CRM Application Manager

Industries: M&A Private Equity Research Financial Services

Location: ON-SITE. Newport Beach CA

Job Type: Full-Time

Experience: 4-7 Years

Compensation: $100000 - $120000

Reports To: Managing Director

About the Role

Were looking for a CRM Application Manager to serve as the central owner of our custom CRM platform built on PHP/Laravel and React. This is a hands-on leadership role: youll sit between our business users and our outsourced development teams (23 vendor firms) translating business needs into clear technical requirements managing developer priorities and timelines and ensuring our applications evolve to meet the organizations needs.

This is not a traditional Database Administrator or software engineering role. While technical fluency is essentialyou need to understand database design application architecture and modern web technologies well enough to make smart decisions and ask the right questionsyour primary value is in project leadership requirements translation vendor coordination and driving results across teams you dont directly manage.

Primary Responsibilities (80% of Your Time)

Requirements Development & Developer Coordination

• Meet with internal business users and stakeholders to understand application needs pain points and feature requests.
• Translate business requirements into clear detailed technical specifications and developer instructions that outsourced teams can execute against.
• Manage and prioritize the development backlog across 23 external development firms ensuring alignment on scope timelines and deliverables.
• Review developer work product for completeness quality and alignment with requirementsnot necessarily writing code but understanding it well enough to evaluate whats delivered.
• Serve as the single point of accountability for CRM application delivery; own the timeline escalate blockers and ensure nothing falls through the cracks between vendor teams.

Bug Triage & Issue Management

• Identify document and prioritize bug fixes; communicate urgency and business impact to development teams.
• Establish and maintain a structured process for issue tracking resolution and verification across vendor teams.
• Coordinate testing and QA efforts to ensure fixes are validated before production deployment.

Documentation & Training

• Write and maintain internal documentation including user guides training materials and system documentation for CRM applications.
• Communicate planned upgrades feature releases and process changes to end users and stakeholders.
• Develop onboarding materials for new users and maintain a knowledge base for common workflows and troubleshooting.

Stakeholder Communication

• Provide regular status updates to leadership on development progress timelines and any risks or trade-offs.
• Facilitate alignment between business stakeholders and development teams on priorities and scope decisions.
• Build and maintain productive working relationships with vendor development leads; hold vendors accountable for commitments.

Technical Value-Add (20% of Your Time)

While the above responsibilities are the core of the role we value technical depth that enables better decision-making smarter questions and stronger oversight of development teams. These are the technical competencies that will make you most effective:

Database & Application Architecture Awareness

• Understand relational database design (PostgreSQL preferred) well enough to evaluate schema proposals identify performance concerns and have informed conversations with developers about data modeling.
• Familiarity with PHP/Laravel application patterns (Eloquent ORM migrations queues) and React front-end data access (REST/GraphQL) so you can review architectural decisions and spot potential issues.
• Awareness of database operations fundamentals: backup/recovery indexing strategies query performance and security best practices.

AI & Automation Awareness

• Ability to identify practical AI use cases within CRM workflows (e.g. automated email drafting lead scoring ticket categorization call summary ingestion) and translate them into actionable requirements for developers or vendor evaluations.
• Understand enough about AI integration patterns to evaluate vendor proposals and ask the right questions about data privacy compliance and performance.
• You dont need to build AI pipelinesyou need to know whats possible and drive the right people to build it.

Infrastructure & Tooling Familiarity

• General understanding of Nginx CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflowsenough to coordinate with DevOps and understand the release process.
• Comfort with Git-based workflows and code review processes (reviewing for logic and completeness not necessarily writing production code).

What Success Looks Like First 30 Days:

• Youve mapped the current CRM application landscape met key stakeholders and vendor development leads and understand the active backlog and open issues.

First 90 Days:

• Youre running the development process: requirements are well-documented vendor teams have clear priorities bugs are triaged systematically and stakeholders are getting regular updates.

First 6 Months:

• Youve delivered measurable improvements to the CRMwhether through new features performance gains better documentation or AI-assisted workflow improvements. The business trusts you as the go-to person for anything CRM-related.

Required Qualifications

• 47 years of experience in a role combining technical project management with application or data engineering in a web application environment.
• Demonstrated ability to manage outsourced or distributed development teams including vendor coordination timeline management and quality oversight.
• Strong technical literacy in SQL web application architecture (PHP/Laravel and/or similar frameworks) and database fundamentals.
• Proven experience translating business requirements into technical specifications that development teams can execute.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear documentation developer instructions and stakeholder updates.
• Experience with issue tracking project management tools and structured development workflows (Agile Kanban or similar).
• Comfortable operating as the single owner of a product area without direct reportsinfluencing through clarity accountability and relationships rather than authority.

Nice-to-Have

• Hands-on DBA experience (PostgreSQL MySQL) including performance tuning backup/DR and security administration.
• Experience with CRM platforms (custom-built or commercial) and customer data models.
• Background in implementing or evaluating AI/ML solutions for business applications.
• Scripting ability (Python PHP or JavaScript) for automation data validation or lightweight tooling.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and monitoring/alerting tools.
• Prior experience managing budgets or vendor contracts for development services.

Core Competencies

• Ownership Mentality: You treat the CRM as your product. If something is broken unclear or falling behind you own the resolution.
• Vendor Management: You know how to get results from external teams without direct authoritythrough clear specs accountability and relationship-building.
• Translation Ability: You move fluently between business language and technical language ensuring both sides understand each other.
• Systems Thinking: You see how database design application architecture user experience and business processes connect and you optimize across them.
• Bias for Action: Youre pragmatic. You prioritize what moves the needle and dont let perfect be the enemy of good.

Who We Are

Founded in 1998 Harvey & Company is a buyside acquisition search and principal investment firm. We are a unique company in that we have advised the buyer on every one of our 1.000 transactions. We proactively reach out directly to business owners and companies that align with specific investment and acquisition strategies that we are leading. Our core team is comprised of 120 professionals dedicated to specific sectors within industrial manufacturing and services distribution healthcare business and financial services technology consumer and energy. For more information visit our website at

Harvey & Company LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer who is committed to maintaining an inclusive work environment. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation age national origin disability veteran status gender identity pregnancy or any other legally protected status based on federal state or local law including national origin or citizenship.

Harvey & Company LLC is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process please contact for assistance.