Group Product Manager, Transformation and Product Ops at Ford Motor Company

Job description

Launched in 2023, Integrated Services creates and markets new customer experiences by integrating hardware, software and services across Ford Blue, Model e and Ford Pro. These products and services allow Ford's retail and commercial customers to customize their vehicles like never before with OTA (over-the-air)-driven experiences that grow better over time. Ford is developing leadership at the forefront of connected, digital platforms that will revolutionize every aspect of how vehicles function, the way people interact with them, and the value those vehicles provide. In this position... As the Group Product Manager, Product Operations and Transformation within Ford Pro Intelligence, you will own one of the most important shifts in how the organization works. To keep its software advantage compounding, Ford Pro is evolving how its product organization plans, operates, and delivers, moving toward a more decentralized and accountable operating model supported by modern ways of working. The aim is to let smaller, empowered teams ship real value faster, while leadership keeps a clear view of progress and tradeoffs across the portfolio. This role makes that shift real on the ground. You will own the new operating model and lead the rhythms that make it stick, build and lead a matrixed product operations function, and set the cadence, metrics, and tooling standards the organization requires. You will also manage the squad(s) that build the shared tools and datasets that no single small team could build on its own. You will get teams trained, make sure the new process is understood and followed, surface what is working and what is not, and share what works across pods. At the same time, you will give leadership the deliverables a decentralized organization needs, including a coherent view of the roadmap, trustworthy metrics, visible dependencies, and clear executive readouts. This is a high ownership leadership role for someone who sets direction in ambiguity, earns influence by enabling senior product and engineering leaders rather than coordinating or chasing them, and stays close to the detail. Done well, it is the difference between a transformation that sticks and one that fades back to the old way of working. What you'll do... Matrixed Function Leadership & Directly Owned Team • Build, lead, mentor, and develop the product operations and transformation function, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement. This is a matrixed role owning processes, tooling, and best practice sharing across squads. • Own the operating model and portfolio governance as a matrixed function, with the decision rights to set cadence, metrics standards, and tooling standards across squads, backed by a budget. • Manage the directly owned team (built as needed) creating the shared tools: Conduct reviews, provide regular feedback, and create opportunities for professional growth, including hiring, onboarding, and training. • Over time this role is expected to morph and increasingly shift into a classic Group Product Manager role, owning the product side of one or more delivery squads, directly applying the learnings and practices consolidated in the product management and transformation side of this role. Operating Model Transformation • Drive the rollout of Ford Pro's Domain/Squad operating model, defining best practices for how squads are formed and working with Domain leads to define how ownership, dependencies, and accountability work in a decentralized structure. • Get deep into team operations so people are trained on the new process, understand it, and are following it, managing the change thoughtfully and with care for how teams experience it. • Find what is working and what is not across teams, codify best practices, and share them so improvements compound instead of staying trapped in one squad. AI Intensive Ways of Working • Support the adoption of AI intensive software and product practices, from AI assisted discovery, competitive research, and customer insight mining to faster, lower cost prototyping and delivery. • Partner with engineering and product leaders to find where AI skills and agentic workflows can remove overhead. Consolidate existing best practices and build the playbooks and enablement that make those practices repeatable. • Map AI adoption and delivery to true business value to inform planning and investment decisions and translate it into executive ready narratives and readouts. • Build toward automating the synthesis and reporting work that is manual today, including feedback aggregation, theme extraction from support tickets and reviews, release notes, experiment summaries, and dashboards. • Design, deploy, and govern the AI tooling that PMs and builders use, including approved AI prototyping and analysis tools. • Own the internal knowledge base and context layer that AI agents draw on, so AI gives consistent answers grounded in real Ford Pro data and keep data and instrumentation machine readable and clean enough for agents to operate on. • Define the guardrails: what can be auto shipped versus what needs review, how AI generated experiments are tracked, and where the data governance and IP and security boundaries sit. Shared Products, Tooling & Datasets • Own the work (and team as needed) that builds and operates shared products, tooling, and datasets no single team would build on its own, treating these as real products with owners, roadmaps, and users. • Build and maintain reusable, scalable LLM skills and agentic workflows that teams can deploy, rather than each pod reinventing them. • Prioritize the solution backlog to ensure we build high-impact, reusable solutions across teams. Product Operations & Delivery Cadence • Stand up the operating rhythms of a growing product organization, including roadmap and product reviews, planning rituals, cross squad syncs, and sharing forums, by defining the cadence and the expected content, so the organization stays coherent as it decentralizes. • Provide the tooling and standards that make inputs, dependencies, and decisions visible without manual chasing, status routing or program coordinating. (Note: These statuses and delivery of updates are owned by the squad leaders, outside of this role). • Set the standard for product tooling such as Jira/Atlassian and Jira Product Discovery (JPD) so roadmaps, backlogs, and tradeoffs are transparent and comparable across pods. Portfolio Visibility, Metrics & Executive Reporting • Build and own a coherent, low effort view of what is coming across squads, including what is shipping, what tradeoffs and judgment calls are being made, and how it ladders up to business value. • Define and govern the KPIs and outcome metrics that make a decentralized portfolio observable, and design the new tools and processes needed to manage roadmaps and tradeoffs at scale. Collaboration & Continuous Learning • Collaborate effectively with engineering teams, product teams, and business stakeholders, and present clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. • Stay close to emerging product operations practices, bring the best ideas back into Ford Pro, and help mature the broader product community of practice. What success looks like in the first year • A single, coherent view of the roadmap and metrics across pods that leadership trusts and uses, replacing manual and previous reporting solutions. • A defined and rising adoption rate for the new operating model and ways of working, measured across teams rather than simply launched. • AI adoption and delivery tied to business value in a way that informs the next round of planning and investment decisions. • Faster, lower overhead planning, with clear ownership and accountability in place of large, centrally coordinated planning events. • A developing product operations team and set of squad leads who can sustain the model, so the organization no longer depends on a single point of coordination. • At least one shared product, tool or dataset is live and used across multiple pods. You'll have... • Bachelor's degree, or equivalent experience. • 10+ years of experience in product management, product operations, transformation or program leadership role within a software or technology intensive organization. • 5+ years of experience in a leadership role, building and managing teams and direct reports. • A demonstrated track record installing new operating models and driving them to real adoption across multiple teams. • A strong sense of curiosity around and familiarity with AI tools as it relates to product management, design, and engineering. • Strong command of agile software delivery across Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe, and the rituals, metrics, and tooling that support it. • Deep familiarity with modern product management practice and the full product lifecycle, from discovery through delivery. • Experience defining KPIs and OKRs and building executive level reporting, roadmaps and portfolio governance. • The judgment to own ambiguity, set direction, and hold senior product and engineering leaders accountable, while still digging into the details. Even better, you may have... • Direct, recent product management experience and readiness to step into heavy support for needed squads, and/or eventually leading a group of squads. • Hands on experience embedding AI and agentic workflows into product and software development processes. • Experience developing or operating software for fleets, connected vehicles, telematics, or other operationally intensive B2B SaaS domains. • Experience with Jira Product Discovery (or similar) and modern product analytics tooling. • Lean and Lean Startup and human centered product development practice, and a continuous learning mindset. • MBA or equivalent, and relevant product or agile certifications. You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply! As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including: • Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage • Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up childcare and more • Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more • Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases • Tuition assistance • Established and active employee resource groups • Paid time off for individual and team community service • A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day • Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time. This position is a leadership level 5 and ranges from $148,800-$281,700. Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value. For more information on salary and benefits, click here: fordcareers.co Visa sponsorship is not available for this position. Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660. #LI-Remote #LI-RR3

