A lighting designer finishes a show in one piece of software. The visualizer needs another file. The console wants its own vocabulary. Somewhere between the first idea and the first cue, information about fixtures, positions, geometry, and control modes can be dropped, flattened, or typed again. The audience will never applaud a clean data handoff, but everyone backstage notices when it fails. Jeremy Powell has built much of his career in this unglamorous territory: the small gap between tools where a good design starts doing clerical work.
Powell is the chief marketing officer of Vectorworks, the Maryland-based maker of design and building-information-modeling software used across architecture, landscape, and entertainment. He works from the greater Philadelphia area and has been at the company since 2002. That date matters. More than two decades is long enough to watch a desktop application become a platform, a box of software become a service, and a product pitch about features turn into a strategic argument about connections.
He did not arrive at the top of a finished marketing machine. Powell was the original member of Vectorworks' Product Marketing Department. His early public trail shows the practical work of the role: answering entertainment designers' questions, pointing customers toward training, and explaining how cloud processing and mobile devices might remove the waiting from design offices. Product marketing, in that version, had very little perfume. It meant knowing where the user got stuck and being able to explain the next useful move.
The department of one becomes a listening post
Vectorworks serves an awkwardly varied table. Architects model buildings. Landscape professionals think in sites, grading, planting, and seasons. Entertainment designers work with stages, trusses, moving lights, video walls, and deadlines that arrive with a crowd. The underlying software may share a name, but the people using it do not share a single working day. A product marketer in this setting cannot survive on a generic description of creativity. The details are the job.
Powell's company biography says he worked consistently with customers to understand their workflows and keep the software moving with the industry. That sentence sounds tidy. The work underneath it is not. A workflow is a chain of habits, shortcuts, partner products, import formats, technical limitations, and promises made to the next person. Changing one link can save an hour or spoil a handoff. The marketer becomes part interpreter and part cartographer, drawing the route that product teams and customers believe they are already taking.
“What we create for you should never dictate your design, rather it should make your process of designing simpler.”Jeremy Powell, introducing the Vectorworks development roadmap
That line is the cleanest statement of Powell's public philosophy. It is also a severe test for software. Design tools have opinions baked into menus, file structures, defaults, and the sequence of clicks they demand. A feature can be technically capable and still boss the user around. Powell's preferred standard is more humane: carry the complexity, preserve the intent, and leave authorship with the designer.
In 2018, after sixteen years at Vectorworks, Powell was promoted to its executive team. By then he was also helping frame a problem larger than one company's interface.
Three companies walk into a file format
Entertainment lighting had a translation problem. A lighting fixture is not merely a bulb in a drawing. Its digital description can include geometry, weight, color systems, movement, control channels, connectors, and operating modes. Generic formats were poor couriers for that information. Move a show among design software, previsualization, and the lighting console, and the same device might need to be mapped again. Multiply the nuisance by hundreds of fixtures and a very modern production begins to resemble a monk copying manuscripts.
The handoff Powell wanted to simplify
geometry + intent
scene + behavior
fixtures + cues
GDTF describes the device. MVR carries the rig and its linked device data. The useful trick is preserving meaning between stops.
Vectorworks joined MA Lighting and Robe Lighting to develop the General Device Type Format, or GDTF, and My Virtual Rig, or MVR. Their coalition was as important as their code. Powell recalled that earlier attempts had failed because one manufacturer tried to make the standard happen, leaving everyone else suspicious of who would control it. This time, three familiar brands represented different pieces that needed to connect.
When Powell presented the formats at the 2018 Vectorworks Design Summit, he said users had almost given up. The response he kept hearing was “Finally.” Designer Teresa Hull offered an even better description: a community service project. Powell liked the phrase because it captured the wager. None of the companies had to do this. They chose a shared language because the missing language was making everybody's product less useful.
