Diesel Laptops is seeking an experienced Director of Product to lead our Software Product Management and UX groups as they expand, level-up, and deliver industry-disrupting, user-friendly solutions. We want you to help us ship big, bold, new ideas for an industry ready for change.
The Director of Product will be primarily responsible for supporting the SVP of Product in a Chief-of-Staff type role and leading a team of UX and Software Product Managers. We will work together to create software solutions that are user-oriented, value-driven, and data-informed.
To that end, the Director will play a pivotal part in developing our next generation of products. We are currently undertaking a massive transformation to best serve our Corporate Why: to make the lives and work of people in the commercial vehicle and equipment industry easier and more fulfilling. We will be utilizing microservices, establishing a data lake, and redefining the end user experience in a platform model. The Director will help envision, define, validate, and deliver this innovative future, while communicating about it in such a way that excites people to join us.
The Director will exercise a great deal of influence and autonomy in executing against these goals. You will be very visible throughout the company and with our external partners, since the position requires a great deal of communication, collaboration, and coordination. To thrive in this role, you will need to be thoughtful, considered, detail-oriented, and ready to learn fast. You will need to be curious, efficient, and ready to roll up your sleeves to get things done. And you will need to demonstrate transparency and purposefully communicate for clarity, alignment, and cohesion.
Personnel Management
- Manage a growing team of UX practitioners, UX research, UX writing, and software Product Managers.
- Foster collaboration, bridge-building, transparency, creativity, innovation, and team maturation. We want to create a high-performing, gelled team that enjoys working together, and that takes work.
- Ensure team members have clarity on goals, priorities, and purpose at all times.
- Prevent over-commitments, missed deadlines, and lack of alignment through frequent and effective communication both within the team and cross-functionally.
- Maintain, document, and evolve team processes, standards, artifact templates, best practices, and shared goals in support of continuous improvement and functional maturity.
- Collaborate with team members and the SVP of Product to establish career development plans and identify opportunities for growth.
- Work with the SVP of Product to refine and enforce team norms, and help generate and maintain onboarding content, and learning content and opportunities.
- Convey critical updates, ideas, and suggestions to the SVP of Product on a regular basis to protect team cohesion, alignment, and success.
Division Leadership
- Establish, maintain, and report on key performance metrics, product success metrics, and new goals at regular intervals to both the team and executive stakeholders.
- Facilitate and advance the development of user data monitoring and UX Research processes, insight mining, synthesization, and presentation of key findings to the company and key stakeholders.
- Build bridges, create and maintain cross-functional alignment toward well-understood shared goals, within the division and throughout the company.
- Evangelize and educate around Product Management, UX, and even Agile methodologies.
- Communicate with empathy and transparency, and help others do the same.
- Coordinate large initiatives, ad hoc requests, and long-running efforts to achieve division and corporate goals, even when those projects span multiple functional areas. You will have the support of the PMO and other leaders to accomplish these tasks.
Product & UX
- Demonstrate deep expertise in Product Management and at least some UX domain capabilities.
- Influence, define, validate, and deliver the strategic product vision at annual and quarterly intervals.
- Coordinate annual and quarterly roadmap efforts, including artifact templates and presentations.
- Develop business cases, explore product-market fit, and refine evaluation rubrics to aid in initiative prioritization; create templates and procedures to help Product Managers do the same.
- Plan UX design and research efforts to grow our repository of user and product data, and aid in synthesization and presentation of our insights.
- Shape the functionality, look, and feel of our products as we evolve them to their next stage.
- Participate in outbound product marketing and communication efforts by articulating value, target personas, user experience details, and nuances that our Marketing and UX Writing teams can use to create compelling messages.
- Build, refine, and manage product playbooks.
Preferred Skills & Experience
- Experience working directly as or deeply embedded with UX Design, Product Design, and UX Researchers.
- Certification, education, or extensive first-hand experience in project management principles, organizational behaviors, and/or change management.
- Proficiency with applicable work management technology and tools such as Jira.
- Experience with design system tools, such as Figma.
- Experience with user behavior tools, such as Pendo, Amplitude, or FullStory.
- Familiarity and experience with product-led growth methodologies and psychology-based product design
- A fondness for the chicken and the pig.
Preferred Knowledge/Education
- Roughly 12 years of product management experience or at least 10 years of experience in product design, Agile delivery, business analysis, data science, software engineering, or related field;
- Or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field and a minimum of 10 years of related experience;
- Or an advanced degree with a minimum of 8 years of related work experience;
- Equivalent certification programs also accepted