Director, Product Marketing & Competitive Intelligence

Lantern is the specialty care platform for surgery, cancer, and infusions. We're looking for a Director, Product Marketing & Competitive Intelligence to own how Lantern understands its market and its competitors — and turn that understanding into commercial advantage. This is a senior level individual contributor role that owns the function end to end.

You're a researcher first, curious by nature, always chasing an angle nobody assigned you. You pull signal from everywhere — Reddit threads, podcasts, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, trade press, HBR — and you know the rhythm of when Mercer, Aon, and WTW drop their annual reports well enough to have it synthesized before a competitor has even opened theirs.

You're just as strong live as you are behind a screen. You know how to run an interview: when to push, and when to sit in silence and let someone fill it. You can go deep in the weeds on a niche detail, then step back and know exactly what an executive needs to hear to make a call. You use AI to move faster through all of it, and you own your domain without needing anyone to check in on you.

Location: Dallas, TX or New York, NY - Hybrid schedule (3x in office per week)

Responsibilities:

• Own competitive and market intelligence for the company — what we track, how we gather it, and how it's used
• Continuously scan public, social, and industry sources — news, social platforms, forums, podcasts, analyst/consultant reports, trade journals — to catch signal early
• Own and evolve our competitive alerting infrastructure: what we monitor, at what alert level, and how raw signal becomes a field-ready teardown
• Design and commission original research — paid surveys and studies — when public and internal data can't answer the question
• Own and run focus groups, advisory-panel research, and other external research relationships as needed
• Run structured interviews with customers, prospects, and the field to understand why we win and lose
• Own fast, ongoing insight delivery to the field — battlecards, real-time competitive alerts — in formats they can pick up and use immediately
• Build and maintain the competitive response playbook: a pre-agreed plan for whether and how Lantern responds to specific competitor moves
• Establish a commercial confidence baseline and track quarter-over-quarter improvement in how the field sells against our primary competitors
• Produce a quarterly report for executive leadership on trends, patterns, and forward-looking recommendations
• Partner with internal data and content teams so findings become narrative others can use, not a silo
• Partner with enablement to train and certify the field on tone and delivery of depositioning and objection handling

Requirements:

• 7+ years in competitive intelligence, market research, or qualitative research, with direct customer and prospect contact
• Healthcare or complex B2B employer-healthcare experience required
• Track record of owning a domain independently — deciding what to track and what to ignore
• Strong live interview skills: can read a room, probe, and know when to back off
• Moves fluidly between deep technical detail and executive-level strategic framing
• Self-directed research instinct across traditional and non-traditional sources
• Concrete, specific AI fluency — not a checkbox answer
• Credibility with the field: can get the truth from a seller after a lost deal and turn it into something they'll actually use

Strong Candidates will:

• Have worked in a PE-sponsored, results-oriented culture and are comfortable with compressed timelines and shifting priorities
• Have built a function from zero rather than inherited one, and can operate without a playbook
• Drive adoption across a distributed commercial organization without formal authority
• Communicate in whatever register the audience needs: a two-line alert for the field, a one-page point of view for leadership, a full readout for executives
• Tell leadership what it doesn't want to hear, and hold the line on findings under pressure from senior stakeholders
• Set their own priorities against a stated outcome, and say what they're deprioritizing rather than quietly dropping it

Benefits

Compensation: Base salary range: $185,000 - $200,000, depending on relevant experience, location, and qualifications.