“We see GDTF and MVR as a gateway to unifying the industry.”Jeremy Powell on open entertainment formats
The formats separate two useful jobs. GDTF provides a common description of the device. MVR packages a design and its linked device information for the next application or collaborator. The standard continues to evolve, and Powell remains publicly connected to that work: a January 2026 roster lists him as an active Vectorworks representative in ESTA's Control Protocols Working Group.
Standards work is an odd extension of marketing only if marketing is reduced to promotion. In practice, an open format needs a story that rival companies can accept, manufacturers can implement, and working designers can test against a bad Tuesday afternoon. The vocabulary must be precise; the invitation has to be broad. Powell's contribution sits in that overlap between product direction and coalition building.
The power of one, plus the many
The same instinct appears in Powell's account of the Vectorworks Partner Network. The company had long emphasized the economy and coherence of an all-in-one design application. By 2022, Powell was making a more nuanced case. An integrated product could remain the center while specialist hardware, rendering software, manufacturer content, and other services improved what happened at the edges.
He called the product a design hub. It is a helpful phrase because a hub is valuable for what it contains and for where it lets you go. Vectorworks developed technology to lower the barrier for synchronization and plug-in work. Each new partner integration could then feed knowledge back into the pipeline, making the next connection easier. Powell said the first goal was to identify partners able to innovate and provide a better solution together.
From “everything in one product” to “one strong product that knows how to cooperate.”
This is a mature answer to a familiar software temptation. Building everything offers control, until the desire for control outruns the customer's need. Integrating everything offers choice, until the experience becomes a drawer full of adapters. Powell's middle course keeps a point of view at the center and opens the perimeter. The test is not the length of the partner list. It is whether the connection gives a designer time or confidence back.
A roadmap is a promise in pencil
Powell also helped bring this thinking into public view. In 2020 he introduced Vectorworks' development-roadmap strategy with a plain explanation of where the company was investing: quality and performance, interface work, graphics modernization, BIM workflows, and the file formats required for collaboration. Publishing a roadmap does not eliminate uncertainty. It makes uncertainty discussable.
That kind of transparency needs an internal culture willing to be seen thinking. Powell credited former chief executive Biplab Sarkar as a mentor who strengthened his confidence in the worldwide brand and marketing vision. Sarkar played a significant role in conceiving the public roadmap. When Sarkar retired in early 2025, Powell's brief tribute was about confidence rather than technique, a glimpse of how strategy travels between people before it appears on a webpage.
Away from the product announcements, Powell's public record has another recurring word: service. His LinkedIn profile lists seven years helping the Home and School Association at Our Mother of Consolation Parish School, including five as treasurer, one as vice president, and one as president. It also records parish council work, support for Commonwealth Youthchoirs, and a board role with environmental nonprofit GreenAllies. The record is specific and pleasantly unshowy: budgets, plans, trips, stages, communities.
The professional version of that disposition is easy to spot. A standard nobody was obliged to build. A forum meant to keep discussion public. A roadmap intended to show customers where the work was heading. A partner network judged by the quality of what companies could make together. Powell's career contains plenty of marketing, but its most interesting artifacts are pieces of connective tissue.
The useful absence
In May 2026, Powell commented on Vectorworks' ISE recognition for an LED video wall tool. He described the feature in terms of accuracy and confidence for people planning complex LED environments. The vocabulary had changed since the cloud articles of 2012 and the GDTF presentation of 2018, but the measure had not. The technology earns its keep when a working designer can move faster without becoming less certain.
A good handoff is remembered mainly by its absence. The geometry arrives. The fixture behaves. The collaborator opens the file and continues. No emergency conversion, no scavenger hunt for a missing mode, no heroic late-night retyping. The show begins, the building gets documented, the landscape takes shape. Software has done something difficult and had the manners not to make itself the main character.
Powell began as the lone product marketer explaining a complex tool to several kinds of designer. More than two decades later, his public work still comes down to explanation, only the scale has widened. He explains customers to product teams, one application to another, a roadmap to a market, and the logic of cooperation to companies accustomed to guarding their edges. His career makes a quiet proposition: sometimes the most persuasive thing a technology company can say is, “You may continue.”