Director of Product Management

Job description

**About Vibes** Vibes is on a journey to reinvent the messaging ecosystem. You probably get dozens of communications from brands every day – most of them are not interesting. They don’t make you love the brand more or improve the service you receive. And maybe you want richer engagement with brands, but are you really going to download their app? Probably not… You may be surprised to learn that in the next year the way people engage with brands is going to completely change. RCS is an exciting new messaging channel that enables the richness of apps through the ubiquity of your phone’s text messaging capabilities. The potential of RCS is clear, but the industry needs to be inspired. Someone needs to chart the path. Luckily, we’ve done this before. Vibes is a pioneer in mobile engagement – shaping the industry and guiding innovation for since the advent of text messages. Today, we route *billions* of messages of month and cultivate excellence through our technology and deep expertise in mobile best-practices. We hold one of only four coveted spots as a Tier-1 DCA for RCS, which means we will shape the journey as RCS replaces Apps and outdated-email for consumer communication. Vibes is shaping the new world that will make text messages more engaging, more useful, and more valuable to everyone. You should join us. **Role Summary** We are seeking a Director of Product to lead the next chapter of our Platform — a product already relied upon by mobile marketing professionals at North America's most recognized brands to plan, schedule, and execute campaigns across SMS, MMS, RCS, Mobile Wallet, and push. This is a dual mandate: stewarding a trusted, revenue-generating platform that customers depend on today while driving an ambitious transformation toward a new generation of AI-native product experiences. That future requires reimagining the way the industry creates campaigns, personalization, and audience workflows and delivering an intelligent system where AI does more of the heavy lifting, freeing marketers to focus on strategy, creative, and outcomes. The Director of Product will own that transformation end-to-end, setting vision and strategy for AI-native capabilities while ensuring the existing platform continues to deliver the reliability and depth professional marketers demand. This role acts as the central leader of our Platform product development partnering closely with our Executive Team, Engineering, Design, Data Science, Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing. It is well suited for a product leader who is energized by building new things in established contexts, influencing transformational change, and translating a bold vision into a disciplined, compounding roadmap. This position in based in Chicago and will report to our SVP of Product. **Key Responsibilities** **Product Strategy and Roadmap** - Own the product strategy and roadmap across the Platform, setting direction for both the AI-native product layer and the underlying platform capabilities that power it. - Define and champion the vision internally and externally, translating it into a phased sequence of bets that compound over time and articulate a clear line from today's product to tomorrow's. - Establish and track success metrics across adoption, marketer productivity, AI feature performance, and downstream campaign outcomes. - Align roadmap priorities with business strategy, ensuring the team balances near-term customer commitments with longer-horizon innovation investments. **Customer-Driven Evolution** - Serve as the senior product voice for mobile marketing professionals using the platform today, maintaining deep fluency in their workflows, measurement frameworks, and evolving expectations. - Build high-trust relationships directly with Vibes customers to accelerate our ability to develop product experiences that accelerate their professional success - Partner with Customer Success, Customer Care, and Sales leadership to identify patterns across the install base and ensure the team is investing in enhancements that move the product forward rather than simply holding ground. - Create the organizational conditions for the team to turn operational feedback into meaningful product investments across campaign creation, scheduling, personalization, and execution at scale. **AI and Automation Initiatives** - Lead the AI strategy, defining what it means for the platform to be AI-native and setting the agenda for how intelligence gets embedded across the marketer workflow. - Partner with Data Science and Engineering leadership to identify, scope, and deliver AI- and automation-led capabilities that advance the vision: send-time optimization, channel orchestration, content personalization, predictive segmentation, and beyond. - Build a culture of experimentation, establishing how the team validates where automation creates real lift and where human control should remain, and scaling what works. **Team Leadership and Execution** - Lead and influence a cross-functional team across Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Sales, creating clarity on priorities, raising the bar on craft, and developing the next generation of product development at Vibes. This role does not have any direct reports today, but we expect it will as we expand our product footprint over the next 12-24 months. - Model and reinforce strong execution discipline across the team: clear requirements, predictable delivery, data-informed decisions, and crisp post-launch evaluation. - Communicate strategy, progress, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to senior leadership, cross-functional partners, and key customers. **Cross-Functional Collaboration** - Partner at the leadership level with Engineering, Design, and Data Science to bring the product strategy to life and maintain strong team-level working relationships. - Coordinate across adjacent product teams within the Vibes ecosystem to ensure cohesive experiences across channels, audience management, and analytics. - Partner with Marketing, Customer Success, and Customer Care to ensure launches land well, enablement is strong, and customers adopt new capabilities. **Qualifications** **Experience** - 8–12 years of Product Management experience, including direct ownership of a meaningful product area shipped to external customers and at least 4–5 years managing teams. - Experience leading product in an established, customer-facing platform with an active enterprise install base, and a track record of driving meaningful evolution without disrupting existing customers. - Demonstrated ability to hold both near-term customer commitments and longer-horizon innovation investments as complementary parts of a single product strategy. - History of shipping products that solve real problems for professional users in B2B SaaS, enterprise software, or prosumer tools. **Domain and Technical Expertise** - Familiarity with marketing technology, CRM, customer engagement, or messaging platforms (mobile messaging, email, push, or similar adjacent categories). - Deep comfort working on products informed by data science or machine learning, including an understanding of what these systems can and cannot do, how to scope them, and how to communicate their value and limitations to customers. - Strong product instincts for AI-native workflow tools, including how to design for augmentation vs. automation and when to keep humans in the loop. **Skills and Approach** - Exceptional written and verbal communication; able to move fluidly from board-level narrative to engineering-level detail. - Customer-obsessed and genuinely curious about the marketer's job, specifically what they are measured on, where they lose time, and how AI can make them fundamentally better. - Visionary about the future of AI in marketing technology while pragmatic about the realities of operating an enterprise platform customers trust and depend on. - Strong leader who builds high-trust, high-performance, collaborative environments, and creates clarity in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience with SMS, MMS, RCS, Mobile Wallet, push notifications, or other mobile engagement channels.