Data Platform Product Manager

Ford Ford · Auto · Dearborn, MI +1 · Enterprise Technology

Product Manager for Ford's Data Platform Engineering, focusing on data catalog, data product creation, and metadata management to ensure data is trustworthy, compliant, and AI-ready. The role aims to empower data-driven decisions across the company.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and execute the vision and roadmap for products in the Data Platform Engineering ensuring alignment with Ford’s broader data and analytics strategy.
  2. Lead user discovery and research across multiple personas (business associates, plant engineers, analysts, developers) to ensure solutions address real pain points.
  3. Translate user needs into epics, PRDs, and evaluation benchmarks; prioritize features and enhancements using impact-driven frameworks.
  4. Drive adoption and continuous improvement of solutions, enhancing data governance, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance.
  5. Define KPIs and success metrics to measure adoption, discoverability, and quality.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
  • 8+ years of Product Management experience, ideally with data, analytics, AI/ML, or developer tools.
  • Strong grasp of cloud technologies, enterprise data platforms, and modern analytics ecosystems.
  • Extensive experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services for compute, storage, messaging, and data solutions (e.g., Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and various data processing services)
  • Experience setting KPIs and evaluation frameworks for AI/analytics products.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to engage both executive and technical audiences.
  • Experience working with big data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Kafka) and API-based integrations.
  • Demonstrated ability to work across cross-functional teams (engineering, ML, UX, business stakeholders) to drive end-to-end delivery.
  • Excellent skills in user research, stakeholder engagement, and storytelling with data.

Nice to have

  • Master's degree in a relevant technical field.
  • Proven success in AI/ML-enabled products, with strong understanding of large language models (LLMs), NLP, and conversational interfaces.
  • Strong understanding and experience with data-centric architectures, including data ingestion, transformation, storage, and consumption patterns, with an emphasis on data quality and integrity.
  • Familiarity with distributed systems, microservices architectures, and event-driven patterns in a cloud environment.
  • Experience with building and managing data pipelines, data integration, or enterprise system integration projects.
  • Knowledge of monitoring, logging, and alerting best practices for production systems on GCP.

What the JD emphasized

  • 8+ years of Product Management experience, ideally with data, analytics, AI/ML, or developer tools.
  • Experience setting KPIs and evaluation frameworks for AI/analytics products.
  • Proven success in AI/ML-enabled products, with strong understanding of large language models (LLMs), NLP, and conversational interfaces.