Director, Product Marketing

Job description

**Get to Know Us** Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company on a mission to shift the advantage from attackers to defenders. Our flagship product, the NodeZero® platform, autonomously executes real attack techniques in production—safely, without agents or disruption—to help organizations find exploitable weaknesses, fix what matters most, verify remediation, and continuously prove their resilience. NodeZero helps organizations understand risk across their internal networks, external attack surface, cloud environments, identities, data, and web applications. Customers use the platform to replace assumptions with evidence: what an attacker can actually exploit, how an attack can move through the environment, what the business impact could be, and whether a fix truly worked. We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We are committed to solving common security problems including ineffective tools, false positives, alert fatigue, blind spots, checkbox security culture, cybersecurity skills shortages, and the time and expense of point-in-time manual assessments. Collectively, we are a team of learn-it-alls committed to respect, collaboration, ownership, and results. As a remote-first company, we require a minimum 25Mbps consumer-grade broadband connection. **What You'll Do** We are looking for a Director of Product Marketing to lead the product marketing function at a defining moment in Horizon3’s growth. This role will establish the strategy, operating model, and talent system that turn product marketing into a measurable engine for category leadership, pipeline creation, sales productivity, customer adoption, and revenue growth. You will report to the VP of Corporate & Product Marketing and lead a team of product marketers, currently expected to include three direct reports. You will work across Product, Engineering, Attack Research, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Demand Generation, Corporate Communications, Alliances, and Revenue Operations to ensure Horizon3’s capabilities are understood, differentiated, adopted, and converted into business outcomes. **Product Marketing Strategy & Category Leadership** - Define and execute the product marketing strategy across the NodeZero platform, aligning portfolio priorities with Horizon3’s corporate narrative, growth objectives, market opportunity, and revenue plan. - Establish a clear architecture for how Horizon3’s capabilities—including internal, external, cloud, identity, Kubernetes, web application, precision defense, threat detection and response, and compliance solutions—fit together as one proactive security platform. - Lead the evolution of Horizon3’s market position from autonomous pentesting and adversarial exposure validation toward a broader, evidence-based proactive security and CTEM operating model. - Translate product and market strategy into clear buyer narratives for CISOs, security leaders, SecOps, ITOps, cloud-security, identity, application-security, infrastructure, compliance, and offensive-security teams. - Identify the highest-value market opportunities, buying centers, use cases, and customer segments, then prioritize product marketing investment against business impact. - Serve as a senior product marketing voice in executive planning, annual operating plans, board preparation, analyst engagements, industry events, and strategic customer conversations. **Product Launch & Go-To-Market Operating System** - Create and scale a repeatable launch methodology that aligns Product, Product Marketing, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Demand Generation, Communications, and channel teams around one plan. - Establish launch principles, stage gates, briefs, roles, timelines, readiness requirements, measurement standards, and post-launch reviews. - Ensure every launch begins with a validated customer problem, a differentiated market position, a clear audience, proof points, a field activation plan, and defined business outcomes. - Oversee the development of messaging, positioning, pricing and packaging inputs, buyer journeys, launch content, campaign requirements, enablement, analyst materials, and customer communications. - Create a consistent process for moving product feedback, field intelligence, customer evidence, and competitive insights back into Product and executive decision-making. - Measure launch performance and use results to improve future launches, portfolio investment, and go-to-market efficiency. **Team Leadership & Talent Development** - Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing product marketing team with clear charters, ownership boundaries, priorities, and measures of success. - Set a high bar for strategic thinking, technical fluency, customer empathy, writing quality, operating discipline, and commercial impact. - Build an effective portfolio model that allows individual PMMs to own their areas while maintaining consistent company-wide messaging, process, and standards. - Recruit, onboard, mentor, and retain exceptional product marketing talent as the organization grows. - Establish regular team operating rhythms including planning, work-in-progress reviews, launch reviews, skill development, and performance conversations. - Create opportunities for the team to build reusable assets, deepen customer and market expertise, and increase leverage through repeatable systems and AI-assisted workflows. **Revenue