Sarah Nakamura, MBA
Independent Enterprise Software Advisor
Former VP Product, SAP SuccessFactors (9 years)
Former Senior Director, Workday Customer Operations
Biography
Sarah Nakamura is an independent enterprise software advisor with 19 years of experience in product management and operational implementation at two of the world's largest enterprise software companies. She holds an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, where she focused on technology strategy and operations management.
At SAP SuccessFactors — SAP's cloud HR platform — Sarah served as VP of Product for nine years, overseeing the product roadmap and customer implementation framework for enterprise modules serving organizations with 10,000 to 250,000 employees. In this role, she was responsible for understanding the gap between what enterprise software vendors claim their platforms can do and what organizations can actually achieve in production deployments — a gap that is central to the proof problem Market Proof Lab exists to address. She led the design of SAP SuccessFactors' customer readiness assessment framework, used to evaluate whether enterprise clients had the organizational prerequisites for successful implementation before contracts were signed.
Prior to SAP, Sarah spent six years at Workday as Senior Director of Customer Operations, where she led the team responsible for customer success outcomes for Workday's financial management customers. She developed Workday's operational proof standard — the internal framework used to classify which customer success claims were backed by documented outcomes versus which were aspirational targets.
Since leaving Workday in 2022, Sarah has worked as an independent advisor to enterprise software companies on product-market fit, implementation methodology, and customer success operations. She also consults for organizations evaluating enterprise software on how to design proof-of-concept and pilot programs that generate operationally valid evidence before full-scale commitments are made.
Areas of expertise
- Enterprise software implementation: what operational prerequisites determine whether an enterprise software deployment succeeds. Understanding the gap between vendor capability claims and realized deployment outcomes.
- Operational readiness assessment: evaluating whether an organization has the data quality, process maturity, and change management capacity to achieve the outcomes a vendor claims its platform produces.
- Vendor evaluation from the buyer side: designing proof-of-concept and pilot programs that generate independently verifiable evidence about vendor performance before contract commitment.
- Implementation proof standards: identifying which vendor implementation claims require documented evidence versus which are theoretical capabilities that may not transfer to specific organizational contexts.
- Decision scenarios for enterprise software: translating general evaluation criteria into practical decision frameworks for different organizational sizes, sectors, and technical environments.
Review scope at Market Proof Lab
Sarah reviews Market Proof Lab's implementation criteria, operational readiness frameworks, and decision scenarios from the perspective of someone who has overseen thousands of enterprise software deployments from the vendor side. Her review confirms that:
- Implementation criteria reflect the genuine operational prerequisites that determine deployment success, not the simplified requirements vendors typically publish
- Decision scenarios match real organizational contexts, including the organizational maturity and resource requirements that vendor marketing materials often understate
- Trial and verification methodology gives buyers actionable steps that generate real proof of operational fit, not just feature demonstrations
- Risk factors capture the implementation risks that commonly cause enterprise software deployments to underperform or fail
| Review area | In scope | Out of scope |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation criteria (practitioner validation) | Yes — primary focus | — |
| Operational readiness frameworks | Yes | — |
| Decision scenarios | Yes | — |
| Trial and verification methodology | Yes | — |
| Research methodology documentation | No | Outside domain |
| Pricing accuracy | No | Outside domain |
| Academic methodology frameworks | No | Outside domain |
Credentials and professional standing
- MBA — Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management (Technology Strategy & Operations)
- Certified SAP SuccessFactors Consultant (enterprise HR implementation certification)
- Workday Financial Management Certified Associate
- Advisory board member, Enterprise Software Implementation Consortium (ESIC)
Conflict and relationship disclosure
Sarah Nakamura left SAP and Workday in 2022 and does not hold current employment, equity, or ongoing consulting relationships with either company as of June 2026. Both SAP and Workday are vendors that may be covered in future Market Proof Lab research. If a specific research output covers SAP or Workday, Sarah will recuse from reviewing that output and this will be noted on the relevant report. She does not hold equity or financial interests in any enterprise software vendor covered in Market Proof Lab's current or planned research. This disclosure is reviewed before each new review engagement.