About the Role

Platforming is a strategic decision to unify experience across Harman products. This position will be responsible for assisting platform strategy definition and driving and implementing platform strategies across product categories and brands.

He/She plans for and executes a wide range of initiatives across business units, regions, functional teams and external partners. He/She creates with the involvement of Director, Product & Platform Planning for all product categories platform strategy implementing.

What You Will Do

• Explore opportunity of new technology adoption, manage and develop internal patent pool, drive innovative concept study for next generation platform.

• Assist in researching market-winning solutions to help elevate the user experiences to ensure differentiate from competitors.

• Competitive benchmark to work with different business unit to come up with solution for platform implementing.

• Assist in structural analysis to evaluate feasibility, profitability, and practicality of product concepts.

• Responsible to implement platform strategy/roadmaps across product categories and brands through deeply communication with cross functional teams.

• Manage a consistent means of communicating key strategy and roadmap documents. Be the ambassador within Harman and external parties to promote the platform.

• Assure adequate market launch support & being the change requester of platform implementing.

• Manage conflicts and priorities to achieve platform strategy/roadmaps deployment. Identify risks and potential issues setting mitigations and action plans.

• Assure compliance to Process, Procedures, and use of Tools and Methods including escalation.

What is Nice to Have

• Change Agent: HARMAN has prided itself historically on developing the industry’s highest-quality and ground-breaking technological audio products. As a result, the company has been heavily engineering-centric and task-oriented. The new SBU Car Audio Services requires the new Sr. Director of Product Management to be a change agent, in a way that brings discipline to the new product development process, a more results-oriented approach to the work at hand, and a consumer-centric view and design-driven innovation to the planning process. Success will be measured not only by product superiority, but also by new product contribution margin, timeliness-to-market, and cost of quality. HARMAN wants to "re-invent" the category and be a top market share and profit share leader.

• Innovation Orientation: A critical contribution of this executive is to develop the product roadmap and improve the New Product Introduction (NPI) process. The first task at hand is to revitalize the new product pipeline in which HARMAN currently competes. Specifically, the need is to boost new product revenue by at least $20 million per year, with improvement in contribution margins. This may be a one-to-two year undertaking; however, the longer term challenge is to put HARMAN back into the driver’s "audio" seat as it relates to developing truly novel innovation by creating new-to-the-world products in which to compete.

• Team Building and Communication: In the context of a company that has historically worked in silos, this executive will be expected to be at the center of a global, cross-functional team with accountability for aligning the SBU around the New Product agenda. This will entail not only the management of the Product Line Managers who are direct reports, but also working closely with the externally focused and high commercial Region Business Unit leaders, as well as the engineering & sourcing teams whose technical expertise will need to be directed toward the projects deemed to be most promising in the market. This executive will be successful by demonstrating an ability to work with and understand the engineering behind the technology, but also by demonstrating an innate ability to connect with consumers and customers to bring new products to market that will be meaningful, and therefore will be in high demand.

• Bridge-builder; roll-up-the-sleeves team player.

• Analytical and results-oriented.

• Culturally sensitive enough to bring the existing team in a different direction.

• Great communicator: oral, written, presentations.

• Operations and execution focused.