Director, Product Marketing & Competitive Intelligence

Lantern•New York, NY

4d•$185,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Lantern is the specialty care platform for surgery, cancer, and infusions. We're looking for a Director, Product Marketing & Competitive Intelligence to own how Lantern understands its market and its competitors — and turn that understanding into commercial advantage. This is a senior level individual contributor role that owns the function end to end. You're a researcher first, curious by nature, always chasing an angle nobody assigned you. You pull signal from everywhere — Reddit threads, podcasts, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, trade press, HBR — and you know the rhythm of when Mercer, Aon, and WTW drop their annual reports well enough to have it synthesized before a competitor has even opened theirs. You're just as strong live as you are behind a screen. You know how to run an interview: when to push, and when to sit in silence and let someone fill it. You can go deep in the weeds on a niche detail, then step back and know exactly what an executive needs to hear to make a call. You use AI to move faster through all of it, and you own your domain without needing anyone to check in on you.

Requirements

7+ years in competitive intelligence, market research, or qualitative research, with direct customer and prospect contact
Healthcare or complex B2B employer-healthcare experience required
Track record of owning a domain independently — deciding what to track and what to ignore
Strong live interview skills: can read a room, probe, and know when to back off
Moves fluidly between deep technical detail and executive-level strategic framing
Self-directed research instinct across traditional and non-traditional sources
Concrete, specific AI fluency — not a checkbox answer
Credibility with the field: can get the truth from a seller after a lost deal and turn it into something they'll actually use

Nice To Haves

Have worked in a PE-sponsored, results-oriented culture and are comfortable with compressed timelines and shifting priorities
Have built a function from zero rather than inherited one, and can operate without a playbook
Drive adoption across a distributed commercial organization without formal authority
Communicate in whatever register the audience needs: a two-line alert for the field, a one-page point of view for leadership, a full readout for executives
Tell leadership what it doesn't want to hear, and hold the line on findings under pressure from senior stakeholders
Set their own priorities against a stated outcome, and say what they're deprioritizing rather than quietly dropping it

Responsibilities

Own competitive and market intelligence for the company — what we track, how we gather it, and how it's used
Continuously scan public, social, and industry sources — news, social platforms, forums, podcasts, analyst/consultant reports, trade journals — to catch signal early
Own and evolve our competitive alerting infrastructure: what we monitor, at what alert level, and how raw signal becomes a field-ready teardown
Design and commission original research — paid surveys and studies — when public and internal data can't answer the question
Own and run focus groups, advisory-panel research, and other external research relationships as needed
Run structured interviews with customers, prospects, and the field to understand why we win and lose
Own fast, ongoing insight delivery to the field — battlecards, real-time competitive alerts — in formats they can pick up and use immediately
Build and maintain the competitive response playbook: a pre-agreed plan for whether and how Lantern responds to specific competitor moves
Establish a commercial confidence baseline and track quarter-over-quarter improvement in how the field sells against our primary competitors
Produce a quarterly report for executive leadership on trends, patterns, and forward-looking recommendations
Partner with internal data and content teams so findings become narrative others can use, not a silo
Partner with enablement to train and certify the field on tone and delivery of depositioning and objection handling