Vice President of Product Marketing

Responsibilities

•Define the Narrative: Own Shakudo’s market positioning, messaging framework, and value proposition across both the high-velocity Kaji SaaS wedge and the comprehensive Full Platform deployment. Translate technical depth into stories that resonate with buyers, practitioners, and executives alike.


• Launch with Impact: Plan and execute go-to-market launches for new products, features, and integrations. Coordinate cross-functionally with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to ensure every launch drives pipeline, adoption, and market awareness.


• Enable the Team: Build and maintain sales enablement toolkits — battlecards, objection handlers, demo scripts, ROI frameworks, and competitive playbooks — that empower AEs and SEs to win deals faster.


• Own Competitive Intelligence: Develop and maintain a deep understanding of the competitive landscape across AI platforms, MLOps tooling, and data infrastructure. Translate insights into actionable positioning, content, and sales strategies.


• Drive Demand: Partner with Demand Generation to craft campaigns, webinars, and content programs that generate qualified pipeline. Ensure every piece of content maps to a stage of the buyer’s journey.


• Technical Storytelling: Create high-quality content — whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, solution briefs, and analyst materials — that articulates Shakudo’s differentiation and 1 drives market pull.


• Analyst & Community Relations: Represent Shakudo in analyst briefings (Gartner, Forrester) and at industry forums. Build relationships that amplify our narrative and shape category definitions.


• Customer-Driven Insights: Establish feedback loops with prospects, customers, and field teams to continuously refine positioning, identify market gaps, and inform product strategy.


• Scale & Hire: Build, hire, and mentor a small but high-impact PMM team. Establish processes, templates, and rhythms that allow the function to scale alongside the business.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of B2B product marketing experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership role at a technical infrastructure, developer tools, or AI-Data platform company.
 
• Proven track record of building and executing GTM strategies that directly contributed to revenue growth in the $2M–$20M ARR range.
 
• Early-stage startup DNA — experience operating in a high-growth startup environment where you built programs from scratch with ambiguity and limited resources.
 
• Technical fluency — ability to hold your own in a room of engineers. You can speak intelligently about on-prem vs. cloud, AI governance, and enterprise data architectures without needing a translator.
 
• Strategic and hands-on — you can set a 12-month vision and also write the battlecard for tomorrow’s pitch.
 
• Exceptional storyteller — written and verbal communication skills that make complex technical concepts clear, compelling, and memorable.
 
• Cross-functional leadership — proven ability to align Product, Sales, Engineering, and Leadership around a unified plan.
 
• Based in the Bay Area (Menlo Park office) and able to collaborate in-person with the team.

A Plus

• Experience marketing AI/ML platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, Snowflake, Databricks) or data infrastructure products.
 
• Prior experience as a founding PMM or first marketing hire.
 
• Background in regulated industries (HIPAA, FINRA) or enterprise security.
 
• Existing relationships with Gartner or Forrester analysts.
 
• Familiarity with PLG or usage-led growth models.