Performance Management Lead – Austin, TX
About The Role
At Optimal, we believe great teams drive great outcomes. As our Performance Management Lead, you’ll build and lead systems that support the growth, performance, and satisfaction of our client-facing digital marketing teams. This strategic, hands-on role focuses on creating clarity, driving development, improving performance, guiding hiring decisions, and addressing sensitive team issues to minimize disruption across our account management and media functions.
Who Are We?
Optimal is a performance marketing agency on a mission, bringing together the best data, technology, and people to achieve our clients’ marketing goals. Brand, campaign, or cause: we maximize performance at every moment.
We are not only digital media strategists – we’re award-winning industry leaders, with deep knowledge spanning all things digital: from advertising and paid media, to marketing and communications, to audience data and analytics, we deliver for our clients.
Everyone at Optimal has the opportunity to learn, grow, and progress. Through our proprietary training programs, we provide our team members with the personal and professional development they need to achieve advancement at any stage in their careers.
We’re always looking for exceptional people to join our team. If this sounds like you, please apply!
Essential Functions, Duties, and Responsibilities:
Performance Systems & Processes
- Develop and refine our performance management processes, including goal setting, individual development plans, reviews, and ongoing feedback mechanisms
- Ensure performance management systems are deployed consistently and correctly across agency teams and individual managers
- Support capacity planning, identifying when it's time to grow teams, and support hiring and recruiting processes accordingly
- Manage and optimize our performance tracker tool, ensuring actionable, consistently maintained data
- Analyze team engagement and performance metrics (e.g., eNPS, promotion velocity, turnover) to identify trends and drive action
- Create scalable processes for career pathing, skill development, and talent calibration
- Maintain regular meetings with people managers to ensure adoption of best practices and proactively address areas of concern
- Serve as a neutral advisor in performance-related decisions (promotions, compensation, development opportunities) to ensure consistency
- Formalize process for promotions and raises including form submission, review process, and approval criteria
Manager & Employee Enablement
- Coach key managers on effective onboarding, people management, feedback, and talent development
- Design and implement customized training and development sessions addressing specific areas of improvement, empowering managers to continue these practices independently
- Provide strategic perspective and proactive intervention on complex team issues, ensuring minimal disruption and effective resolutions
- Act as a trusted advisor to leadership on team health, talent strategies, and development opportunities
- Develop best practices for delivering tailored feedback (written, verbal, etc.) to effectively support individual growth
- Champion a culture of accountability and growth by promoting and coaching managers to deliver regular feedback, transparency, and clear career pathways
Minimum Qualifications & Skill Requirements:
- 5+ years experience in developing high performance teams, ideally within digital marketing agencies or similar client-service environments
- Proven success as an exceptional people manager, having directly managed and developed large teams
- Deep expertise in employee performance management, talent lifecycle best practices, and team development methodologies
- Demonstrated experience in coaching teams, leveraging impactful training programs, and influencing senior leadership
- Hands-on experience managing team growth, including resource planning, hiring, onboarding, and team integration
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Management, Marketing, or a related subject
- Strong communication, organizational, and relationship-building skills
- Ability to balance strategic vision with hands-on implementation and drive for continuous improvement
Optimal is proud to offer the following:
- $85,000 - $120,000 annually depending upon factors including, but not limited to, experience, skill level, education and location.
- Open leave (paid time off)
- Paid Leave for new parents
- Health insurance (including dental and vision)
- Flex Spending Plan
- Employee Assistance Program
- 401K with company matching
- Student Loan Repayment Program
- Professional development opportunities
- Rewards and recognition programs
- And so much more!
Office Hours
This role is based out of our Austin office. Our Austin team works on a hybrid basis, with three days per week working in the office and two days per week working from home. Work hours are consistently 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., Monday - Friday, with the expectation that evening and weekend work will be required as necessary.
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