Vice President, Product Marketing

Paychex•Cincinnati, OH

About The Position

Leads Paychex’s product marketing function and is accountable for the commercial strategy across every product set, including ideal customer profiles, positioning and value narratives, pricing and packaging, go-to-market strategy, and market intelligence. Serves as the voice of the market within Paychex, translating industry, buyer, competitive, and regulatory signals into evidence-based recommendations about product development, target customers, pricing, and competitive strategy. Partners with Product to influence roadmap direction, owns pricing and bundling recommendations brought to governance, and supplies strategic points of view and messaging for teams across the organization. The role transforms product marketing into a strategic, market-facing partner and establishes the team, standards, decision rights, and operating cadence to sustain that approach. The position builds and leads a product marketing team organized by product set, develops talent and capabilities, represents the market perspective to executive leadership, and establishes governance and outcome-based measurement for the function.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business Administration, Economics, Communications, or a related field.
12+ years of experience in product marketing, product management, or commercial strategy in a B2B technology, SaaS, or business services environment, including responsibility for a multi-product portfolio.
5 years of experience leading a product marketing team, including other people leaders, with accountability for hiring, developing, and organizing the function.
3 years of experience influencing product roadmap decisions through market, buyer, and competitive evidence in a matrixed organization without direct roadmap authority.
Expert-level market sensing and synthesis, customer and buyer insight, commercial and monetization acumen, narrative and message craft, go-to-market orchestration, influence without authority, executive communication, and decisiveness under ambiguity.
Advanced analytical rigor and measurement, and organizational leadership and talent development.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in an MBA program or a related advanced degree.
3 years of direct ownership of pricing, packaging, or monetization strategy with measurable accountability for revenue, margin, or attach outcomes.
3 years of experience in HCM, payroll, HR technology, benefits, insurance, or financial services serving small and mid-sized business customers.
Experience transforming a product marketing function from a request-driven, execution-oriented model into a strategic, market-facing one.

Responsibilities

Own continuous sensing of the HCM market, including industry and technology trends, regulatory and compliance changes, competitive movement, win/loss findings, analyst and channel input, and market sizing; present evidence-based recommendations during product roadmap reviews.
Define, maintain, publish, and drive organizational adoption of ideal customer profiles, buyer and user personas, buying committee dynamics, and journey maps for each product set.
Establish a voice-of-customer research program incorporating primary interviews, advisory boards, and surveys, and hold the organization accountable for targeting and serving defined profiles.
Own monetization analysis and recommendations for each product set, including pricing model and metric, tiering, packaging fences, bundle architecture, willingness-to-pay research, competitive price positioning, price change programs, and discount guardrails; partner with Finance, Product, and Sales and secure governance approval.
Own portfolio- and product-level positioning and messaging architecture; translate product capabilities into customer benefits and quantified outcomes, provide messaging briefs to partner teams, and govern enterprise message consistency.
Own launch tiering, go-to-market plans, and cross-functional readiness across Product, Sales, Enablement, Service, Compliance, and partner channels; exercise go/no-go authority on go-to-market readiness and oversee 30/60/90-day post-launch performance.
Own end-of-life and migration go-to-market strategies.
Own post-sale commercial strategy, including activation and time-to-value messaging, feature adoption, cross-sell and attach strategy by ICP, retention and renewal narratives, and customer proof and references.
Build and lead a product-set-organized team, including Directors and Principal or Senior Product Marketing Managers; define job architecture and competencies, assess and develop talent, recruit specialist capabilities, and coach team members to develop and defend points of view.
Represent the market perspective to executive leadership; establish roadmap review participation, pricing governance, and messaging governance; define and report business outcome metrics for the function.