Product Director

General Description

The Product Marketing Director (PMD) is responsible for defining, positioning, pricing, and evangelizing assigned products--along with managing the market adoption and product life cycle.  As such, the PMD “owns� the product and is ultimately responsible for its overall success.  This role also includes working in cooperation with strategy, marketing, corporate development, product management, engineering and sales to ensure the product’s success.

The assigned products for this position include the portfolio of PowerSGâ„¢ distribution intelligence solutions from BPL Global.

 Job Responsibilities include:

Market Intelligence

Meet with customers, sales, partners, FAEs, industry analysts, to understand the overall market and to quantify the specific benefits and features that customers expect from the product.

Understand the uncontrollable factors that impact product definition such as market structures, applicable laws and regulatory policies in the company’s markets.

Understand the business models that ensure our own and customer’s success.

Create a competitive matrix outlining our strengths and weaknesses. Ensure that there are active files on competitors.

Product Definition

Manage the market segment portfolio including product positioning and value propositions, the market and product segmentation as well as competitive advantage.

Work with Strategy, Sales, Marketing and Engineering to create timely Product Concept Documents for each product.  Ensure that these documents are aligned with our roadmaps to create an integrated portfolio. 

Develop customer business cases as well as company internal ROI forecasts for proposed products.

 

 

Product Development

Execute a professional, consistent and process-driven transition of product concepts to the engineering organizations.

Attend engineering meetings regularly to answer additional customer related questions and provide on-going feedback.

Work closely with engineering to ensure that the final product specified is the same as the product delivered--within the agreed upon time frame. 

Sales and Product Support

Create competitive and profitable pricing strategies that align with our portfolio of products.

Provide pre-sales support to the worldwide sales team on assigned products. 

Create effective sales training materials and perform worldwide sales training on your product’s target customer, positioning, benefits, capabilities, competition, pricing and negotiation points.

Provide promotional communications content for assigned products to marketing communications.

Manage the assigned product’s lifecycle in the context of market evolution, competitor offerings and technology obsolescence.

Experience & Skills Required

The ideal person for this position has the following:

A strong technical background and an understanding of the product development process

5-10 years of experience within serving the electric utility industry with software or hardware products and services

At least 5 years of actual hands-on marketing experience including determining customer requirements, turning them into product concepts and complete products.

Demonstrated experience of working well with customers, partners, FAEs,  engineering and company management.

Writing and presentation skills, to communicate information effectively to customers, marketing, sales, business development, executive and technical staff

Interpersonal skills, to establish good rapport, generate enthusiasm, negotiate priorities, and to resolve conflicts between various company resources

Technical skills, including strong Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook and other computer skills

Knowledge and Education Needed

An understanding of the utility industry worldwide, including key industry trends, developments and issues that the company’s customers are faced with in the near, intermediate and long term

Knowledge of product marketing concepts and how software products are developed, marketed, positioned and sold.

Power Grid management domain knowledge is a plus, to have credibility with utility representatives and be able to work effectively with them.

BSC required; MBA strongly desired; engineering background preferred