Head of Product Marketing
DriveCentric, Inc.About DriveCentric
- Founded in 2010 and headquartered in St. Louis, MO, with a distributed team across the US.
- Backed by Summit Partners, with a mandate to grow, not to trim.
- Trusted by 3,300+ dealerships across the US and Canada, from single-store independents to multi-billion-dollar dealer groups, plus adjacent retail such as RV, marine and powersports.
- Launched the Service Engagement Hub in August 2026, the first engagement platform built for fixed operations, and ships autonomous AI agents (Sales, Prospect, Nurture, Service-to-Sales, Performance Management, Service) on a monthly cadence.
- One of the first automotive software companies certified to ISO/IEC 42001 for AI management.
- Runs DC20, a dealer-led peer community and event series that most vendors would call a user conference and our customers call a 20 Group.
Why this role exists now
Three things are true at once:
Three things are true at once:
- The portfolio is multiplying. We are moving from one product line to a platform spanning sales, service, data, F&I, payments and digital retail. Each department has a different buyer, a different competitor set and a different vocabulary. Nobody owns the messaging architecture that ties them together.
- Product velocity is ahead of field readiness. Engineering and product are shipping at a pace the company has never operated at. Sales, account management, onboarding and support need enablement that is timely, credible and actually used, and we do not yet have the system to produce it.
- The category is up for grabs. The market wants to put us in the CRM box. Our thesis is that AI agents change what "CRM" means, and the company that explains that best to a skeptical, relationship-driven buyer wins the next decade of auto retail software. That story needs an owner.
And one thing underneath all three: we are building an AI-native company, not a company with an AI product. Engineering ships with AI, our internal agents answer the field's questions, and every function is expected to automate its own work. Product marketing has to be built that way from day one, which is why the person who builds it matters so much.
You will report to the Chief Product & Business Officer and sit on the product leadership team alongside the VP Product, the AI Labs lead and the Head of Product Operations. Two product marketing managers will report to you on day one, with room to grow the team as the pillars scale.
What you will own
Positioning and narrative. Build and maintain the messaging architecture for the platform and each of its pillars: the umbrella story, the per-department stories, and the proof that connects them. Lead the multi-year narrative evolution from CRM to AI Engagement Platform, and make it land with three very different audiences: the owner-operator of one store, the centralized buying group running 5 to 15 rooftops, and the enterprise group with a CFO in the room.
Launches. Design and run our new product introduction system: launch tiers, the artifacts each tier gets, who does what, and how we measure whether the launch worked. Build it AI-first, so that a monthly agent cadence produces a full set of launch assets without a monthly scramble. Then run the big ones yourself. NADA Show (February, Orlando) is the industry's Dreamforce and our largest launch moment of the year; you will own the product marketing plan for it.
Commercial enablement. Make sales, account management, customer success and onboarding fully ready to sell and support what we ship: positioning docs, discovery frameworks, competitive battlecards, demo narratives, objection handling, pricing and packaging talk tracks. Build the feedback loop from the field (Gong, win/loss, DC20, reference customers) back into the message, and use AI to make that loop continuous rather than quarterly: agents that mine calls for objections, generate first-draft battlecards from competitive signals, and keep enablement current as the product changes.
AI, explained to people who are tired of hearing about AI. Dealers have been pitched "AI" for a decade. Our agents actually do the work. Own how we talk about AI to a pragmatic, ROI-driven buyer without hype, and give the company a point of view on the agentic future of dealership software that competitors have to respond to.
Voice of the buyer. Sit with dealers, listen to sales calls, attend DC20, ride along with account managers. Product marketing here is written from the customer, not from other product marketers' decks.
The team and the discipline. Lead and grow the product marketing team. Coach product managers on how to use product marketing as leverage: how to write a brief, how to think about positioning before the roadmap is locked, how to run a launch. Teach the company what good looks like, then systematize it.
An AI-native way of working. Model it yourself and teach it to others. Build the agents, skills and workflows that let a small team operate like a large one: research synthesis, message testing, asset generation, enablement upkeep, competitive monitoring. Set the standard for how product marketers here use AI, coach your team and your PM partners to that standard, and be honest about where the tools fall short and human judgment has to do the work.
Cross-functional partnership. Work as one team with Marketing (brand, demand and events), Sales, Customer Success and Product. In the near term you will also direct an outside agency engaged to add launch and content horsepower, with the explicit goal of bringing that capability in-house.
What success looks like
By 6 months: the platform messaging architecture exists and is in use by sales and marketing; our launch system is defined, AI-assisted end to end, and has run at least two launches; the field says it is enabled on the current portfolio; your team is staffed and operating with clear ownership by pillar; NADA product marketing plan is locked.
By 12 months: NADA launches executed to plan; the CRM-to-engagement-platform narrative is visible in analyst, press and customer language; enablement runs as a system rather than a scramble; product managers are producing better briefs and positioning because you taught them how; the product marketing team is visibly the most AI-fluent function in the company and other teams are borrowing its workflows; the agency dependency has been replaced with internal capability.
Who we are looking for
You will report to the Chief Product & Business Officer and sit on the product leadership team alongside the VP Product, the AI Labs lead and the Head of Product Operations. Two product marketing managers will report to you on day one, with room to grow the team as the pillars scale.
What you will own
Positioning and narrative. Build and maintain the messaging architecture for the platform and each of its pillars: the umbrella story, the per-department stories, and the proof that connects them. Lead the multi-year narrative evolution from CRM to AI Engagement Platform, and make it land with three very different audiences: the owner-operator of one store, the centralized buying group running 5 to 15 rooftops, and the enterprise group with a CFO in the room.
