Senior Director, Vertica Product Management

It's fun to work in a company where people truly BELIEVE in what they're doing!

Job Description Summary:

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. 

Within the business unit, the role of product management will include identifying market opportunities, creating roadmaps, prioritizing features, validating engineering timelines and driving commercial success. In addition, this leader will define and institutionalize a modern product operating model that leverages design-led product management practices, customer discovery, user-centered design, product analytics, outcome-based prioritization, and continuous validation of customer and market needs. Establishing this role, both as a key component of Rocket leadership as well as a functional competency within the business unit, requires a seasoned professional with years of experience product managing technology solutions geared at the enterprise market.

To be successful in this role, this person will operate cross-functionally, engaging actively with their engineering counterparts as well as marketing, sales, GTM strategy, and customer success leadership. Building alignment around the business unit’s product direction throughout the company will be critical to driving growth in revenue, customer satisfaction, and market position. The Senior Director will partner closely with UX, architecture, engineering, and customer-facing teams to ensure product investments are informed by deep customer understanding, validated user workflows, and measurable business outcomes. They will also act as a public face of the business unit to analysts, customers, and partners, communicating the benefits of the solutions, the roadmap, and Rocket’s core values outside the organization. This individual will be expected to represent Rocket Software and Vertica as a thought leader in the data analytics, lakehouse, and data platform market, helping shape conversations around modern data architectures, performance, governance, and AI-enabled analytics.

The successful candidate combines strategic vision with operational excellence, demonstrating expertise in product operations, portfolio planning, customer-centric innovation, and data-informed decision making. They have a proven track record of leading teams through complex platform transformations, balancing near-term market opportunities with long-term architectural investments, and delivering measurable business outcomes in highly competitive enterprise software markets. As a leader, they develop high-performing teams, foster a culture of customer obsession and continuous learning, and inspire organizations to execute against ambitious product strategies.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• 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 be an advocate for addressing those customer and partner needs.  This includes anticipating future customer needs.
• Understand product strengths and weaknesses, and balance 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 in order 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 the process for 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

Required 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
• Influencing and communicating product offers to customers, prospects, sales, industry analysts and trade press
• 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 among business partners and stakeholders
• 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
• Travel Requirements: 5-25%

#LI-Remote

What Rocket Software can offer you in USA:

• 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

EOE M/F/Vet/Disability.  Rocket Software Inc. is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. Rocket Software Inc. is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

At Rocket Software, we believe AI is a critical enabler of innovation and productivity. All Rocketeers are expected to actively leverage AI-powered tools and technologies, where appropriate, to enhance efficiency, improve decision-making, and deliver greater impact in their roles. Embracing continuous learning and the responsible use of AI is an essential part of how we work.

Rocket is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with physical and mental disabilities.  If you need special assistance or an accommodation while seeking employment, please call: 781-577-4321 or send an email to people@rocketsoftware.com.  We will make a determination on your request for reasonable accommodation on a case-by-case basis.

As part of our commitment to a safe and trustworthy workplace, we include background and reference checks in our hiring process.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you'll enjoy your career with us!