Product Marketing Lead

About Rec

Think about the last time you tried to book a tennis court. Or sign your kid up for a swim lesson. Or find an open rec league that actually fits your schedule. You probably ended up on a website that looked like it was built in 2003, or even worse, filled out a piece of paper.

$3T is spent on recreation globally, and it's built on a completely fragmented system that's largely untouched by technology.

At Rec (recreation.ai), we're using AI to change that: reimagining how the world plays, participates in community, and gets active. Our vision is simple: more recreation for everyone. We sit at a rare intersection, a consumer product loved by everyday players and an enterprise platform trusted by the organizations that power recreation.

We're a small team with firepower. Our founders were among the first few hundred at Uber, then led teams at The Athletic and MasterClass. The rest of the team combines builders from Google, Microsoft, Strava, Hipcamp, and Airbnb.

People join Rec for two reasons: you want to build AI that gets people back in the real world, and you want to work with really smart people.

About The Role

Rec is looking for a Product Marketing Lead to own how we explain what we've actually built, to different buyers, in a category that AI is rewriting right now. Reporting to the Head of Revenue, you own positioning, messaging, launches, competitive strategy, pricing and packaging input, and the proof that makes an Account Executive credible.

This is the marketing seat closest to the product, and it's a technical one. Rec sells to Parks & Recreation directors inside public agencies, where the path runs through procurement, budget calendars, and council approval, and to private operators (racquet and sports facilities, golf, ice, camps, membership clubs) where a GM or owner decides in weeks. Same platform, two buying motions, two vocabularies. Your first job is to stop us from talking to both of them in one voice.

You'll need to go deep on the product itself, not just the story around it. That means sitting with Product and Engineering, understanding how registration, memberships, facility booking, payments, and our AI workflows actually behave for an agency running hundreds of programs a season, and building positioning that holds up in a technical review against incumbents these buyers have used for fifteen years. Writing is table stakes here. Judgment about what to say, to whom, and why it wins is the job.

You're building this function, and today that means doing the work yourself. There is no product marketing team to inherit. You'll run the customer interviews, the competitive teardowns, the messaging work, and the launch plans personally, and use freelancers or agencies where they genuinely extend your capacity. If the function earns headcount, you'll be the one who scopes and hires it. We're hiring at this level for judgment and pattern recognition, not for span of control.

This is also not a demand generation role. Growth Marketing owns the campaigns, the channels, ABM execution, marketing operations, and the pipeline number. You own the positioning, the proof, and the assets those campaigns run on, and whether the story is right in the first place.

What You'll Own

• Segment positioning: Own distinct, tested positioning and messaging for Parks & Recreation and for Private Rec operators, down to the persona level (director, program manager, GM, facility operator), so Sales stops translating on the fly.

• The AI narrative: Turn Rec AI from a category word into concrete, defensible claims about workflow change and time saved. Practitioners don't buy "AI," they buy getting their Sunday back, and the messaging needs to prove it.

• Launches: Run go-to-market for new product and AI releases end to end: positioning, naming, pricing input, enablement, launch assets, internal readiness, and a real post-launch read on whether it moved anything.

• Competitive and win/loss: Build and maintain Rec's competitive picture against legacy recreation software incumbents. Run win/loss interviews, own battlecards and objection handling, and feed what you learn back to Product, not just Sales.

• Pricing and packaging: Partner with Revenue and Product on how Rec is packaged and priced across both segments, including how AI capability is packaged as the market moves toward usage and outcome-based models. This is a seat at that table, not a review pass at the end.

• Sales enablement architecture: Own the deck, one-pager, proposal, and RFP content system that Sales and Growth pull from, modular by market, persona, and stage. Own whether it gets used, not just whether it exists.

• Customer proof: Turn real deployments into case studies, proof points, and reference stories, and keep a library that ABM, events, and live deals can pull from directly.

• Product partnership: Work with Product and Engineering early enough to influence what gets built and how it gets framed, and bring market and buyer evidence into roadmap conversations.

Who You Are

• 10+ years in B2B product marketing, including time at a company small enough that you were the person doing the work, not directing it. We care more about what you've owned than where you've owned it.

• You've built or substantially rebuilt a product marketing function, and you can describe what you put in place first, what you deliberately skipped, and what you'd do differently.

• Technically curious and product-fluent. You can get into a product deeply enough to explain it to a skeptical operator, hold your own with engineers, and spot when a claim won't survive a demo.

• You've owned positioning for more than one buyer or segment and can show how you kept them distinct without fragmenting the company's story.

• You've run launches end to end and can talk honestly about what worked, what didn't, and how you measured it.

• You've been in the room on pricing and packaging decisions and can point to a call you influenced and why.

• Strong writer across formats: messaging docs, sales decks, web copy, case studies. Clear beats clever.

• Comfortable interviewing customers and lost prospects directly. A lot of your best input arrives as a messy phone call, not a research report.

• A self-starter who works well without structure and is energized, not insulted, by a role where you build the function before you staff it.

• Bonus: vertical SaaS, public sector or procurement-driven sales, AI product marketing, or experience replacing entrenched legacy software.

Our Values

• Be Relentless. Move fast. Own it. Ship real value early and often.

• Win Together. Speak up, go beyond the boundaries of your role. That's how we win.

• Take Pride. Treat this like it's yours, because it is.

Pay & Benefits

• Compensation: $160,000 - $200,000 base + meaningful equity (final offer will be based on your background, experience and skillset)

• Benefits: Flexible PTO, top-tier health/dental/vision, and a 401(k) plan to support your future.

• Work location: San Francisco, hybrid, in-office most days at our FiDi SF office.