Product Marketing Manager

About Us

Insurance is a $10T industry still running on PDFs, email threads, and manual reconciliation. Ascend is changing that. We built the first and only complete financial operations platform purpose-built for insurance — combining AI-powered accounting automation, payments, and premium financing in a single vertically integrated solution. In five years, we've become the market leader: over 4,000 businesses, including more than half of the 50 largest brokers in the country, trust Ascend to bring clarity to complex accounting operations — from collection to close.

Ascend automates the financial operations that insurers, MGAs, and agencies run every day — and embeds directly into the transactions where money actually moves. AI is driving the cost of software toward zero. The companies that win won't just sell tools — they'll capture value at the point of the transaction itself. Ascend is built for exactly that moment. Our customers don't just adopt software; they unlock measurable efficiency with a proven 5–7x return on investment.

Our 70+ person team, based in San Francisco and Columbus, brings together deep expertise in insurance, fintech, and AI to build infrastructure the industry has never had. The insurance industry intermediates trillions of dollars — and almost none of that infrastructure was built for the modern era. Legacy systems aren't just inefficient; they're a ceiling on what the industry can become. Ascend's mission is to become the leading financial automation platform for insurance by 2030 — powering the financial operations of the entire industry and transforming the way trillions of dollars move. We're not building another point solution. We're building the financial backbone of insurance.

About the Role

We are seeking our founding Product Marketing Manager (PMM) to define our product marketing strategy and execution. You will act as a bridge between Product, Marketing, and Sales, using your research to influence the roadmap and positioning of existing and new feature launches. You will directly translate product strategy into marketing campaigns, sales motions, and collateral. As the first PMM hire, you will need to be comfortable wearing many hats, detail-oriented, and able to thrive in a fast-paced environment. This role reports directly to the Head of Marketing and will collaborate closely with teams across design, product, sales, and customer success.

Responsibilities

• First 30 Days:
  • Learn how to position Ascend across different products, personas, and customer segments.
  • Dive into sales and customer calls to understand our customers, their challenges, and how Ascend helps prospects overcome these problems.
  • Own the design, messaging, and creation of sales decks, one-pagers, and case studies to reinforce our market positioning and messaging.
  • Conduct internal and external research to understand the current competitive landscape for Ascend.
• First 60 Days:
  • Entrench yourself with the product team to translate the product roadmap into sales and marketing messaging.
  • Become an expert on our product, workflows, and integrations to clearly overlay Ascend over legacy workflows.
  • Work closely with product to translate new feature functionality into value propositions within the sales motion and across collateral.
  • Coordinate go-to-market (GTM) campaigns across owned channels (email, in-product, website).
• First 90 Days:
  • Translate messaging and positioning into sales enablement and strategy by working closely with sales.
  • Own the evolution of our value propositions and positioning against competitors as new features or competitive products are released.
  • Report back on learnings, successes, and areas of improvement for our messaging across product, sales, and customer success.
  • Conduct win/loss analysis to understand what messaging and positioning is working or not working across different segments.

Qualifications

• Hands-On Experience: You have 2+ years of experience working in a similar industry (fin-tech, health-tech, etc.), you move fast, and you get things done without waiting for someone to hand you a perfect process.
• Brand-Driven Storyteller: You understand that messaging shapes how people perceive a company, and you know the difference between brand awareness and brand perception — and why both matter.
• Creative and Analytical: You are able to use both the left and right sides of your brain — you have an eye for design but can also dive into data.
• Customer-Focused: You care deeply about your customers and their problems and want to deeply understand, relate to, and connect with our customer base. You're willing to hop on calls with them directly — insurance is a main-street business where relationships matter.
• Outcome-Oriented: You have a track record of owning a function and delivering measurable results, and you'd rather work through problems live with your team than grind away on your own.

Pay

$100,000 - $130,000

Schedule

All roles at Ascend are 5 days a week onsite at our office in SoMa, San Francisco.

Benefits

• Meaningful equity
• 100% health premiums covered for you and your dependents
• 401k with employer matching options
• A fast-growing team with an emphasis on promoting from within (80% of all hires in the last 12 months have already been promoted)
• Unlimited PTO
• Company-paid commuter benefits
• Parental and family leave
• Lunch provided every day
• Dog-friendly office