Product Marketing Manager

OPPORTUNITY We're looking for a Product Marketing Manager to help shape how StratusGrid understands its market, communicates the value of Stratusphere, and brings new capabilities to customers. This is a highly cross-functional, hands-on role at the intersection of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing. You'll develop a deep understanding of our customers, buyers, competitors, market, and product, and use that understanding to make our positioning sharper, our pricing and packaging smarter, our launches more effective, and our product easier to understand and adopt. We're building an AI-native platform for cloud infrastructure management in a market that is changing quickly. That means this role requires more than producing marketing materials. You'll be expected to develop strong points of view, challenge assumptions, identify what actually resonates with customers, and translate complex technical capabilities into clear, differentiated stories. You'll also be expected to use AI aggressively as a force multiplier, accelerating research, synthesis, exploration, iteration, and content production while maintaining personal ownership of the thinking, judgment, originality, and taste behind the work. RESPONSIBILITIES • Own Product Positioning and Messaging: Develop and continuously refine the positioning, value propositions, messaging hierarchy, and core narratives for Stratusphere. Ensure our story is differentiated, credible, easy to understand, and grounded in what customers actually value. • Develop Deep Customer and Market Understanding: Spend meaningful time with customers, prospects, Sales, Customer Success, and Product to understand buyer motivations, customer problems, objections, alternatives, market dynamics, and the language customers naturally use. Turn those insights into better product and go-to-market decisions. • Research and Inform Pricing and Packaging: Partner closely with Product, Sales, Finance, and leadership to research willingness to pay, competitive approaches, customer value, packaging alternatives, and pricing models. Bring evidence and market context to pricing decisions rather than treating pricing as an internal financial exercise. • Own Competitive and Market Intelligence: Develop an ongoing understanding of competitors, emerging categories, substitutes, customer expectations, and broader changes in cloud infrastructure and AI. Translate that research into actionable implications for positioning, product strategy, pricing, Sales, and company leadership. • Build Compelling Customer Proof: Own the development of case studies, customer stories, testimonials, quantified proof points, and other evidence that demonstrates the outcomes customers achieve with Stratusphere. Partner directly with customers and internal teams to uncover the story behind the results. • Own Customer-Facing Product and Solution Briefs: Translate product capabilities into concise, useful materials that help buyers and customers understand what Stratusphere does, why it matters, how it works, and where it is differentiated. Partner with Product and technical teams to ensure accuracy while owning the customer-facing narrative. • Shape Website Product Messaging: Own or contribute to product-related website copy, including core product pages, solution pages, feature messaging, proof points, calls to action, and other customer-facing language. Continuously improve the messaging as our product and market evolve. • Own In-Product Messaging: Partner with Product and Design to develop clear, useful messaging inside Stratusphere, including feature introductions, empty states, onboarding language, prompts, explanatory copy, and other moments where communication affects comprehension, trust, or adoption. • Lead Product and Feature Release Communication: Develop the narrative, audience, messaging, and communication approach for meaningful product releases. Create customer-facing release updates and coordinate supporting go-to-market communication, partnering with Product on substance and leaving detailed user documentation to the appropriate technical owners. • Partner Closely with Product Throughout Discovery: Bring customer, buyer, competitive, pricing, and market context into product discovery early. Help Product understand how customers are likely to perceive, evaluate, purchase, and adopt new capabilities while respecting Product's ownership of product definition and solution discovery. • Support Go-to-Market Strategy and Launches: Help determine who new capabilities are for, why they matter, how they should be positioned, what proof is needed, how they should be introduced to the market, and what Sales and Customer Success need to communicate them successfully. • Enable Sales and Customer Success: Create the messaging, talk tracks, competitive guidance, objection handling, product narratives, buyer-facing materials, and other tools customer-facing teams need to communicate Stratusphere clearly and consistently. • Contribute to Social Media and External Communication: Help establish the product and market narratives that should show up in StratusGrid's social presence. Contribute messaging, ideas, product-related posts, customer stories, and points of view. • Measure Whether the Message Is Working: Look beyond content production to understand whether positioning, launches, pricing, customer proof, and messaging are changing behavior. Use qualitative and quantitative signals to identify what is resonating, what is not, and where we should adjust. • Create Leverage with AI: Use modern AI tools to accelerate research, competitive analysis, customer-feedback synthesis, first-pass exploration, content iteration, repurposing, and production. Know when AI is useful and when human judgment matters