Community Executive Escalations Program Manager

Community & Executive Escalations Program Manager

When to Use

• Design or improve exec escalation intake, severity, and SLA
• Run community escalation response (forums, social, GitHub, Discord, public posts)
• Stand up program charter, RACI, and escalation ladder to leadership
• Facilitate war rooms for strategic accounts or reputational issues
• Produce executive briefings (facts, impact, options, recommendation, ask)
• Define metrics: time to acknowledge, owner assignment, resolution, recurrence
• Coordinate cross-functional owners (CS, support, eng, product, legal, comms)
• Run post-escalation retros and playbook updates

When NOT to Use

• Reproduce bugs and engineering handoff artifacts → support-engineer
• Paging, SEV definitions, postmortem process for outages → incident-management-engineer
• Multi-team delivery milestones without customer/exec visibility → technical-program-manager
• Company-wide narrative and holding lines → communication-lead
• Renewal health scoring and CS operations → customer-ops-specialist
• Contract negotiation or liability language → commercial-counsel

Related skills

Core Workflows

1. Program charter and governance

Scope, forums, RACI, escalation ladder.

See `references/program_charter_governance.md`.

2. Intake and triage

Community vs executive paths; severity; routing.

See `references/intake_triage_matrix.md`.

3. Executive escalation playbook

VIP handling, briefing template, leadership cadence.

See `references/executive_escalation_playbook.md`.

4. Community escalation playbook

Public issues, moderation, coordinated response.

See `references/community_escalation_playbook.md`.

5. War room operations

Cadence, roles, decision log, exit criteria.

See `references/war_room_operations.md`.

6. Metrics and reporting

KPIs, exec dashboard, retrospective.

See `references/metrics_reporting_retro.md`.

Output standards

• Every active escalation has single DRI, severity, and next update time
• Executive briefs are one page: situation, impact, options, recommendation, ask
• Public responses approved via comms/legal when reputational or legal risk
• Decisions logged with date, owner, rationale
• Close with customer outcome and program learnings (playbook delta)

When to load references

• Charter → references/program_charter_governance.md
• Triage → references/intake_triage_matrix.md
• Exec path → references/executive_escalation_playbook.md
• Community path → references/community_escalation_playbook.md
• War room → references/war_room_operations.md
• Metrics → references/metrics_reporting_retro.md

Community Escalation Playbook

When this path applies

• High-reach negative posts (social, forum, GitHub, Discord, review sites)
• Coordinated feedback (many users same issue in 24h)
• Maintainer, champion, or influencer public criticism
• Misinformation about product, security, or pricing
• Community perceived as ignored after product incident

Goals

1. Understand fast (facts, scope, sentiment) 2. Stabilize narrative without defensive tone 3. Route fix to correct owner (eng, product, docs, policy) 4. Close the loop publicly when appropriate

Response principles

Severity-driven response

Workflow

1. Monitor — alerts on keywords, GitHub labels, forum tags, NPS verbatims 2. Triage — severity, link to incident if any (incident-management-engineer) 3. Fact sheet — reproducible? known issue? workaround? 4. Draft response — community manager + comms review for E1–E2 5. Publish — forum post, GitHub comment, blog update, or status page 6. Track — engagement after reply; adjust if misinformation persists 7. Retro — playbook update if new failure mode

Message templates (adapt; get approval)

Acknowledgment:

We're aware of [issue] affecting [scope]. Our team is investigating. We'll update [here/status page] by [time]. Thanks to everyone who reported details.

Known issue + workaround:

This is a known issue tracked in [link]. Workaround: [steps]. Fix targeted for [date/phase] if eng-approved.

Resolution:

We've deployed a fix for [issue]. If you still see problems after [action], contact [support link]. We appreciate your patience.

Moderation and legal

• Escalate to legal: defamation, threats, PII dumps, IP allegations
• Document moderation actions (hide, lock thread) with policy cite
• Never confirm individual customer data in public threads

Champions and maintainers

• Separate private line for sensitive escalations
• Proactive outreach before public break when health signals red
• Recognize good-faith critics; separate bad-faith spam

Metrics

• Time to first official response
• Thread sentiment trend (manual or tooling)
• Repeat mentions of same issue post-fix
• Contributor/champion churn signals

Handoff

• Technical fix → support/engineering with public tracking ID
• Messaging → communication-lead
• Product prioritization → product leadership via program RAID

Executive Escalation Playbook

When this path applies

• C-suite or board-level customer contact
• Strategic account tagged at-risk in CRM
• Sales or CS exec escalation with revenue threshold
• Partner or investor-referred issue
• Formal complaint threatening contract or public action

Roles

Executive briefing (one page)

# Exec escalation brief — [Account] — [Date]

**Severity:** E1 | **DRI:** Name | **Next update:** Date/time

## Situation (facts)
- What happened; when detected; current state

## Customer impact
- Users affected; workload blocked; ARR / renewal date

## Business impact
- Churn risk; expansion blocked; reference risk; competitive angle

## Timeline
- Key events (bullets, timestamps)

## Actions taken
- Owner: action — status

## Options
1. [Option A] — pros/cons — ETA
2. [Option B] — pros/cons — ETA

## Recommendation
- Preferred option and why

## Ask
- Decision needed from [role] by [date]

## Comms
- Last customer touch; next planned touch; draft message link

## Open risks
- Legal, security, over-promise, dependency

Customer executive call prep

Commitment discipline

• No engineering dates without eng DRI sign-off
• No contractual concessions without legal/deal ops
• No feature promises without product DRI
• Log all verbal commits in decision log same day

Escalation within the company

Pair with other skills

• Engineering facts: support-engineer escalation package
• Wording: communication-lead
• Terms: commercial-counsel

Intake and Triage Matrix

Two primary channels

Same incident may hit both — link cases; one program DRI.

