Cornerstone is seeking a Director of Global Partner Delivery to build and lead a formal global program that enables our Professional Services organization to scale through a high-performing ecosystem of delivery partners.
This is a builder role with end-to-end accountability for establishing the operating model, standards, governance, and performance mechanisms required to deliver consistent customer outcomes through partners. The Director will create the foundation and guardrails governing how partners are selected, enabled, assigned, measured, and improved throughout the delivery lifecycle.
The role will work closely with Services leadership, Alliances, Sales, Customer Success, Product, Finance, Legal, and regional delivery teams. Success will be measured not by the number of partners recruited, but by partner-delivered customer outcomes, quality, predictability, capacity, economics, and customer experience.
In this role you will…
Build the Partner Delivery Program
- Design and implement Cornerstone’s global service delivery partner operating model, including program structure, roles, decision rights, engagement processes, and governance.
- Define clear partner segments and delivery models based on capability, geography, industry expertise, solution complexity, and customer needs.
- Establish criteria for partner selection, onboarding, certification, tiering, advancement, remediation, and offboarding.
- Develop a scalable lifecycle for managing partners from initial qualification through delivery readiness and ongoing performance.
- Clarify the respective responsibilities of Services, Alliances, Sales, Customer Success, and partners throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Establish a capacity-planning model that matches forecasted demand with qualified partner capability and availability.
Establish Delivery Standards and Guardrails
- Define the minimum standards partners must meet to deliver Cornerstone services, including methodology, technical proficiency, project governance, documentation, security, and customer communications.
- Create delivery playbooks, quality gates, acceptance criteria, escalation protocols, and implementation controls.
- Partner with Customer and Partner Enablement to develop role-based training, certification, and continuing-readiness requirements.
- Ensure partners demonstrate delivery proficiency—not simply completion of training—before independently leading customer engagements.
- Establish requirements for complex, strategic, regulated, and migration-related programs, including when Cornerstone oversight or approval is mandatory.
- Create mechanisms to protect the customer experience while allowing partners sufficient autonomy to deliver efficiently.
Govern Partner Performance and Quality
- Implement a consistent performance-management framework with measurable standards for quality, customer outcomes, delivery predictability, and financial performance.
- Establish partner scorecards incorporating metrics such as:
- Customer satisfaction and NPS
- Time to value and time to go-live
- On-time and on-budget delivery
- Milestone acceptance and first-pass quality
- Defect, rework, and escalation rates
- Resource quality and certification compliance
- Forecast accuracy and capacity fulfillment
- Gross margin and cost-to-deliver
- Customer adoption and achievement of defined outcomes
- Lead regular operational reviews and quarterly business reviews with priority delivery partners.
- Develop early-warning indicators that identify delivery risk before it becomes a customer escalation.
- Establish corrective-action, probation, and remediation processes for underperforming partners.
- Create a closed-loop feedback mechanism connecting implementation results to enablement, methodology, product, and partner-management improvements.
Scale Partner-Led Delivery
- Determine which services and customer segments are appropriate for partner-led, co-delivered, or Cornerstone-led delivery.
- Build a deliberate transition model for increasing partner delivery capacity without compromising customer experience.
- Develop repeatable service packages and delivery patterns that partners can execute predictably.
- Coordinate with regional Services leaders to identify capacity gaps and deploy qualified partners against demand.
- Support new product introductions, migrations, and strategic transformation programs by ensuring partners are prepared before customer demand scales.
- Create a balanced portfolio that reduces dependency on any single partner and provides adequate geographic, language, industry, and technical coverage.
Strengthen Commercial and Operational Discipline
- Partner with Finance, Legal, Procurement, and Alliances to establish commercial standards, statements of work, rate structures, payment milestones, accountability provisions, and quality protections.
- Improve the economics and predictability of partner delivery while maintaining appropriate incentives for performance.
- Define rules for opportunity assignment and partner engagement that are transparent, objective, and aligned with customer needs.
- Establish accurate reporting for partner capacity, utilization, pipeline, delivery status, financial performance, and customer risk.
- Evaluate total delivery economics, including oversight requirements, rework, escalations, and internal capacity—not only partner rates.
- Support annual planning and investment decisions with data on partner performance, capacity, and market coverage.
Lead Cross-Functional Alignment
- Serve as the primary operational leader for partner-delivered services within the Global Services organization.
- Build strong working relationships with Alliances while maintaining clear accountability for delivery readiness and quality.
- Partner with Sales and Customer Success to set appropriate customer expectations and engage delivery partners early in the opportunity lifecycle.
- Work with Product and Engineering to improve implementation readiness and incorporate partner feedback into product and deployment strategies.
- Represent partner-delivery performance, risks, and investment needs to senior leadership.
- Champion a shared standard: customers should receive a consistent, high-quality experience regardless of who performs the implementation.
First-Year Priorities
Within the first 12 months, the Director will be expected to:
- Assess the current delivery partner portfolio, operating practices, performance, and coverage gaps.
- Define and launch the global service delivery partner operating model.
- Establish partner segmentation, tiering, readiness standards, and certification requirements.
- Implement a standard scorecard and baseline performance across priority partners.
- Launch formal governance, including operational reviews, quarterly business reviews, escalation management, and remediation processes.
- Establish delivery-quality gates and oversight requirements for strategic and complex engagements.
- Create a demand and capacity-planning process for partner-delivered services.
- Define the initial portfolio of repeatable services suitable for partner-led delivery.
- Produce a multi-year roadmap for responsibly increasing partner-delivered capacity and improving delivery economics.
You have what it takes if you have…
- 10+ years of experience in professional services, enterprise software implementation, partner delivery, consulting operations, or a related discipline.
- At least five years of leadership experience managing service delivery programs, partner ecosystems, or complex global transformation initiatives.
- Demonstrated success building or materially transforming a partner-delivery program—not solely managing alliance relationships.
- Experience governing systems integrators, consulting firms, or outsourced delivery providers in an enterprise SaaS environment.
- Strong understanding of implementation methodologies, project governance, quality management, resource planning, and customer-risk management.
- Proven ability to translate strategy into operating processes, metrics, controls, and repeatable execution.
- Experience developing partner scorecards, service-level expectations, certification standards, and performance-improvement plans.
- Strong commercial and financial acumen, including experience with statements of work, rate structures, delivery margins, and partner economics.
- Ability to influence senior stakeholders and align teams across Services, Alliances, Sales, Customer Success, Product, Finance, and Legal.
- Experience operating across multiple regions, cultures, and delivery models.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience; advanced degree preferred.
An extra dose of awesome if…
- Experience with enterprise HR technology, learning-management platforms, talent solutions, or other complex SaaS products.
- Experience scaling partner-led implementations, migrations, or managed services.
- Familiarity with outcome-based services, standardized delivery packages, and milestone-based commercial models.
- Experience applying automation and AI to improve implementation efficiency, quality management, or delivery oversight.
- Background working for both a software provider and a systems integrator or consulting organization.
- Relevant project, quality, or service-management certifications.
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