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In this position...
What you'll do...
Matrixed Function Leadership & Directly Owned Team
Own the operating model and portfolio governance as a matrixed function, with the decision rights to set cadence, metrics standards, and tooling standards across squads, backed by a budget.
Manage the directly owned team (built as needed) creating the shared tools: Conduct reviews, provide regular feedback, and create opportunities for professional growth, including hiring, onboarding, and training.
Operating Model Transformation
Get deep into team operations so people are trained on the new process, understand it, and are following it, managing the change thoughtfully and with care for how teams experience it.
Find what is working and what is not across teams, codify best practices, and share them so improvements compound instead of staying trapped in one squad.
AI Intensive Ways of Working
Support the adoption of AI intensive software and product practices, from AI assisted discovery, competitive research, and customer insight mining to faster, lower cost prototyping and delivery.
Map AI adoption and delivery to true business value to inform planning and investment decisions and translate it into executive ready narratives and readouts.
Build toward automating the synthesis and reporting work that is manual today, including feedback aggregation, theme extraction from support tickets and reviews, release notes, experiment summaries, and dashboards.
Design, deploy, and govern the AI tooling that PMs and builders use, including approved AI prototyping and analysis tools.
Define the guardrails: what can be auto shipped versus what needs review, how AI generated experiments are tracked, and where the data governance and IP and security boundaries sit.
Shared Products, Tooling & Datasets
Own the work (and team as needed) that builds and operates shared products, tooling, and datasets no single team would build on its own, treating these as real products with owners, roadmaps, and users.
Build and maintain reusable, scalable LLM skills and agentic workflows that teams can deploy, rather than each pod reinventing them.
Prioritize the solution backlog to ensure we build high-impact, reusable solutions across teams.
Product Operations & Delivery Cadence
Set the standard for product tooling such as Jira/Atlassian and Jira Product Discovery (JPD) so roadmaps, backlogs, and tradeoffs are transparent and comparable across pods.
Portfolio Visibility, Metrics & Executive Reporting
Build and own a coherent, low effort view of what is coming across squads, including what is shipping, what tradeoffs and judgment calls are being made, and how it ladders up to business value.
Define and govern the KPIs and outcome metrics that make a decentralized portfolio observable, and design the new tools and processes needed to manage roadmaps and tradeoffs at scale.
Collaboration & Continuous Learning

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