more, and maintain a high bar for accuracy, originality, voice, reasoning, and taste rather than outsourcing those responsibilities to the tool. • Own Your Work End to End: Move comfortably between strategic thinking and hands-on execution. Ask questions early, seek out the context you need, develop a point of view, produce high-quality work, gather feedback, measure the result, and close the loop. REQUIREMENTS • Product Marketing Experience: Experience in product marketing, preferably for a B2B technology, SaaS, infrastructure, developer, cloud, AI, or other technically complex product. • Ability to Simplify Complex Products: Demonstrated ability to understand technically complex products and translate them into clear, differentiated customer value without oversimplifying or relying on unnecessary jargon. • Deep Customer Orientation: A willingness to spend meaningful time directly with customers and prospects rather than relying solely on secondhand feedback or internal assumptions. • Research and Analytical Capability: Experience conducting market, competitive, customer, and pricing research and turning incomplete or ambiguous information into clear recommendations. • Excellent Written Communication and Editorial Judgment: The ability to recognize the difference between technically correct copy and communication that is genuinely clear, persuasive, differentiated, and memorable. • Strong Commercial Judgment: An understanding of how product, pricing, positioning, Sales, Customer Success, and buyer behavior interact, and the ability to connect product marketing work to commercial outcomes. • Cross-Functional Influence: Comfort partnering closely with Product Managers, Product Designers, engineers, Sales, Customer Success, executives, and other stakeholders without relying on formal authority to drive alignment. • Comfort with Ambiguity: The ability to operate effectively in an environment where the product, category, market, and go-to-market motion are evolving and many of the answers need to be discovered rather than inherited. • Outcome Orientation: A bias toward measuring success by whether customers understand our value more clearly and our teams are more effective at bringing that value to market. • High Standards for Craft: Strong attention to detail, judgment, and taste, combined with the ability to move quickly and distinguish between work that needs refinement and work that needs rapid learning. • AI Fluency: Comfort using modern AI tools to increase the breadth, speed, and quality of research, synthesis, exploration, and execution without substituting generated output for first-principles reasoning, judgment, originality, or taste. • Travel: Willingness and ability to travel periodically, as needed, for customer engagements, team planning sessions, or onsite work. • Remote-Work-Ready: Equipped to work effectively in a distributed team, including a reliable high-speed internet connection, a professional and distraction-limited workspace, and the ability to consistently communicate, collaborate, and execute independently. • Work Authorization: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire. This position does not offer visa sponsorship. NICE-TO-HAVE / DIFFERENTIATORS • Cloud Infrastructure or FinOps Domain Experience: Direct familiarity with AWS, Azure, GCP, cloud economics, FinOps, infrastructure as code, platform engineering, or adjacent technical categories. • Early-Stage Function-Building Experience: Experience as the first or primary Product Marketing hire, or in an environment where you had to establish positioning, messaging, research, launch, and enablement practices from the ground up. • Non-Traditional Pricing Experience: Experience working with outcome-based, usage-based, value-based, consumption-based, or other pricing models beyond traditional seat-based SaaS. • Enterprise Technical Buying Experience: Experience marketing products that require alignment across technical practitioners, operational leaders, and executive or economic buyers. • Developer or Technical-User Marketing Experience: Experience building credibility with highly technical audiences where vague marketing language is quickly rejected. • Category Creation or Market-Shaping Experience: Experience helping define or reposition an emerging product category where customer language, competitive boundaries, and market expectations were still forming. • Quantified Customer-Story Experience: A track record of turning customer outcomes into credible, evidence-based case studies with measurable business or technical results. • Product-Led Communication Experience: Experience shaping in-product messaging, onboarding, feature adoption, or lifecycle communication in partnership with Product and Design. • Strong Visual Storytelling Instincts: Ability to recognize and shape effective information hierarchy, presentation flow, and visual storytelling, even if you are not a designer. • Experience Operating in AI-Native Workflows: Hands-on experience building effective AI-assisted research, synthesis, writing, or analysis workflows that materially improve speed and quality while preserving human judgment and originality. BENEFITS At StratusGrid, we invest in the health, well-being, and growth of our team. We offer competitive pay and a flexible benefits package that supports employees and their families at every stage. Full-time employees receive: • Competitive salary • Medical, dental, and vision insurance • Life insurance and short-term and long-term disability coverage • 401(k) plan • Flexible PTO, paid sick leave, and paid holidays Benefits may vary by location and employment status. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & FAIR CHANCE HIRING StratusGrid is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with applicable laws…