Senior Director, Product Management

Role Description

The Senior Director of Product Management will lead the product management team for Vertica, drawing on extensive experience, best practices, and a deep understanding of the market. They will be responsible for leading and owning the overall product vision roadmap and leading the individuals on their team to drive the roadmaps for each area. The ideal candidate brings significant experience in enterprise data and analytics platforms, including modern data warehouse and lakehouse architectures, analytical databases, cloud-native data platforms, and AI-driven analytics solutions.

• Identify market opportunities and create roadmaps.
• Prioritize features and validate engineering timelines.
• Drive commercial success and define a modern product operating model.
• Leverage design-led product management practices and customer discovery.
• Engage cross-functionally with engineering, marketing, sales, GTM strategy, and customer success leadership.
• Partner closely with UX, architecture, engineering, and customer-facing teams.
• Act as a public face of the business unit to analysts, customers, and partners.
• Represent Rocket Software and Vertica as a thought leader in the data analytics market.
• Combine strategic vision with operational excellence.
• Develop high-performing teams and foster a culture of customer obsession.

Qualifications

• Expertise with product management of B2B applications.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills.
• Ability to partner with cross-functional teams, including R&D, Sales, Business Development/Pricing, and Marketing.
• Plan, execute, and lead successful product releases.
• Strategic thinker, creative problem solver, and strong analytical skills.
• Minimum 15 years of related product or business experience with enterprise data, analytics, AI, machine learning, database, or cloud data platform products.
• Experience with project management approaches, including discovery, scoping, planning, and leading project reviews.
• Experience with a rapidly scaling technology/software business.
• Experience in team/people management or functional leadership roles.
• Demonstrated expertise in data lakehouse architectures, data warehousing, query engines, distributed systems, data governance, and cloud-native analytics platforms.
• Experience with modern data ecosystems including Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Spark, Kafka, Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Proven success implementing design-led product development practices, customer discovery programs, journey mapping, and product operating models.
• Strong understanding of product operations disciplines including roadmap governance, portfolio management, OKRs, product analytics, and measurement frameworks.
• Experience presenting to executive stakeholders, industry analysts, strategic customers, and partners.
• Bachelor's or graduate degree in Business, Technology or related field; MBA strongly preferred.

Requirements

• Understand the functional role of product management and how to build and implement a product management function within an organization.
• Understand customer pains and domain landscape in your product portfolio to advocate for addressing those customer and partner needs.
• Understand product strengths and weaknesses, balancing feature requests against market opportunities and maintenance requirements.
• Interact with customers and partners to build relationships and gain perspective on how product features are used.
• Frame market segmentation and targeting to define market opportunities for the overall product portfolio.
• Build business cases for expanding market presence.
• Oversee and provide direction for the creation and socialization of product-level documents.
• Engage Product Marketing in creating product positioning, value propositions, and messaging that resonates with the buying audience.
• Support corporate development activities in identifying new inorganic options and integrating acquisitions.
• Lead competitive and win/loss analysis.
• Support analyst relations by acting as a spokesperson for the business unit solutions.
• Support enablement efforts for sales and channel partners.
• Serve as a market-facing subject matter expert for your product portfolio.

Benefits

• Unlimited Vacation Time as well as paid holidays and sick time.
• Health and Wellness coverage options for Rocketeers and dependents.
• Life and disability coverage.
• Fidelity 401(k) and Roth Retirement Savings with matching contributions.
• Monthly student debt benefit program.
• Tuition Reimbursement and Certificate Reimbursement Program opportunities.
• Leadership and skills training opportunities.