BigCommerce is looking for an outstanding competitive strategy professional who will focus on understanding market trends and analyzing the competitive landscape to improve BigCommerce’s go-to-market strategy, advise our product roadmap and enable sales with the latest “how to win” messaging. As Director, Competitive Strategy, you will be an integral cross-functional partner to leadership, product, business, and corporate development, sales, and marketing. You’ll use your technical experience and savvy to evangelize and speak at industry events, conferences and to brief industry analysts. You will build processes to supervise the competitive landscape to provide regular strategic and useful insights to internal collaborators. You’ll bring your personal real-world experience in evaluating and/or implementing ecommerce platforms to drive improvements in our product roadmap and M&A strategy. In this role, you will positively influence the trajectory of an ecommerce industry leader by leading the competitive insights, strategy, and messaging.

Reporting to the VP, Product Marketing, our preferable candidate is someone with hands-on ecommerce experience, ideally coming from a digital commerce agency. In addition to experience with the BigCommerce platform, you have a strong familiarity with multiple SaaS and Headless commerce platforms (e.g., Magento, Salesforce, Shopify, commercetools, etc.) and how they position/compete/serve different types of merchant segments and use cases. We value a depth of personal experience observing different platforms and how they compete in sales, implement to varying degrees of success, and ultimately meet or fall short of merchant expectations. The ability to draw valuable insights and form impactful recommendations based on those experiences is essential to success in this role as you will use your technical background to identify portfolio gaps and synthesize key insights for product management and executive leadership on relevant technology advancements made by competitors. Ultimately, you possess a strong technical acuity in order to evaluate real product capabilities, and not just messaging to best advise our go-to-market strategy, segments and use cases. Strong candidates must possess technical competence in order to evaluate real product capabilities, and not just messaging.

What You’ll Do

• Use your competitive SaaS and Headless ecommerce platform experience to curate and iterate on competitive feature gaps which advise P&E on roadmap needs and Business & Corporate Development on potential M&A opportunities.
• You’ll combine your hands-on experience with competitive research and analysis to build winning competitive strategies for marketing and sales.
• Complete research through different channels including agency partners, direct conversations with merchants, industry analysts, and publicly available information, to deliver useful competitive updates and recommendations to continuously improve our ecommerce leadership.
• You’ll use your real-world understanding of ecommerce technology trends product capabilities to find opportunities that will differentiate and influence successful go-to-market plans, industry segments targeting, use cases, and overall product strategies.
• Under your leadership, you will champion and position BigCommerce as a “Leader” in industry analyst reports for Digital Commerce such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Forrester Wave and IDC Marketscape etc.
• You’ll use your compelling speaking skills combined with your ecommerce industry and product knowledge to evangelize “Why BigCommerce” at technology, industry, and partner events.
• You’ll share your competitive strategy knowledge and recommendations to help assist sales win in competitive situations and close opportunities.
• You’ll use your experience build and cultivate an award winning competitive strategy and intelligence program including competitive briefs, quarterly “competitive” points-of-view (POVs), product matrices, battle cards and content for different audiences (product teams, sales, pre-sales, marketing, executive team, partners) with the appropriate level of details.

You Have/Are:

• 8+ years of experience in ecommerce platform evaluations, recommendations, and/or implementation within an ecommerce agency or vendor.
• Additional experience valued: competitive intelligence, management consulting, research, product management, product marketing, or sales engineering.
• A deep love of commerce technology, ecommerce, and retail, and a strong competitive ethos to earn customer opportunities and success.
• You know how to investigate competitive capabilities and uncover competitive strategies and messaging and pricing, and how to use it to influence sales, marketing, and product roadmaps.
• Skilled in distilling down myriad sources of information, extracting key findings, and providing internal customers with “So What”- “Now What” context and strategic recommendations.
• Skilled diplomat with organizational savvy, extensive C-level interaction, and ability to adapt communications to a wide variety of audiences.
• A self-starter mentality who possesses critical thinking capabilities, intellectual curiosity, and creative problem-solving skills.
• Demonstrated success in public speaking on a variety of ecommerce technologies.
• Outstanding ability to be collaborative in a highly matrixed environment, influence without authority, stand out as a successful, objective, and strategic thought partner.
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills with a proven track record to synthesize large amounts of data and content into thoughtful, useful insights and strategies.
• Strong project management and organizational skills.