Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
Who You Are
You are a sharp, ambitious product marketing leader with a keen customer focus—someone who can articulate complex technology in language that moves buyers, champions, and the market alike. As Zūm’s Director of Product & Customer Marketing, you will own how we position our platform, activate our customer base, and build the narratives that win deals and grow accounts. Reporting directly to the CMO, you are a true player-coach: equally at home crafting a compelling positioning brief, coaching another teammate through their first launch, and sitting across the table from a district superintendent or COO to understand what keeps them up at night. You write with precision and punch. You believe great marketing is equal parts strategy and craft—and you have the portfolio to prove it. You embrace gen AI as a force multiplier: using it to move faster, test more ideas, and spend your energy where human judgment matters most.
This is a hybrid position based out of our headquarters in Redwood City, CA. You will be required to be onsite 3 days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday). We will only consider candidates already based in the Bay Area.
What You'll Do
Own Product Positioning & Messaging
- Define and continuously sharpen Zūm’s platform positioning—ensuring our value proposition is differentiated, credible, and resonant across every buyer persona and market segment.
- Translate roadmap and product releases into crisp, compelling narratives. You make the complex feel obvious and the innovative feel inevitable.
- Partner closely with Product and Sales to develop messaging frameworks, product one-pagers, battlecards, and pitch decks that equip the field to win.
- Lead go-to-market planning for new product launches and feature releases—owning the strategy, timeline, and cross-functional execution.
Drive Customer Marketing & Expansion
- Build and run Zūm’s customer marketing engine—from onboarding communications and adoption campaigns to reference programs and expansion plays.
- Develop a library of high-impact customer stories, case studies, and ROI narratives that serve as the connective tissue between Sales, CS, and the market.
- Create programs that turn satisfied customers into vocal advocates: executive roundtables, advisory councils, and co-marketing opportunities.
- Partner with Customer Success to track adoption signals and design targeted campaigns that deepen engagement and reduce churn.
Build the Category & Competitive Intelligence
- Monitor the competitive landscape relentlessly—synthesizing intel into crisp, actionable guidance for Sales and leadership.
- Establish Zūm as the category-defining voice in school transportation technology through thought leadership, awards, analyst relationships, and speaking opportunities.
- Collaborate with Demand Gen to ensure messaging and positioning are activated consistently across campaigns, ads, content, and events.
Lead & Develop a High-Performance Team
- Over time, hire, develop, and inspire a lean team of marketers—setting a high bar for craft, strategic thinking, and cross-functional partnership.
- Model the behavior you expect: you still write, edit, present, and build. The Director title doesn’t mean you hand things off.
- Partner with the CMO to shape the overall marketing strategy and represent the function with executive stakeholders.
What You Bring To Zūm
- 8+ years of B2B product marketing or customer marketing experience, ideally at a SaaS or tech company; experience with complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles is a strong plus.
- A portfolio that demonstrates your ability to take a complicated product and craft messaging that is clear, differentiated, and memorable—you write well, and you know it.
- Deep expertise in positioning methodology—you have built frameworks from scratch, stress-tested them with sales teams, and iterated based on win/loss data.
- Excellence in writing: you are compelling storyteller and writer of exciting, crisp narratives, with perfect grammar an ability to move audiences. You can write a best practices blog post or come up with a punchy tagline that captures the essence of the value prop.
- Proven customer marketing chops: you’ve owned reference programs, case study pipelines, and expansion campaigns that drove measurable retention and growth outcomes.
- A strong track record as a player-coach—you lead by doing, not just by delegating. You are energized by getting into the details while also thinking three levels up.
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where ambiguity is the norm and speed is a competitive advantage.
- Outstanding communication skills—verbal and written. You can hold your own in a room with a C-suite buyer or a school district superintendent.
- Experience working closely with Sales, Product, and Customer Success to align go-to-market motions and build shared accountability for pipeline and revenue outcomes.
- A gen AI-native working style—you actively use AI tools to accelerate research, drafting, competitive analysis, and campaign ideation, and you’re thoughtful about where human judgment and craft still lead.
Nice To Haves
- Experience in edtech, govtech, or selling into public sector / school districts.
- Familiarity with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Highspot, Gong, or similar sales and marketing platforms; comfort using gen AI tools (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity) as part of your everyday workflow.
- A background in category creation or narrative-led marketing at a growth-stage startup.