Launches. Design and run our new product introduction system: launch tiers, the artifacts each tier gets, who does what, and how we measure whether the launch worked. Build it AI-first, so that a monthly agent cadence produces a full set of launch assets without a monthly scramble. Then run the big ones yourself. NADA Show (February, Orlando) is the industry's Dreamforce and our largest launch moment of the year; you will own the product marketing plan for it.
Commercial enablement. Make sales, account management, customer success and onboarding fully ready to sell and support what we ship: positioning docs, discovery frameworks, competitive battlecards, demo narratives, objection handling, pricing and packaging talk tracks. Build the feedback loop from the field (Gong, win/loss, DC20, reference customers) back into the message, and use AI to make that loop continuous rather than quarterly: agents that mine calls for objections, generate first-draft battlecards from competitive signals, and keep enablement current as the product changes.
AI, explained to people who are tired of hearing about AI. Dealers have been pitched "AI" for a decade. Our agents actually do the work. Own how we talk about AI to a pragmatic, ROI-driven buyer without hype, and give the company a point of view on the agentic future of dealership software that competitors have to respond to.
Voice of the buyer. Sit with dealers, listen to sales calls, attend DC20, ride along with account managers. Product marketing here is written from the customer, not from other product marketers' decks.
The team and the discipline. Lead and grow the product marketing team. Coach product managers on how to use product marketing as leverage: how to write a brief, how to think about positioning before the roadmap is locked, how to run a launch. Teach the company what good looks like, then systematize it.
An AI-native way of working. Model it yourself and teach it to others. Build the agents, skills and workflows that let a small team operate like a large one: research synthesis, message testing, asset generation, enablement upkeep, competitive monitoring. Set the standard for how product marketers here use AI, coach your team and your PM partners to that standard, and be honest about where the tools fall short and human judgment has to do the work.
Cross-functional partnership. Work as one team with Marketing (brand, demand and events), Sales, Customer Success and Product. In the near term you will also direct an outside agency engaged to add launch and content horsepower, with the explicit goal of bringing that capability in-house.
What success looks like
By 6 months: the platform messaging architecture exists and is in use by sales and marketing; our launch system is defined, AI-assisted end to end, and has run at least two launches; the field says it is enabled on the current portfolio; your team is staffed and operating with clear ownership by pillar; NADA product marketing plan is locked.
By 12 months: NADA launches executed to plan; the CRM-to-engagement-platform narrative is visible in analyst, press and customer language; enablement runs as a system rather than a scramble; product managers are producing better briefs and positioning because you taught them how; the product marketing team is visibly the most AI-fluent function in the company and other teams are borrowing its workflows; the agency dependency has been replaced with internal capability.
Who we are looking for
- 12+ years in B2B software marketing with deep product marketing roots, including 4+ years leading product marketers; you have built or rebuilt a product marketing function, not just inherited one.
- You have taken a company through a single-product to multi-product or platform transition and owned the positioning work that came with it.
- Player-coach by temperament. You can present to a CEO in the morning and write the battlecard yourself that afternoon, and you do not need a large team before you can be effective.
- You bring patterns. You know what a good launch framework, messaging hierarchy, enablement program and competitive practice look like, and you can install a working version in your first quarter and improve it from there.
- You have marketed AI, data or platform products to buyers who are not technologists, and you can talk credibly about how AI changes what the product is and how it should be positioned.
- You are AI-native in how you work. You already use AI daily for research, drafting, analysis and asset production; you have built at least a few of your own agents, prompts or automations rather than only using what came in the box; and you have taught a team to work this way. You will be asked to show this, not describe it.
- You write clearly and quickly. Strategy that cannot be written down is not strategy.
- You have sold into both an SMB-style motion and a true enterprise motion, and you understand how the message changes across them.
- Executive presence with low ego. Comfortable disagreeing with executives, comfortable being wrong in public, comfortable in a company that is humble, fast and consensus-leaning.
- Experience in a PE- or growth-backed company where the plan is clear and the clock is real is a plus.
Nice to have: automotive retail or dealer software experience, vertical SaaS, category creation or redefinition, pricing and packaging, analyst relations. If you do not know auto retail yet, we will teach you the industry; bring the judgment and the appetite to learn it fast.
Practicalities
Practicalities
- Location: remote within the US. We operate on East Coast hours. Expect to be at our St. Louis headquarters roughly every six weeks and at major industry events (NADA, DC20, select conferences).
- Compensation: base salary range of $[225,000] to $[275,000], plus an annual performance bonus, with final level and placement set by experience and location. Full benefits including medical, dental, vision, 401(k) and paid time off.
- Start: as soon as we find the right person. This is an active search and the hiring manager will move quickly.
Our process
- Conversation with the Chief Product & Business Officer (hiring manager).
- Conversations with the CEO and the VP Product.
- A working session: you bring a point of view on our positioning and one launch, and you show us how you actually work with AI to get there. We react together. No busywork; this is the interview you will remember.
- Panel with commercial and marketing leadership, then references.
Benefits
- Paid Time Off
- Nine (9) Paid Holidays
- 401(k) plus employer match
- Health Insurance
- Flexible Spending Account
- Health Savings Account
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Short/Long-Term Disability Insurance
- Employer-paid Life Insurance
- Additional Voluntary Life Insurance
- Accident Insurance
- Critical Care Insurance
- Hospital Indemnity Insurance
- Employee Assistance Program
Equal Opportunity Statement:
DriveCentric is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other protected characteristics. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply.
DriveCentric is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other protected characteristics. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply.