All companies claim that they put the customer first, but at Winnow, we believe actions speak louder than words. That’s why we are proud to announce that we are bringing on Lucy Karis as vice president of customer success as one of our first major hires.
Karis has serious tech chops, as she started her career as a developer in the aerospace industry, later moving into a pre-sales role and becoming a jack-of-all-trades. “Though I was at a larger company, managing my product was like operating a startup company within a large company,” says Karis, who embraces dynamic roles which present her with lots of change and new challenges daily.
Karis eventually settled in at BMC where she became the director of global support. BMC was doing a lot of capacity management, understanding how fast computers could run with different software loads on them. Karis’ teams managed the highest-level accounts for the largest customers. “I established a global support model for our highest level of customer. I then brought support to India where we hired 90 people in 90 days. And I then brought support to the US with some off-shoring as well as some “near-shoring,” said Karis.
Ultimately, Karis ended up managing one of the products that she supported as director of support. It was similar to the role she will have at Winnow, in that she managed a product line from the support side, but also from a development standpoint. This ensured that the product was extremely customer focused. Karis shared that she had “managed customer support for that product for years and they wanted to make sure that every change we made to the product was because the customer needed it and not because the product marketers had dreamed it up.”
Running support and operating as development director taught Karis to delegate well because there was no way she could be everywhere at once while filling these two important roles. She became comfortable trusting her team members to attend key meetings and to report back with the critical information and updates required to grow her product and the success of her business. Her management style resulted in exceeding corporate goals with record high employee satisfaction on both the support and r&d organizations.
Karis then worked closely on the M&A side, which she loved because she was able to introduce companies that were newly acquired by BMC to their global support system. Despite working mostly in larger organizations, Karis has always enjoyed working with startups and smaller, fast-moving groups. These skills and experiences came in handy when she launched her own yoga studio and spent time managing her own consulting business.
Karis found out about Winnow through a mutual colleague of ours from my days at BMC. She was immediately drawn to Winnow because she fell in love with the challenges, the idea of having something new to do every day, and getting to work directly with customers. Her favorite part about Winnow is the culture and getting to work with smart, capable, interesting people sharing: “Both the challenge and the people fit perfect for me.”
As vice president of customer success, Karis sees her role as ensuring that our clients turn into customers. This means initially focusing on trials and onboarding, and then making sure that the product is aligned with the issues the customers are running into.
On a personal level, Karis shared that she is a Francophile, and she loves her children and her dogs (she has an Italian greyhound and a larger hound mix named Ellie May).
Please help us in welcoming Lucy Karis to the Winnow Analytics community and feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn.
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