Vice President Product Management & Marketing

Position Overview:      

The role is responsible for portfolios in both Zeolyst and Silcat. The Vice President of Product Management & Marketing has the responsibility to manage the business processes around planning, developing, launching new products and for managing the profitability of the core portfolio of products. It takes a strategic view of the profitability of the current portfolio identifying opportunities to improve profitability, building models and forward-looking tools that support decision making and driving actions across commercial, supply chain and operations to improve profitability.  

**Open to someone local or along the East Coast only**

What you will be doing:

Product Management

• Partner with SBU leaders to determine maximum price & margin potential for each product line, benchmarking performance and driving action to beat benchmarks
• Build and implement new tools to create transparency on contribution and gross margin profitability at product family, product and account level. Create transparency on underperforming products and accounts and drive actions to improve profitability
• Work with Purchasing and FP&A to create forward looking (6months ) cost models. Develop tools that enable fluctuations in variable costs to be quickly translated into necessary price increases
• Lead the development of business cases for capacity expansions / additions, ensuring timely approval, project management of implementation and post project reviews proving investments achieved key metrics
• Partner with all relevant functions to ensure new products are established / set up following defined protocol, are legally compliant, trials completed, forecasts established and achieve business case KPI’s
• Lead portfolio optimization / rationalization / sunsetting strategy for products
• Accountable for partnering and communicating Zeolyst JV partner 5-year demand planning, asset utilization and investment needs  
• Participate in global SIOP meetings, addressing potential road blocks to on-time, accurate shipments to customers.
• Lead shortage / Force Majure product allocation assessment, gain approval from legal and manage implementation

Marketing 

• Lead stage gate process, ensuring business cases for new projects are robustly developed / challenged, presented for approval, and deliver against timeline and KPI’s agreed (note leader of each stage will change according to Gate needs)
• Partner with Commercial and Technical teams for new product introductions ensuring value propositions are developed, pricing strategy is set, and marketing activities complete prior to launch  
• Working with Business Development teams, understanding market conditions, competitor developments and potential new product development opportunities by assessing and communicating market intelligence, conducting market research and analysis to support planning and decision making
  • Develop and own brand strategy for each Zeolyst and Silcat product family including:

• Establish and maintain appropriate product literature
• Build and execute advertisement and social media strategy
• Define KPI’s to measure success, review performance & adjusting for learnings
• Accountable for conference and event planning, ensuring brand requirements are achieved, participation achieves goals and reviews of learnings shared

• Provide expert input in to M&A opportunities, helping build business cases and presentations necessary to gain Board approval

Required Qualifications:

• MBA preferred. BS degree in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering required.
• Significant accomplished experience in commercial and business growth ideally within petro-chemical, chemical and materials manufacturing companies will be considered.
• 15 years total career experience including:
  • Commercial, product management and marketing experience in chemical/materials    manufacturing environment
  • Highly influential, able to sell ideas and concepts to gain the buy-in of others
• Strong analytical skills, comfortable analyzing data and preparing models that can be used by commercial teams to make decisions
  • Ideally SAP literate
  • Strong Excel skills
  • Demonstrated project management skills
• Evidence of significant customer facing sales experience
  • Solid knowledge of catalyst markets, ideal.
  • Developing and growing a wide variety of customer accounts highly preferred.
  • International sales experience desirable
• Demonstrated experience introducing new products and building strategies to enter new markets
• Composed character, professional presence and confidence:

• To discuss, listen and lead the commercial team.
• To present ideas clearly to corporate executives
• Self-motivation, ability to energetically work as team leader, contributor  
• Detailed focus, ability to analyze significant quantities of information quickly and produce concise summaries with actions – able to see the wood for the trees concept

**Ability to travel domestically and internationally 50% of the time**