Product Operations Manager
Our Mission:
Driving technology always feels old. Not by a little bit. We believe vehicles can be a thousand times smarter, safer, and more connected to the world around us, and our mission is to see it happen. In 2019, we joined forces with Honda as their first startup acquisition, and now we’re expanding our vision into building the future of connected vehicles for millions of people around the world.
Why Drivemode:
Join Drivemode for an exciting startup environment and a vibrant culture that combines impactful work, competitive compensation, and excellent benefits. By becoming a part of our team, you'll contribute to a crucial mission that revolutionizes the way people engage with vehicles, addressing both business needs and the world's environmental challenges. This presents an exceptional opportunity to be at the forefront of innovation and drive Honda's success in the automotive market.
About the role:
We're seeking a highly organized, customer-obsessed Product Operations Manager for our 4W Product Group in Tokyo, Japan. This pivotal role ensures exceptional customer experience and operational efficiency for our connected vehicle products. You will serve as the operational bridge connecting Engineering, Product, Design, Executive Leadership, and global stakeholders.
You will oversee support queue health, manage L2/L3 triage and incident response workflows, optimize support processes, localization strategy, drive Voice of Customer insights and operational improvements across the product lifecycle. This is a unique opportunity to directly impact customer satisfaction and drive scalable growth at Drivemode.
What You'll Do
Customer Support Enablement: Contribute building the Customer Support Operations, collaborating with engineers, providing product information, enabling effective troubleshooting, and streamlining escalations.
L2/L3 Support Triage & Queue Management: Perform daily monitoring and initial triage of Jira support queues (8:00 AM-5:00 PM weekdays JST) across mobile apps and backend systems. Classify severity, troubleshoot reproducible issues, verify context, and route to appropriate teams.
Escalation management & Operational Health: Oversee incident response workflows, unblock critical issues, and track key operational performance metrics. Track ticket resolution against defined SLOs. Intervene on stalled issues, manage Severity 1 incident escalations to on-call engineers via Slack/Jira, oversee daily/weekly transition handovers, and report operational performance to executive and external stakeholders weekly/monthly.
Stakeholder Alignment: Act as a critical liaison between core development teams, executive management and regional global offices.
Content Management: Own the creation and maintenance of comprehensive FAQs, product manuals, and knowledge base articles for customers and internal teams. Lead the effective product content creation, localization and review processes.
Scale Localization: Build and scale the localization process as we launch multiple languages across the globe. Manage vendor relationships and deliver the high quality of localization.
Operational Project Management: Lead certain key projects for product launches and feature rollouts, ensuring smooth execution and cross-functional alignment.
Process & Tooling Improvements: Analyze workflows, identify inefficiencies, and recommend/implement tools and best practices to optimize product operations. Drive continuous improvement.
Voice of Customer (VoC) & Customer Insights: Establish and manage systems to collect, analyze, and synthesize customer feedback. Translate insights into actionable product recommendations.
Occasional travel to Honda Japan and US offices required.
What we are looking for:
Experience: 4+ years in Product Operations, ITSM, Technical Support Management, TAM roles, Customer Operations, Localization (7+ years of total professional experience, including L2/L3 support background)
Languages: Full professional fluency in Japanese (native/equivalent) and business-level English (written and spoken) to bridge local and global stakeholders
Collaboration & Resilience: Outstanding cross-functional communication and triage judgment under pressure in a fast-paced environment. Strong ability to build relationships and influence cross-functional teams in a large corporation that spans across regions
Technical Acumen: Hands-on experience with Jira, incident workflows, and support tools. Familiarity with mobile applications, cloud services, or connected vehicle/automotive software.
Operational Excellence & Analytical Skills: Proven track record of optimizing scalable processes, setting up operational KPIs, and translating data into actionable insights.
Customer-Centric: Deep passion for understanding customer needs and advocating for their experience.
Proactive & Organized: Self-motivated, highly organized, and effective in a fast-paced environment.
Nice to Have:
Ability to read or debug basic code (GitHub, Swift, Server Logs)
Background in automotive or connected vehicle technology
User research experience
Knowledge of product documentation best practices.