Product Manager

Global Customs IT PDO team partners with internal Mfg. MPL Systems, Finance Systems, and Invoicing systems, and external customs solution/service providers to provide end-to-end customs solutions to manage customs operations globally, enabling Free Trade Agreement (FTA) qualifications and meeting legal and regulatory needs when importing and exporting parts and vehicles.

Are you a hands-on product manager with strong technical leader understanding for creating exceptional developer tools and infrastructure? Global Customs is looking for a Product Manager who embraces Lean, Agile and Human Centered Design practices to deliver innovative software products for Ford Motor Company. As our Developer Enablement Leader, you will be instrumental in shaping the future of our Customs IT practices. You'll lead the charge in evaluating, implementing, and driving the adoption of cutting-edge technologies and best practices – from CI/CD pipelines and testing frameworks to monitoring solutions. Your work will directly empower our software engineers to build high-quality software faster and more efficiently. You will also play a key role in enhancing our internal development platform, ensuring it provides a robust and scalable foundation for all our teams. If you possess deep expertise in DevOps principles, modernization through Google Cloud adoption, a relentless drive for automation, and a proven history of building and scaling developer infrastructure, we encourage you to apply.

What You'll Do:

Fuel Developer Productivity: Your primary mission will be to empower our development teams to be as productive and efficient as possible.

This means:

Driving Product Strategy: Owning the product vision and roadmap to ensure Customs IT delivers maximum business value.

• Product Discovery: Engaging customers and business stakeholders to uncover needs, validate problems, and identify opportunities before committing engineering investment.

• Roadmap Prioritization: Defining and prioritizing the product roadmap based on customer impact, strategic alignment, and delivery feasibility.

• Stakeholder Prioritization: Balancing and negotiating competing requests across NA, EU, and IMG stakeholders to focus the team on the highest-value work.

• Backlog Grooming: Owning and continuously refining the product backlog, writing clear epics/stories, and ensuring readiness for sprint planning.

• Business Value Articulation: Building the business case for initiatives and clearly communicating expected ROI, cost savings, and developer productivity gains to leadership.

Orchestrating Innovation: Conduct experimentation and build products that would accelerate developer flow.

Cloud-Native Empowerment: Playing a vital role in enabling developers to build and deploy applications seamlessly on our chosen cloud platform (GCP, OpenShift, GKE), making the cloud a natural extension of their development workflow.

Inner Source Evangelist: Collaborating with teams to cultivate a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation by encouraging developers to contribute to internal customs projects and collaborate across team boundaries – NA, EU, and IMG.

Promote New Products with AI: Conduct experimentation and build products that would accelerate developer flow. Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions for code acceleration and tech debt reduction, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

DevSecOps Champion: Driving the adoption of DevSecOps principles and practices, embedding security into every stage of the development lifecycle.

Lead and Inspire: You'll be a great leader, mentor, and advocate for our development teams. This means:

Providing Expert Guidance: Sharing your deep knowledge on a variety of topics related to developer tooling, best practices, and emerging technologies.

Lead the Code Reviews: Leading &Providing constructive feedback on code quality, architectural alignment, and adherence to best practices.

Staying Ahead of the Curve: Keeping your finger on the pulse of the latest industry trends and emerging technologies in the developer tooling space.

Championing Continuous Improvement: Continuously seeking ways to improve our platform, processes, and the overall developer experience.

Collaborate and Communicate: You'll be a critical bridge between development teams and other stakeholders, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards a common vision. This means:

Working Closely with Teams: Collaborating with development teams, architects, product managers, security teams, and the "Tools" team.

Communicating Effectively: Explaining complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Presenting at Events: Sharing your knowledge and insights at team meetings, workshops, and conferences, inspiring others to embrace new technologies and best practices.

Acting as a Liaison: Representing the needs of development teams to other departments, ensuring their voices are heard.

What You'll Bring:

• A bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field.

• 10+ years of experience in project management & software development - with a focus on Java, Angular, and Spring Boot.

• Minimum of 5 years of experience with Agile methodologies, including defining product vision and strategy, building product roadmaps, and creating and managing backlogs.

• A deep understanding of object-oriented design principles and patterns.

• A proven track record of driving adoption of developer tools and best practices.

• A deep understanding in modern development tools (VS Code, IntelliJ with CoPilot assistance etc) and technologies (e.g., Git, Gradle, Tekton, Terraform, OpenShift / Kubernetes, SonarQube, Checkmarx, Cycode/ SAST & FOSSA etc).

• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., GCP – Preferred, Azure/AWS – Nice to have).

• Familiarity with agile development methodologies.

• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and presentation skills.

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.

• The ability to work independently and as part of a team.

• Mainframe – nice to have.

• COBOL – nice to have.

• Familiarity with customs regulations, trade compliance processes, or Free Trade Agreement (FTA) requirements – nice to have.

Additional Skills:

• Experience with developer enablement initiatives.

• Experience with DevSecOps practices.

• Experience with API design and development.

• Experience with microservices architecture.

• Experience mentoring and coaching junior developers.

• Knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Key Skills:

• End-to-End Program / Project Management experience

• Java, Angular, Spring Boot is mandatory; good to have experience in GCP implementations.

• Developer Enablement

• CI/CD

• Cloud Technologies – GCP preferably

• Agile Development

• Communication

• Problem-Solving

• Software Architecture Patterns

• Understanding on Test-Driven Development (TDD)

• Understanding on Java Full Stack & GCP offerings

• Understanding on Databases (e.g., PostgreSQL – Preferred; SQL Server, Oracle – Nice to have)