IT Product Manager at Ford® in Dearborn, MI

Job description

This role owns and leads the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for user-facing applications, with a strong emphasis on user experience (UX) design, functionality, cross product integrations, and the development of intuitive and engaging front-end solutions. This Product Manager is the voice of the end user, ensuring that product development aligns with user needs and delivers exceptional functionality and usability. The role also ensures agency and contracted team members understand and complete assigned work. Product Strategy & Vision: Own and manage the Global Safety and Ergonomics Tool (GSET) Product map. Own and manage the Global Medical Employee Data (GMED) Product map. Define and communicate the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for front-end applications, ensuring alignment with broader organizational digital strategies. Conduct comprehensive research, analysis, and industry trend analysis to identify opportunities and inform product decisions. Develop business cases for new features, sagas, or epics, focusing on user desirability and business viability. User Experience (UX) Leadership: Sign off and approve UX design from supplier's Designer. Own the end-to-end user experience of the product, managing the translation of business goals into user-centric designs. Lead and support a dedicated Product Designer, providing design leadership, mentorship, and first-level review of visual (UI) and interactive (UX) designs (information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, user flows). Discover and frame user problems through stakeholder interviews, user interviews, concept testing, and usability testing. Ideate, test, and iterate solutions through brainstorming and lean experiments, gathering direct user feedback on proposed designs and features. Privacy & Compliance: Leads and owns the Ford Privacy process for the health and safety PDO. Oversee Ford Privacy set up, review and approval for global and regional privacy requirements. Ensure DRIs are identified for regional and global reviewers/approvers. Technical Collaboration: Collaborate closely with software engineers/developers/architects and other integrated services/sources to discuss development feasibility and review visual/interaction designs. Maintain an understanding of the technical architecture of the user interface and front-end applications. Product Development & Delivery (Front End): CO-Define the Release Plan & Process. Coordination, implementation, and management of Gemba sessions. Ensure user stories and tasks are identified and provided to the Project Managers for Jira assignment. Lead and support requirements gathering and refinement by working directly with end users, other ET application teams, and internal business partner teams. Translate requirements into clear, concise, and testable sagas, epics, and user stories/tasks (e.g., Gherkin format), owning their definition and acceptance criteria. Signing off/approving on supplier written sagas, epics, user stories/tasks and test cases. Champion Agile PDO methodology, actively participating in and contributing to agile ceremonies (e.g., sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives). Prioritize deliverables and maintain a healthy product backlog in Jira, focusing on user-facing features and improvements. Own the creation and management of agile ceremony meetings for sprint prioritization, release management, and release communications. Collaborate with business partners, engineering and design teams to define MVPs and ensure technical feasibility and user desirability. Lead and manage User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and ensure product readiness for release from a user perspective. Participate in QA Testing that is lead by the Testing Engineer Stakeholder Management & Communication: Foster cross-functional collaboration with engineering, integration partners, design, and business stakeholders, ensuring clear communication and alignment on front-end product development. Communicate product strategy, roadmap, a