Industry Strategy Lead

About CoLab

At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.

CoLab is the AI platform for driving stronger engineering decisions. Every design review in CoLab builds a knowledge repository of design feedback, decisions, and lessons learned - which AI agents draw from to flag issues on future designs before they compound. The more your team works in CoLab, the smarter it gets and the faster you arrive at the ideal design. Companies like Ford, Komatsu, and Johnson Controls use CoLab to catch issues earlier, eliminate rework cycles, and bring products to market faster.

Founded in St. John’s, Newfoundland, CoLab has grown quickly from our first customer in 2019 to a rapidly scaling company. We’ve recently been recognized on Deloitte’s Fast 50™ and Fast 500™, and named a Canadian company to watch by The Globe and Mail and Financial Post.

About the Role

Our Ideal Candidate

This role is a high-leverage operator reporting into the Director of Industry Strategy & Transformation, with direct exposure to revenue mentorship and account owners. This role exists to inject strategic execution into CoLab’s enterprise deals, sharpen focus to scale wins, translate platform capability into enterprise strategy, and ensure we maintain product market fit.

This is a deal-facing, customer-facing, and product-influencing role. In this role, you will drive consensus inside complex manufacturing organizations and position CoLab as the engineering transformation partner of choice. The right person is part strategist, part operator, part competitor. Someone who can read a room of executives, build a hyper compelling value case on the fly, and close out the next step before the meeting ends.

Job Responsibilities

Enterprise Deal Execution and Acceleration (50%)

• Co-own enterprise deal strategy on CoLab’s most strategic opportunities, partnering with revenue stakeholders and account executives to define the path to close.
• Run executive/management/user workshops that surface transformation goals, expose workflow friction, and create the urgency needed to mobilize multi-stakeholder buying groups.
• Collaborate and coach champions within customer accounts, navigate political landscapes, and orchestrate alignment across engineering, manufacturing, quality, procurement, and C-suite.
• Pressure test business cases that account teams bring forward, ensuring they tie CoLab’s value to measurable engineering and manufacturing outcomes.
• Build the executive narratives, critical business cases, and deal decks that translate CoLab's value into language that moves buying groups forward.

Playbook Development and Revenue Enablement (30%)

• Build strategies to accelerate the revenue team into new industries, get in front of the right stakeholders, and grow accounts after the first sale.
• Partner with enablement to translate winning patterns into content, training, and tools that scale across the revenue organization.
• Translate continuous learnings across revenue accounts, pulling the best ideas forward

Cross Functional Strategy and Product Influence (20%)

• Synthesize signals from strategic accounts into structured product feedback that helps the roadmap reflect enterprise priorities.
• Validate product concepts with key customers and ensure new capabilities align with the transformation outcomes driving the deals.
• Support the Director of Industry Strategy & Transformation with boots on the ground market trends, strategic themes, and customer insights.

Who you are:

The ceiling on this role is set by the person, not the title. Stronger operators will be given more deal ownership, more playbook authority, and more leadership exposure.

• Founder exposure through mentorship from a founder, time inside a founding team, or a seat close enough to leadership to see how the calls actually get made. You know what it feels like to own an outcome with no scaffolding.
• Experience in manufacturing, engineering, product development, or business transformation environments. You can walk a plant floor, read a design review, and recognize where engineering teams lose hours every week.
• High emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room of executives in real time. You know when to push, when to pause, when to ask the harder question, and when to take the win and move on.
• Competitive by nature. You are wired to play to win, you put in the reps, and you run at high cadence. You take losses personally enough to learn from them and not personally enough to slow down.
• Strong context switching ability. You can move from a board level value conversation to a workflow mapping session back to back and bring the right focus to each one.
• Sharp sense of time value. You understand which work compounds, which work is throwaway, and which conversations are worth a calendar hold versus a quick Slack. You make calls and you move.
• Strong commercial acumen and the ability to translate technical capability into business outcomes that resonate with VPs of Engineering, CEOs, and CFOs.
• Operationally wired. You understand how work actually gets done inside complex organizations. You can spot process drag, identify where reviews break down, and connect workflow-level friction to business-level cost. You don't just diagnose, you translate it into a path forward.
• Clear, direct communicator. You write concisely, present without filler, and can build a clean, compelling deck under pressure. You know that a strong deck is a forcing function, not a deliverable, and you build them that way.
• Fluent with AI tools as a force multiplier. You know how to use AI to compress research, sharpen messaging, and build faster. You don't just tolerate the tools, you intentionally reach for them to do more with less.

What Success Looks Like in Year One

• You are owning transformation workshops with our top enterprise accounts.
• You have shipped impactful playbook work to the broader revenue org that is in use.
• You have meaningfully influenced the outcome of multiple seven figure deals.