Product Designer

Ford is in the middle of Supply Chain Transformation. One of the key focus areas to enable this transformation is to ensure there is robust management of supply chain risk and assurance of supply to ensure demand for our world-leading products can be met optimally.

This role will help to design and develop product concepts and specifications that reflect the customer’s needs aligning with technical and business requirements for various aspects of supply chain management. The key to successful product design is an understanding of the customer’s needs. This individual
- Emphasizes and advocates for the customer, based on validated research
- Identifies and validates pain points and opportunities with the team for impactful solutions
- Researches, imagines, and designs highly usable and intuitive solutions for products / services to solve customers’ problems that align with targeted business opportunities across multi-tier supply chain, supporting direct-buy & strategic sourcing initiatives
- Collaborates with cross-functional teams and ensure seamless interoperability across ecosystem
- Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science/Engineering, or related field and a minimum 5 to 8 years of gathering and analyzing requirements and designing software prototypes to support product development
- Ability to operate in an ambiguous environment with a curiosity towards new technologies and a strong desire to learn so that the team may benefit
- Good communication and collaboration skills in working with cross functional global teams
- Understands design principles and tools
- Uses UI/UX design practices to advocate for the customer and help the team evolve the product
- Engages in and provides a design perspective for cross-product integrated experiences
- Ensures a cohesive design within product groups and platforms by adhering to the Ford Design System running usability tests, creating open feedback forums, etc.
- Produces research assets (journey maps, affinity walls, empathy maps, storyboards, personas, etc.) to capture learning and communicate the immersive customer experience with the team and other stakeholders
- Conveys design requirements and specification details to the team
- Communicates how design incorporates both customer and business value
- Work across Product Development, Material Planning & Logistics and Supply Chain functions to address critical needs for mitigation of supply chain shortage
- Plans and conducts customer research to gather data and discover problems through user and stakeholder interviews/surveys
- Validates researched data to bring leading indicators in focus, allowing the team to actively analyze, synthesize and determine valuable product / service options
- Iteratively hypothesizes and discovers new opportunities for the customer’s needs / desires, aligning with business objectives and technical standards
- Seeks continuous feedback, emphasizing the importance of research driven product decisions
- Plans and conducts idea generating sessions and facilitates prioritization of relevant ideas
- Engages with the Product Owner and team to prioritize and define product strategy and roadmaps
- Collaborate with vendors to design, develop, document, and maintain software / hardware prototypes
- Collaborate with external and internal technical peers (Product Managers, Product Designers, Software Engineers, Architects, and vendors) to design and validate technical approaches and designs
- Keep awareness of technology advances and recommend innovative approaches consistent with Ford enterprise IT direction
- Contribute to maintain a readied backlog and enable the team to go further with effective usage of Rally/Jira
- Advocate the use of agile methodologies to meet stakeholder requirements
- Develop relationships and maintain a knowledge of the ecosystem
- Assist in estimation, systems testing, triage and debugging sessions for N-Tier tool integration issues and helps track product and data quality metrics