Job Description
The Navigation team are proud builders of solutions to challenges in the routing space for industries like auto, logistics, outdoors and more. We solve complex geospatial data problems and leverage algorithms and statistical analysis for use cases ranging from turn-by-turn navigation, to delivery route planning for fleets of thousands of trucks. Our services are at the heart of the operations of our customers’ businesses. We get people and products from start to finish effectively and on time, whether it’s delivering meals or going on a road trip. Our customers are primarily developers, like us.
We're looking for a Technical Product Manager for the Mapbox Japan office to partner with local Mapboxers and a wide variety of customers and internal stakeholders. You'll drive key product decisions, manage customer priorities, lead customer conversations, and launch new features. This role will be the glue between the Japanese market and the global Mapbox organization. You will lead a small team of engineers in Japan to help drive localization efforts and launch new features, capabilities and products in Japan.
We're looking for a creative thinker fascinated by what our customers need and where they — and the team — are getting stuck. You like to experiment, but love finishing projects even more. You know how to communicate, collaborate, and think about software as a collective effort. You have strong opinions, loosely held. You keep an open mind and welcome debates that surface multiple perspectives. Once a decision is made, you put your personal preferences aside and commit and execute together.
Responsibilities
- Work with US/European Product and Engineering teams to align on priority and scope of feature requirements that are unique to the Japan marketplace
- Uncover and understand customer needs and translate them into requirements
- Ability to work well with internal teams, including developers, engineers, architects, quality assurance, and operations.
- Ensure requirements are fully understood and that implementation plans match expectations
- Follow competitors and conduct capability analysis regularly
- Provide internal and customer training on how to use the product
- Answer incoming questions about the product and its capabilities
- Assess and address technical risks
- Serve as a product evangelist and subject matter expert to the technical/developer community in Japan
- Use database queries to analyze performance indicators, evaluate experiments, etc.
- Define success criteria for testing and product acceptance.
- Facilitate the creation and maintenance of proper product documentation.
- Set KPIs and other metrics for measuring success of our products. Pull these metrics, analyze results, and synthesize learnings to support continuous software improvement.
- Translate strategy into a tactical execution plan
- Regularly engage our customers via video conversations, emails, and in person visits to understand their needs, as well as validate our proposed solutions.
- Build up and share product knowledge across teams, contributing to best practices that grow the entire product team within Mapbox.
- Uphold a culture of collaboration, transparency, creativity, inclusion, and data-driven decisions.
Qualifications
What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role
- 5+ years of proven ability to design and develop sophisticated, innovative, efficient, and durable solutions to complex technological and business problems.
- Professional experience as an engineering manager or technical product manager with people management experience of Japanese employees in Japan.
- An analytical approach: you have strong SQL skills or a willingness to learn, and always use data to properly evaluate the success or failure of features, as well as guide your next steps.
- Tolerance for ambiguity and intrinsic motivation: you gravitate towards chaos. You can weed out what’s important in highly ambiguous spaces, and juggle a variety of competing priorities. Even so, you are proactive around driving solutions to completion.
- Strong English written and verbal communication skills: you can talk and write about complex ideas concisely to a wide audience and walk through decisions with teammates and collaborators. We work backwards, which means that we start product development by writing an FAQ. Writing documents early on clarifies how the world will see the product - not just how we think about it internally.
- You have a desire to share your expertise through documentation, mentorship, and discussion.
- Devotion to systematization, repeatability, efficiency, and measurement: processes, data, and nailing the details are key to how we work.
- Empathy and collaboration: you communicate effectively with others and earn credibility quickly. You’re comfortable giving and receiving feedback in the open. You have a desire to work with individuals with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
- Solid business/strategic intuition: you are able to identify the right business opportunities, make prioritization calls, and devise clear action plans.
- Strong preference for direct experience in navigation, automotive or logistics markets
- Both Japanese and English fluency are strict requirements
What We Value
In addition to our core values, which are not unique to this position and are necessary for Mapbox leaders:
- We value high-performing creative individuals who dig into problems and opportunities.
- We believe in individuals being their whole selves at work. We commit to this through supportive health care, parental leave, flexibility for the things that come up in life, and innovating on how we think about supporting our people.
- We emphasize an environment of teaching and learning to equip employees with the tools needed to be successful in their function and the company.
- We strongly believe in the value of growing a diverse team and encourage people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply.
About the Company
Mapbox is building a live location platform. Our maps represent the ever-evolving world, accessing, aggregating, and adapting anonymous data from millions of sensors and phones in real-time. Mapbox has the exciting opportunity to power devices and products across the next frontier in location-based data. Whether you’re watching the delivery of your grocery order on Instacart, tracking your personal best mile on Strava, sending snaps on Snapchat, monitoring your gas budget on Metromile, or checking today’s forecast on The Weather Channel, Mapbox is the location and maps within those apps. We’re changing how people move by live-mapping the world.