James Costello
Professional Summary
Service operations and product support leader with 10+ years scaling global, highly technical support organizations. Builds data-driven systems and automation that turn fragmented, manual operations into clear, prioritized, measurable performance. Owns multimillion-dollar budgets and leads cross-functional, matrixed teams across engineering, manufacturing, sales, and the C-suite. Executive MBA with deep technical roots in metrology and new-product introduction.
Core Competencies
Global Product & Service Support · New Product Introduction (NPI) Readiness · Process Automation & System Design · BI Dashboards & KPI Design · Escalation & Operations Management · Cross-Functional & Matrixed Leadership · Financial & Cost Modeling · Data Extraction & Mining (Snowflake, SQL, APIs) · Budget Ownership · Team Building & Talent Development
Work Experience
- Direct a 15-person global organization (7 direct reports) across technical support, product engineering, sustaining service, and installation operations, coordinating teams across China, Germany, North America, and Korea to keep a high-mix instrument portfolio supported worldwide.
- Architected and deployed a custom escalation-prioritization system — a full web application with AI-driven logic and live Snowflake data integration that ranks active cases by business and revenue impact — adopted organization-wide and expanded at leadership's request.
- Manage a $2.5M annual operating budget by modeling cost and risk trade-offs against strategic priorities, aligning resources to the highest-impact technical operations and growth initiatives.
- Replaced ineffective standard reporting by designing custom BI dashboards and fully automated reporting across NPI, sustaining support, installations, and service performance, giving leadership real-time, higher-integrity visibility.
- Orchestrate cross-functional response during high-stakes escalations by building the data-backed case and coordinating sales, engineering, manufacturing, and C-suite stakeholders to secure resources and alignment without direct authority.
- Led internal innovation initiatives, including a webstore prototype that ranked top 25% company-wide and scored highest in collaboration during the 2025 internal hackathon.
- Owned service readiness for 10+ concurrent product launches by driving risk-mitigation, field-readiness, and design-for-service reviews with engineering, delivering on-time launches while scaling the team to full staffing within a year through internal headcount governance.
- Built end-to-end product launch plans and ran reliability and service-cost analyses to forecast long-term costs and inform financial planning.
- Created a Service Financial Modeling course later adopted across multiple divisions.
- Advised global production teams on precision-metrology and surface-finish methods, improving part quality and process consistency.
- Built a surface-finish metrology training program for ~30 associates, later becoming company-wide onboarding.
- Solved a complex aerospace metrology application that competitors were unable to support, generating $1.2M in new revenue.