Technical Product Manager - Planning & Work Management
About the role
Vanguard is seeking a Technical Product Manager to lead the vision and roadmap for Planning & Work Management. Reporting to the Director of Product Management, this role will focus on translating market trends and stakeholder needs into actionable plans, setting product guardrails, and driving adoption and behavior change.
Responsibilities
- Set the vision & tell the story: articulate a compelling narrative for Planning & Work Management; create marketing-ready demos and written artifacts that make the why and what undeniable.
- Turn signals into a roadmap: translate market trends (MarTech, workflow, AI-assisted work) and stakeholder needs into a prioritized roadmap with clear business outcomes, metrics, and explicit tradeoffs.
- Own portfolio-level tradeoffs: create a single, defensible priority order across foundational work, integrations, and enhancement asks; actively manage demand by deferring or declining work when it doesn’t align to outcomes, and reset expectations with partners using clear decision frameworks.
- Define the planning-to-execution North Star: design cohesive experiences across intake, prioritization, resourcing/capacity, execution, approvals, and reporting.
- Align to the Content Supply Chain: ensure clean handoffs across the asset lifecycle and partner on integrations/automation (e.g., Fusion patterns) so Workfront serves as the central orchestration hub for marketing work, with reliable data flow across the broader MarTech ecosystem.
- Lead consultative discovery: partner with stakeholders to understand business challenges, map real enterprise workstreams and handoffs, and collaboratively define scalable solutions—including edge cases.
- Champion admin and scale needs: optimize for configuration, governance, maintainability, templates, and data quality so the platform scales across teams and business units.
- Ship product with rigor: own requirements and acceptance criteria; drive product team to deliver intuitive experiences that reduce friction, clarify status, and surface dependencies.
- Drive adoption and behavior change: deliver playbooks, templates, training/office hours, and comms that increase adoption and make new ways of working stick—validated through sustained usage, workflow compliance, and observable behavior change (not just launch completion).
- Lead cross-functionally: connect Product, Engineering, Design, Customer Success, Sales, and partners; represent the capability area in leadership forums as the voice of the customer and the voice of the product.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of product management (or product owner) experience delivering SaaS capabilities; experience in workflow, work management, MarTech, or operations software preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to be a storyteller: you can explain complex systems in simple, compelling narratives tailored to marketing leaders, practitioners, and technical teams.
- Hands-on understanding of enterprise work management concepts: intake, prioritization, capacity/resourcing, dependencies, governance, approvals, and reporting.
- Strong cross-functional leadership and stakeholder management skills; proven ability to influence without authority.
- Demonstrated consultative mindset: able to partner with stakeholders to frame ambiguous business problems, evaluate options, and guide teams toward scalable technical solutions without requiring fully formed approaches up front.
- Comfort operating at both 30,000-foot strategy and 3-foot detail: you can define a roadmap and also debug a broken workflow with an admin.
Special Factors
Sponsorship: Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.
About Vanguard
Vanguard is committed to providing a working environment that is free from discrimination, prejudice, and bias. Vanguard is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination based on genetic information, as well as any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
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