Technical Product Manager - Planning & Work Management

The Vanguard Group•Charlotte, PA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Vanguard is seeking a Technical Product Manager to define and drive the vision for Planning & Work Management capabilities. This role involves translating market trends and stakeholder needs into a prioritized roadmap, owning portfolio-level tradeoffs, and setting product guardrails to ensure scalability and compliance. The ideal candidate will design cohesive experiences across the entire work lifecycle, from intake to reporting, and ensure alignment with the broader MarTech ecosystem. This position requires strong cross-functional leadership, a consultative mindset, and the ability to operate at both strategic and detailed levels. The role also focuses on driving product adoption through training, playbooks, and clear communication, acting as the voice of the customer and product in leadership forums.

Requirements

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.

Responsibilities

Set the vision & tell the story: articulate an opinionated 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 (what is in/out, what gets deferred, and what gets declined).
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.
Set product guardrails: define what becomes standard vs. exception (intake models, templates, metadata, governance), when customization is allowed, and when work is declined to protect scalability, compliance, and reuse.
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.