Implementation Manager

About Meadow Meadow is the modern payments platform for higher education that simplifies the entire student financial experience. We're transforming the $600 Billion higher education payments industry in the United States — building for universities what Shopify built for retail businesses, and bringing the entire student financial experience online. The need for a platform like Meadow has never been greater. If you're passionate about our mission to empower students financially and strengthen economic mobility through higher education — and you're excited to join a highly ambitious, talented team — we'd love to hear from you. About the Role Overview As Meadow's Implementation Manager, your primary mission is to take a school from "Signed Contract" to "Live" on Meadow Pay and Pre, and to leave it set up to grow. You own the customer side of every implementation in your portfolio: You get the school's business office and IT to do the work only they can do, help keep our Implementation Engineers unblocked, and always know where each project really stands, so the next blocker gets cleared and the school launches as soon as it's able. You'll carry a portfolio of concurrent implementations and deliver against it at the pace Sales sells. Along the way, you'll help make the way we implement more efficient — right the first time, without rework, so schools get value sooner and the process scales as we grow. This is a full-time position reporting to Maclore, Meadow's Senior Manager, Implementations. Outcomes: What Success Looks Like • Schools launch at the pace Sales sells, or faster. Launches keep up with kickoffs, so your portfolio holds steady or shrinks instead of growing, and you carry your share of each quarter's launch goal. • Every school goes live at a level that earns a great CSAT Score — trained, with validated data, no surprises in launch week, and nothing to redo after go-live. • Schools launch with the full implementation we recommend, not the narrowest one they'll accept, and are set up for retention and growth with the features turned on that get them more value. • Time-from-First-Working-Session-to-Launch comes down, because you keep finding, and helping fix, what slows schools and engineers down. What You'll Do • You'll own the relationship with each school's business office from the first working session through go-live. Run the meetings, keep the school informed, and be the person they call. • You'll configure each school's setup in Meadow and teach the business office to run it. You'll translate what the school needs into product settings, start from the full setup we recommend for every school and make the case for it when a school wants less, validate it with them before launch, and train their team on the administrative tools. • You'll keep each implementation moving. You'll get the school's IT Team moving through the business office or our Implementation Engineer, work through influence with the engineers who build the integration, and find a way to get it done. • You'll own the status of every school you carry. You'll keep our systems of record current as information comes in from the school, your Implementation Engineer, and everyone else touching the project; the weekly check-in is a backstop, not the only time it gets looked at. You'll raise risks the day you see them, and be straight about what threatens a committed date and what you're doing about it. • You'll land the launch and hand the school to our Customer Success Managers with nothing left open and the school set up to grow. About You What You Bring Experience • Implementation Experience • You've owned customer implementations before, as an Implementation Manager or a Customer Success Manager who ran onboarding. You know where implementations stall and how to keep both customers and internal partners moving. Mindset • Builder Mindset: High Agency x High Urgency x High Resilience • You adapt fast, have a high tolerance for frustration, and are energized by problems rather than worn down by them. You look for the solution instead of stopping at the problem, and you find something worth improving wherever you're put. • Represents Meadow's Interests • You know what a full, successful implementation looks like for us and you make the case for it, even when a school asks for less. You explain what it does for them and for us, and you keep making the case when a school's first instinct is to narrow the scope. You represent Meadow in the room, and you look for the version of the plan where the school wins too. Skills • Customer Accountability Without Authority • You get customers to do their part. You set deadlines, follow up, and move people you don't manage. You don't give or accept "waiting on the customer" as a complete status. • Project Management Judgment • This isn't strictly a project management job, but it runs on a Project Manager's judgment: critical path, dependencies, risk sense, escalation. You know which task moves the launch date and whose desk it sits on, and you don't need a formal PM structure to do it well. • Operational Discipline • You keep systems of record current, you give a straight assessment of every project, and you manage multiple concurrent implementations without close supervision. • Process Improvement • You notice when the same problem shows up across customers and fix the process instead of working around it again, in your own work and across the team. • Clear Communication • Your communication is timely, meaningful, and helpful — whether you're leading a meeting over Zoom, writing to a client, or moving quickly in Slack. You're comfortable with high visibility and confident talking about progress and risk. • Technical Fluency • You understand how a SaaS product is built, released, and supported well enough to ask the right question and translate between a business office and an engineer, and you treat a product that keeps changing as normal. You'll learn our products fast. • AI Fluency • You use AI tools as a normal part of how you work, you're curious about where else they apply, and you ask whether a tool or a better workflow could take a recurring problem off the team's plate. What Makes You Stand Out • Enterprise Software Familiarity: You've implemented, supported, or administered enterprise systems (e.g. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Student information System (SIS), Payments Platform) and know how integrations, SSO, and data feeds behave in practice. • Experience in FinTech or EdTech, or any role where higher ed business offices (e.g. Student Accounts, Bursar, Financial Aid) were your customers or your partners, so the concerns of the people we serve aren't new to you. • Experience at an Early Stage (e.g. Seed, Series A, Series B) B2B/Enterprise SaaS Company Compensation and Benefits Meadow wants all employees to be supported in their personal and professional development, so we take a comprehensive approach to compensation and benefits. The initial annual salary for this position is expected to range from $103,700-$150,000. Actual compensation will depend on numerous factors such as: experience, knowledge and skills, qualifications, location, and other job-related factors. In addition to the chance to positively impact the world while building a company around a $600B opportunity, Meadow offers: • Competitive Salary • Competitive Equity • 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan • Subsidized Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance (with HSA & FSA Plans Available) • Flexible Paid Time Off • Paid Company Holidays • Paid Parental Leave • 1-2 Onsites Per Year • Membership in an Ambitious, Kind, No-Drama Team We believe in hiring resourceful, curious people who are eager to learn and develop their skills. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with the job description, we encourage you to go ahead and apply. You may be just the right candidate for thi