The VP Execution Gap: What the Best SaaS Leadership Teams Are Doing Differently to Scale Growth

SaaS leadership teams have always been rewarded for their momentum. Velocity and growth masked inefficiency, and capital softened execution gaps. When results fell short, the answer was often more spend, more hires, or more time.

That school of thought has decisively changed.

PE-backed SaaS leadership teams are now operating under a far more exacting mandate. Capital is more expensive, exit paths are narrower, and boards are no longer evaluating performance based solely on top-line acceleration. Overall, they are focused on how growth is generated, the likelihood and ease of scalability, and whether this recipe ultimately creates durable enterprise value.

What many executive teams are discovering is that these outcomes are not ultimately determined in the boardroom or the CXO level, but one layer down: at the VP level. This is where strategy either gets translated into disciplined, repeatable execution or slowly unravels in day-to-day decision-making. This is where growth models either scale or stall, and where value is either compounded or quietly eroded.

As a result, the VP layer has become the most overlooked – and most decisive – lever of value creation in today’s SaaS market.

The Boardroom Reset Is Forcing a VP-Level Reckoning

Across PE-backed SaaS portfolios, a consistent pattern is emerging. Growth is a multi-layered term that must showcase:

• Profitability
• Repeatability
• Retention

Recent McKinsey research confirms that execution remains a persistent challenge as organizations often struggle to sustain momentum and deliver against strategic ambitions, with roughly one third failing to deliver results after implementation. Our experience reinforces that the issue is rarely strategic clarity, but more often, reflects a breakdown in leadership capability and operating discipline at the VP level.

This reset is forcing leaders, under the CEO’s guidance, to fundamentally rethink roles that were once designed for scale and specialization, and now must be rebuilt for enterprise-level execution.

Customer Success Is No Longer a Support Function

Customer Success is often the first function to feel this shift.

In a retention-led growth model, Customer Success has morphed into a primary revenue engine, accountable for expansion, renewals, and lifetime value. That said, many SaaS organizations still staff Customer Success leadership for relationship management rather than revenue ownership. And a mindset shift is necessary.

The VP of Customer Success mandate is evolving in clear and material ways:

• Own NRR as a business outcome
• Partner tightly with Sales, Product, and Finance
• Replace ad-hoc renewal activity with systematized execution

When Customer Success leadership is not built for this mandate, retention becomes unpredictable, expansion stalls, and growth that appears healthy on the surface quietly erodes underneath.

RevOps and Finance: From Reporting to Enforcement

As efficiency comes under greater scrutiny, RevOps and Finance have moved from simply providing visibility to actively driving operating discipline.

RevOps is the connective tissue that enforces segmentation, capacity planning, and forecasting accuracy across the go-to-market engine. Finance, particularly FP&A, is being pulled closer to daily operating decisions. Companies with both functions tightly integrated consistently outperform peers on operating predictability.

At the VP level, the mandate is no longer ambiguous. They must:

• Translate board-level metrics into weekly operating behavior
• Establish a single source of truth across the go-to-market engine
• Make and enforce prioritization decisions across teams when resources, timing, or metrics are in conflict

These roles require leaders who can collaborate across functions and impose discipline — comfortable introducing structure, holding the line, and managing tension in service of execution.

Product, Pricing, and GTM: Where Efficiency Is Designed

Product leadership is also being reshaped by the efficiency mandate.

In this cycle, pricing, packaging, and segmentation are core growth levers. Product and Growth leaders are expected to balance innovation with margin discipline, making deliberate tradeoffs about where to invest, what to deprioritize, and which customers the product is truly built to serve. Just as importantly, they must work tightly with Customer Success, RevOps, and GTM to ensure the roadmap directly supports retention, expansion, and predictable revenue.

When product leadership operates in isolation, inefficiencies compound; pricing drifts from value, roadmaps bloat, and growth becomes harder to sustain. When it is tightly integrated into the operating model, product becomes one of the most powerful drivers of efficient, scalable growth.

Where SaaS Transformations Stall

Across PE-backed SaaS organizations, we see the same failure point repeatedly: when VP-level leaders lack the mandate, capability, or operating rigor to translate strategy into action.

Alignment at the executive table does not guarantee execution in the business. When middle management cannot institutionalize discipline, transformation efforts remain wholly theoretical.

The New VP Mandate

The executive teams navigating this cycle most effectively are redefining what they expect from VP-level leadership:

• Ability to make decisions based on enterprise impact, not functional optimization
• Fluency in metrics and operating cadence
• The ability to enforce disciplined execution at scale

In our work alongside PE-backed SaaS leadership teams, we see these expectations show up most clearly during moments of post-growth reset, when operating models, incentives, and execution rhythms need to be recalibrated to support the next phase of scale.

Over time, this work has reinforced a simple but important insight: efficient growth is less about new strategies and more about having VP-level leaders who can consistently run the system day in and day out.

Executive Team Takeaway

Value creation is no longer driven by the next idea or the next product release. It is driven by whether the organization, particularly its middle management, can consistently execute the strategy already agreed upon.

The leadership teams that win will be those who treat VP leadership as a core value creation lever, deliberately investing in leaders who can translate board-level ambition into repeatable execution across the business.

In today’s SaaS market, that is the difference between growth that looks good on paper and value that endures.