Product Operations Manager

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.

Responsibilities

Customer Support Enablement: contribute to building 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 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, track operational metrics and ticket resolution against defined SLOs, manage Severity 1 escalations to on-call engineers, oversee handovers, and report operational performance to executive and external stakeholders; Stakeholder Alignment: act as a critical liaison between core development teams, executive management, and regional global offices; Content Management: own creation and maintenance of FAQs, product manuals, and knowledge base articles, and lead product content creation, localization, and review processes; Scale Localization: build and scale the localization process across multiple languages, manage vendor relationships, and deliver high-quality localization; Operational Project Management: lead key projects for product launches and feature rollouts, ensuring smooth execution and cross-functional alignment; Process & Tooling Improvements: analyze workflows, identify inefficiencies, recommend and implement tools and best practices, and drive continuous improvement; Voice of Customer & Customer Insights: establish and manage systems to collect, analyze, and synthesize customer feedback and translate insights into actionable product recommendations; Occasional travel to Honda Japan and US offices

Requirements

3+ years in Product Operations, ITSM, Technical Support Management, TAM roles, Customer Operations, or Localization (5+ years total professional experience, including L2/L3 support background); Full professional fluency in Japanese (native/equivalent) and business-level English (written and spoken); 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 spanning regions; Hands-on experience with Jira, incident workflows, and support tools; Familiarity with mobile applications, cloud services, or connected vehicle/automotive software; Proven track record of optimizing scalable processes, setting up operational KPIs, and translating data into actionable insights; Deep passion for understanding customer needs and advocating for their experience; 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

Benefits

Competitive compensation; Excellent benefits; Exciting startup environment and vibrant culture