Product Area Lead

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Technical Support - Procurement

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**PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES**:
The Technical Support (TS) - Procurement team supports the SAP Intelligent Spend and Business Network (ISBN) Product Areas of SAP Business Network, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass within the Customer Support organization.
The Product Area Lead (PL) is a senior employee within TS, specializing in at least one Product Area and possessing deep technical and functional knowledge of the Product Area in question. They can bring critical customer situations and incidents to resolution, either by themselves or in collaboration with other experts.

**EXPECTATIONS AND TASKS**:
Operational Responsibilities
- Monitor long running issues for the Product Area with a goal of minimizing long runners and reducing time to solve cases.
- Through better enablement, improved escalation practices and bringing the right knowledge to the right cases. Through better enablement, improved escalation practices and bringing the right knowledge to thee right cases.
- Analyze data to help understand Product and support performance, problems, and root causes.
- Work with Support Readiness Leads (SRLs) and PLs across TS to identify larger issues.
- Maintain expert knowledge in Product Area through support delivery especially with complex cases.
- Work with the Product Heads and SRL to ensure that the Product is being supported well - Customer Effort Score (CES), backlog, headcount, knowledge training gaps, includes facilitating and leading joint initiatives to improve the customer experience.
- Understand, from a customer view, the supportability issues affecting customer success.
- Gather intelligence from customers about problems and issues they encounter using our Products and service.
- Survey customers for supportability input; interaction with user groups and individual customers to gather specific input.

**Build and maintain a strong Collaboration with Engineering and Product Management**
- Attend regular review meetings to discuss technical escalations sent to Engineering focusing on areas of improvement, escalation quality and learning potential.
- Champion the support readiness of Products to provide reactive and proactive support to customers and partners through management and coordination of releases.
- Partner with Engineering and SRL throughout the design lifecycle to improve the supportability characteristics of TS-Procurement Products.
- Create opportunities within the Product for customers to diagnose and recover with minimum business impact and increase SAP’s ability to effectively resolve the problem.
- Actively participate in meetings with Lines of Business (LOBs) to provide an overview of the customer experience.
- Represent Product Area in the development and release process of new versions, which include providing feedback on architecture design and operability of Product features.
- Partner across the organization to ensure Product Area is engaged before Product releases, sales campaigns, or other customer facing actions are taken.
- Single point of contact between engineering and Product Area including overall supportability of the Product and readiness of new releases. This includes development of training plans and assisting in building test scenarios as needed.
- Working with Product teams globally, driving continuous improvement in key Support metrics.
- Facilitate and drive regular meetings with Engineering teams, identify and address trends in escalated incidents that require Engineering participation.
- Look at engineering activities from a support point of view as well as discuss incidents that are likely to be escalated to Development.
- Put proactive steps in place to address Products and tackle knowledge gaps.
- Work with Engineering, SRL, and Product teams to implement the Transfer of Information (TOI) for support around new releases - identify and address risk items, key features, functionality changes, etc.
- Act as technical supportability experts that represent Support by interfacing with Development to provide input to new Product designs.
- Understand industry and SAP best practices.
- Develop