Customer Lifetime Value Planning Director

The mandate

This project will design a planning-grade customer lifetime value method for resource decisions, not an individual targeting engine. Existing estimates combine different observation periods, retention assumptions and cost boundaries, making comparisons unstable. The commission will produce a governed methodology, calibrated range and limited decision pilot using aggregated authorised data.

Five deliverables define scope: use-case and boundary charter, cohort and contribution specification, uncertainty and calibration report, three-decision pilot, and governance-and-transfer dossier. The consultant must show where evidence supports a range, where judgement enters and where lifetime value should not be used at all.

Milestones fall at weeks three, eight, thirteen, nineteen and twenty-four. The Sponsor accepts boundaries and specification; a finance-control owner accepts calibration; the steering group accepts the pilot and transfer. Acceptance requires financial reconciliation, out-of-sample backtesting, documented bias limitations, privacy review and internal reproduction.

Client dependencies include approved aggregated cohort extracts, finance totals, current retention definitions, named cost owners, privacy clearance and three historical or prospective decisions. Missing or restricted data will narrow the model claim. It will not be replaced with external proxies that imply client characteristics or unsupported precision.

What you will own

• Define legitimate planning uses and prohibited individual uses for lifetime value before analytical design begins.
• Specify cohort entry, observation horizon, contribution boundary, retention event, discount treatment and uncertainty presentation.
• Reconcile cohort economics to controlled totals while documenting residual timing, scope and allocation differences.
• Calibrate retention and contribution assumptions through holdout or out-of-sample testing and report stability by relevant aggregated cohort.
• Quantify sensitivity to acquisition burden, service cost, decay, cross-subsidy and terminal value without privileging one point estimate.
• Pilot three allocation choices and show how the method changes or constrains each decision.
• Establish refresh triggers, model-change approval, drift monitoring, ethical-use review and override documentation.
• Transfer the model through analyst reproduction and sponsor explanation of limitations without consultant assistance.

Candidate qualifications

• At least 14 years in commercial FP&A, cohort economics or planning analytics, including Director-level methodology leadership.
• A lifetime-value model personally designed and backtested, with evidence of where prediction failed and how limits were changed.
• Advanced skill in retention curves, contribution margins, censoring, discounting, cohort drift, confidence ranges and financial reconciliation.
• Experience distinguishing an aggregate planning model from an individual treatment or decision tool.
• A case where terminal-value or retention optimism materially overstated attractiveness and was corrected before allocation.
• Strong privacy and fairness judgement, including reduction of model scope when available data did not support responsible use.
• Demonstrated internal transfer through reproducible calculations, controls and limitation-focused training.

Working terms and boundaries

• The six-month project is delivered four days weekly through five milestones with named acceptors and defect criteria.
• Scope is limited to aggregated planning methodology, calibration and three decisions; individual scoring, targeting and production deployment are excluded.
• The consultant can recommend analytical boundaries but cannot approve customer actions or override privacy and control owners.
• Approved cohort data, finance reconciliations, definition owners, privacy clearance and decision cases are client-provided dependencies.
• Final acceptance requires successful backtesting, documented limitations, a completed pilot and independent internal reproduction.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 12 October 2026. Mandate reference FPA-CON-2026-VAN-32.