Intake fields (minimum)

- ID / source (exec referral, CS, support, community monitor, legal)
- Customer or community entity (account ID, handle, forum thread URL)
- Reporter and relationship (role, influence)
- Summary (1–3 sentences, facts only)
- Customer impact (# users, ARR, segment)
- Public visibility (none / limited / viral)
- Product area / suspected component
- Desired date (customer or exec deadline)
- Attachments (ticket IDs, screenshots, links)

Severity matrix

Routing rules

SLA examples (tune per org)

Acknowledge = human confirms receipt and next step—not auto-reply only.

Downgrade / close criteria

• Customer confirms acceptance OR explicit written close from sponsor
• Public thread de-escalated (no new high-reach posts in 72h) with published resolution
• Tracking issue owned by product/engineering with committed date
• No open legal/comms blockers

Triage checklist (first 30 minutes)

• [ ] Severity assigned with rationale
• [ ] Single DRI named
• [ ] Linked tickets/incidents
• [ ] Public? → comms/legal ping if E1–E2
• [ ] Exec sponsor identified if E1–E2 exec path
• [ ] War room scheduled if cross-team >2 days

Metrics, Reporting, and Retrospective

Program KPIs

Segment by: exec vs community, severity, product area, region.

Executive dashboard (monthly)

1. Volume — opened, closed, open by severity 2. Aging — cases past SLA; oldest open 3. Themes — top 5 root-cause categories 4. Revenue exposure — ARR at risk in open queue 5. Public — open community E1–E2 count 6. Program health — SLA trend, repeat rate, staffing gaps

Weekly operational report

## Escalation program — Week of [date]

**Open:** E1 n | E2 n | E3 n
**Closed this week:** n
**SLA misses:** [case IDs]
**Top themes:** 1. … 2. …
**Decisions needed:** [bullets]
**Next week focus:** …

Case close record

- Case ID, severity, channel (exec/community/both)
- Duration (open days)
- Root cause category
- Owning team for fix
- Customer/public outcome
- Playbook used? Y/N — delta if N
- Repeat risk: low/med/high

Retrospective (within 5 business days of E1 close)

Blameless; focus on system fixes.

Governance reviews

Tooling hints

• CRM flag for exec escalation + link to war room channel
• Single dashboard (Sheets, BI) fed from case tracker
• Do not double-count tickets and program cases—link IDs

Pair with TPM

Use technical-program-manager when escalation spawns multi-quarter remediation program; this skill owns case program until handoff.

Program Charter and Governance

Charter elements

RACI (typical)

R = responsible, A = accountable, C = consulted, I = informed.

Escalation ladder (example)

Tune thresholds to company stage.

Policies to document

• Single front door for exec escalations (email alias, form, CRM flag)
• No surprise execs — brief sponsor before external exec outreach
• Document retention — where notes, decisions, and comms live
• Confidentiality — what can be shared in community vs 1:1
• Sunset — when case exits program (resolved, downgraded, transferred)

Steering committee cadence

Anti-patterns

• Program PM owns technical root cause (delegate to eng DRI)
• Parallel exec paths bypassing triage
• Permanent war rooms with no exit criteria

War Room Operations

When to open a war room

• E1–E2 exec or community escalation
• Cross-functional blocker with no single owner >1 business day
• Customer-imposed deadline within 72h
• Public + private escalation on same underlying issue

War room charter (one slide)

**Case ID:** — **DRI:** Program PM — **Customer/community:** —
**Objective:** Resolve [specific outcome] by [date]
**In scope:** — **Out of scope:** —
**Cadence:** Daily 30m at [time] until exit criteria met
**Participants:** [names/roles]

Standing agenda (30 minutes)

Roles in session

Decision log entry

| Date | Decision | Rationale | Approver | Communicated to customer? |

RAID linkage

Exit criteria

• [ ] Customer sponsor accepts resolution OR documented impasse path
• [ ] Public thread plan executed (if applicable)
• [ ] No open E1–E2 blockers without owner and date
• [ ] Handoff to steady-state owner (CS, product, support)
• [ ] Retro scheduled within 5 business days

Async norms between meetings

• Single Slack/Teams channel per case; no side DMs for decisions
• Status update at agreed cadence even if "no change"
• Escalate silent stakeholders after one missed update

Anti-patterns

• War room without technical DRI
• Re-litigating severity each day
• Large audience without decision authority
• Continuing war room after exit criteria met