Product Operations Manager (Contract)

About the role:

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 (9:00 AM–5:00 PM weekdays PT) 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.

Who You Are:

• Experience: 3+ years in Product Operations, ITSM, Technical Support Management, TAM roles, Customer Operations, Localization (5+ 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-Haves:

• 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.