage the Client Success team directly, ensuring that onboarding processes lead to rapid time-to-value. Retention and expansion will be directly tied to product usage, and you will maintain tight feedback loops between customers, CS, Product, and Engineering. Churn will be treated as a leadership failure until proven otherwise, recognizing that retention is fundamental to revenue.
• • Engineering Leadership will be approached with a focus on cost and output discipline. Engineering time will be allocated as a capital decision, balancing speed, quality, and margin. You will prevent overbuilding and 'gold-plating,' ensuring every sprint has a clear business justification. Engineers will be held accountable for outcomes, not just delivery, as engineering costs are a direct component of your P&L.
• • Success within the first 90-180 days will be defined by having a clear revenue model and pricing strategy in place, a product roadmap explicitly tied to financial impact, established baseline P&L visibility, and upsell paths live or in progress. Within 6-12 months, success will be demonstrated by predictably growing revenue, improving margins (or intentionally investing them), trending upward retention, and the product being recognized internally as a genuine business, not an experiment. The CEO will trust you to operate this unit with minimal oversight.
• • The ideal background for this role is for individuals who have founded or co-founded a company, have personally experienced the pressures of payroll, burn rates, and margins, and may have navigated a startup that didn't succeed before learning how companies scale in-house. You are now seeking to own something meaningful again. Strong fits often include former founders, General Managers with P&L responsibility, product leaders with a commercial focus, and early-stage SaaS operators with strong commercial instincts. If you have never been directly accountable for revenue, this role is not the right fit.
• • Reporting and Accountability are clear: you report directly to the CEO with wide autonomy and clear financial expectations. Performance is evaluated primarily on the EBITDA generated by this business unit. The long-term growth path is optional and earned, offering opportunities to either scale and deepen your role as General Manager of this business unit, building a larger team and expanded product surface area, or to transition this unit to a replacement GM and move on to launch and scale new products or business units as an internal builder or entrepreneur-in-residence. Movement between these paths is optional, performance-based, and determined jointly with the CEO. This opportunity is for those who want to build multiple real businesses, not just manage one.