Senior Manager, Product Marketing

Job Description

Marketing | San Francisco, CA, United States or Remote (North America)

VMware’s Modern Application Platforms Business Unit (MAPBU) has a bold mission—catalyze enterprise transformation through software. At the center of telling this narrative and empowering sales is product marketing.

Product marketing takes a unique combination of skills. To be a product marketer is to be savvy of technology industry dynamics and trends, a messaging expert, a constant collaborator with marketing and go-to-market teams, and a creative producer of content that cuts across product positioning to industry commentary.

Managing a team of product marketers requires all this and more. Product marketing leadership requires coaching, handling escalations, solving tough problems, and adapting to changing business requirements and market opportunities. It’s intellectually challenging and rewarding work.

Job Role and Responsibilities:

MAPBU is seeking a Senior Manager, Product Marketing to lead a significant portion of our portfolio—anchored by products including Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (ubiquitous Kubernetes runtime) and Tanzu Mission Control (centralized control of Kubernetes clusters).

The Senior Manager, Product Marketing will play a critical role in our success—shaping our overarching portfolio narrative and establishing VMware as a leader in the cloud native market. We count on Product Marketing to define messaging, drive sales enablement, feed campaigns and collaborate across business units to amplify our value proposition.

This role also has the potential for greater company-wide impact; informing VMware’s perspective on business-aligned open source technology, subscription- based businesses and engagement with new customer personas.

Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:

Team leadership. Guide a team of product marketers, providing mentorship, support and clear priorities
Product launches. Run a rhythm in the lead-up to minor and major product launches to ensure all content and communication is on track
Product positioning. Define the core messaging framework for owned products, socialize across stakeholders and apply to a core set of marketing materials
Sales enablement. Ready our sales specialists to carry our message(s) to market with consistency and confidence through annual sales kick-off and ongoing trainings
Customer engagement. Take every opportunity to get in front of customers—supporting sales meetings, presenting at executive briefings and engaged our advisory board
Content creation. Create external-facing content (blogs, papers, multi-media, etc.) aligned to campaigns and to reinforce product positioning in market

Required Skills & Experience:

Product Marketing. At least five (5) years of product marketing experience. You'll need to have seen the full cycle of product launches and transitions to guide and coach the team.
Containers technology. You'll need to be familiar with containers and other cloud-native technologies, such as site reliability engineering practices and tooling.
Student. You don’t need to be steeped in Kubernetes and cloud native, but you’ve got to have the desire to really dig in and understand the technology and its impact
Organizer. You’ll need to stay on top of multiple product threads, collaborate with different business units and marketing teams. Demands for collateral and messaging support will compete for your time; you’ll need to ruthlessly prioritize
Storyteller and writer. This isn’t a behind-the-scenes role; you’ll need to collaborate with stakeholders across VMware and stay in close communication with/present frequently to sales reps and sales leadership. You need to have the ability to break down complex concepts into extremely simple and clear terms for sales. Strong written communication will serve you for internal and external content.
Presentation skills. The ability to deliver clear and concise trainings -- supplemented by clean visual materials like slide decks -- is critical for this role.

Preferred Skills:

Management. This is a management position with direct reports. You’ll need to manage HR and budgeting responsibilities for the team, as well as motivate and develop the individuals on the team.
Cloud-native ecosystem. Ideally, you’ve worked in and around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem. Familiarity with microservices patterns and continuous integration and continuous delivery practices and tooling will help you quickly get up to speed on the broader Tanzu value proposition.
Data analysis. Experience using campaign data and sales data to determine enablement priorities and to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

This job requisition is not eligible for employment-based immigration sponsorship by VMware.

TeamTanzu

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