Alignment, Enablement & Customer Adoption** - Partner with Sales and Revenue Operations to define how product marketing contributes to pipeline, conversion, deal velocity, win rates, expansion, retention, and customer value. - Develop a consistent enablement system spanning messaging, discovery, qualification, solution narratives, demo guidance, objection handling, competitive responses, sales plays, and training. - Ensure the field can communicate both technical proof—real attacks, exploitable paths, verified impact, and verified fixes—and executive value, including reduced exposure, faster remediation, and defensible security assurance. - Partner with Customer Success and Customer Marketing to create adoption, expansion, advocacy, and customer-proof programs that connect product use to measurable outcomes. - Establish a structured process for capturing win/loss insights, customer feedback, field requests, and recurring objections, then convert those insights into action. - Build scalable campaign-in-a-box and partner-ready packages that allow regional, field, channel, and demand teams to activate product narratives consistently. **Messaging, Content & Market Influence** - Own the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of Horizon3’s product narratives across the full customer journey. - Guide the creation of proof-first content including product pages, solution briefs, technical blogs, buyer’s guides, white papers, customer stories, webinars, executive POVs, analyst materials, demos, and presentations. - Ensure technical claims are accurate, differentiated, supportable, and grounded in customer evidence, product capability, or validated research. - Partner with Corporate Communications, Analyst Relations, Demand Generation, Field Marketing, and Alliances to amplify product stories through integrated programs. - Help Horizon3 educate the market on the shift from vulnerability volume and theoretical risk to verified exploitability, prioritized remediation, and continuous resilience. - Build a durable content and evidence system that makes high-quality product marketing faster to produce, easier to reuse, and more effective in-market. **Product, Engineering & Cross-Functional Leadership** - Serve as a trusted strategic partner to Product and Engineering leadership, helping connect roadmap decisions to customer problems, market shifts, competitive dynamics, and commercial opportunity. - Establish productive working relationships with Attack Research and technical subject-matter experts so the company’s deepest capabilities become understandable and valuable to the market. - Represent the customer and market perspective in portfolio planning, prioritization, packaging, launch readiness, and roadmap discussions. - Resolve cross-functional ambiguity by clarifying decision rights, owners, dependencies, and next actions. - Build alignment across a fast-moving global organization without relying solely on formal authority. - Model direct, evidence-based, and respectful communication in high-stakes decisions and executive conversations. **AI Operations Transformation & Marketing Excellence** - Lead the product marketing organization’s adoption of AI-assisted workflows that improve research, content development, personalization, competitive analysis, enablement, reporting, and operational scale. - Define responsible standards for using AI in product marketing while protecting accuracy, security, brand quality, customer trust, and human judgment. - Identify high-value opportunities to reduce repetitive work, accelerate time to insight, and improve the quality and consistency of PMM outputs. - Build shared systems, templates, prompt libraries, knowledge resources, and quality-control practices that increase team leverage without creating disconnected one-off experiments. - Use data, automation, and structured feedback loops to continuously improve the product marketing operating model. **Measurement, Planning & Business Management** - Define the product marketing scorecard, including launch readiness, pipeline influence, conversion, competitive performance, sales productivity, content engagement, adoption, expansion, and customer-proof metrics. - Partner with Finance, Revenue Operations, and marketing leadership on planning, budget allocation, headcount planning, forecasting, and resource tradeoffs. - Establish reliable reporting that communicates progress, business impact, risks, dependencies, and recommended actions to executive leadership. - Use Salesforce, product analytics, market intelligence, win/loss data, and customer insights to make investment decisions and improve performance. - Hold the function accountable for outcomes, not activity volume, while preserving the quality and rigor required for a technical cybersecurity category. **What You’ll Bring** - 10+ years of B2B product marketing experience, including significant experience in enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, cloud, infrastructure, or another complex technical category. - 4+ years of experience leading, coaching, or managing product marketers and building high-performing cross-functional teams. - Demonstrated success defining product marketing strategy and operating models across multiple products, segments, or buying centers. - A track record of launching and scaling complex technical products with measurable impact on pipeline, revenue, adoption, retention, or market position. - Strong understanding of cybersecurity markets, buyer journeys, competitive dynamics, and the process of turning technical differentiation into commercial advantage. - The ability to move fluently between executive strategy and technical detail, building trust with board-level leaders, product executives, sales teams, engineers, security practitioners, and customers. - Exceptional writing, presentation, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills. - Experience building repeatable launch, enablement, content, customer-insight, and measurement systems. - Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, create clarity, and drive decisions across a high-growth organization. - Strong business judgment, analytical skills, and comfort using data to prioritize investments and assess performance. **Nice to Have** - Experience marketing offensive security, autonomous security, cloud security, identity security, application security, exposure management, CTEM, vulnerability management, security operations, or adjacent enterprise cybersecurity products. - Experience working with a product-led, sales-led, partner-led, or hybrid go-to-market model. - Experience supporting analyst relations, executive thought leadership, category creation, customer advisory programs, or major industry events. - Experience using AI and automation to transform marketing operations, research, content, enablement, or reporting. - Experience working with Salesforce, product analytics, marketing automation, customer intelligence, and business-intelligence tools. - Experience in a fast-growth company that has scaled its product portfolio, customer base, and go-to-market organization quickly. **What We’re Looking For** - Strategic and commercial: you connect market insight, product strategy, customer value, and revenue outcomes. - A multiplier: you make the people and teams around you more effective through clarity, coaching, standards, and reusable systems. - High agency with sound judgment: you move quickly, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and know when to go deep or simplify. - Influential and collaborative: you align diverse stakeholders around a clear point of view and create momentum without unnecessary process. - Evidence-based: you prefer customer proof, measurable outcomes, and validated claims over generic positioning or unsupported hype. - Builder-minded: you are comfortable creating the operating model, talent systems, and standards required for the next stage of growth. **Travel Requirements** - We are a fully remote company. This role requires up to 20% travel for executive meetings, strategic customer engagements, key product launches, major industry events, sales-team engagement, partner programs, and internal offsites. - Job-related travel expenses are reviewed and must be approved by your manager. **Perks of Horizon3** - Inclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive. - Growth Opportunities: Be part of a dynamic and growing team with numerous career development opportunities. - Innovative Culture: Work in a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. - Hybrid & Remote Work: We embrace a mix of remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location, including our Chicago office, where some roles require regular in-office presence. - Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive salary, equity and benefits. Our benefits include health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family, a flexible vacation policy, and generous parental leave. **Compensation and Values** At Horizon3, we believe that our people are our greatest asset, and our compensation philosophy reflects this core value. We are committed to fostering an environment where all employees feel valued, respected, and rewarded for their contributions. Our compensation structure is designed to be fair, competitive, and transparent, ensuring that every team member is recognized and compensated equitably across roles, levels, and locations. In accordance with various State’s transparency regulations, we provide the following salary range information for this position: - Base salary range: $232,000 - 260,000 annually. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate’s location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills. - Additional compensation: All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options. **You Belong Here** Horizon3 is not just an equal opportunity employer - we are a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental principles of our culture and success. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, hair length or any other legally protected status by law. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we strive to attract, develop, and retain a workforce that reflects the varied communities we serve. We believe that diverse perspectives drive innovation and strengthen our ability to create cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. At Horizon3, every team member is valued and supported in an environment that encourages personal and professional growth. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences, and we encourage all qualified individuals to apply. Come be a part of Horizon3, where your unique contributions are recognized, and your potential is limitless. **Other Duties** Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice. **Application Note** In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.