Toyota Research Institute is hiringDirector of UX Product Design
THE COMPANY
Toyota Research Institute - Advanced Development (TRI-AD) was established in March 2018 as a $2.8 billion joint venture between Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. (Aisin), and Denso Corporation (Denso) to develop fully integrated, production-quality software and automated driving technology. On July 28, 2020, TRI-AD announced that, effective January 2021, it will expand and improve its operations into a holding company with two operating companies. The holding company will be Woven Planet Holdings, Inc. (“Woven Planet Holdings”), and the two operating companies under it will be Woven CORE, Inc. (“Woven CORE”), which will develop, implement and scale automated driving technologies at its core, and Woven Alpha, Inc. (“Woven Alpha”), which will explore new business opportunities and incubate innovative projects that go beyond today’s TMC, such as Woven City, Arene, and Automated Mapping Platform.
THE POSITION
As the Director of UX Product Design for Woven City, you will supervise all facets of the experience across the portfolio to help organizations turn governance into a strategic advantage. You will lead a team of UX Product Designers to define a unified user experience vision for Woven City, to implement the principles, processes and tools required to scale superior experience for our users and design and content across our distributed product organization, and to drive effective execution of the user experience strategy.
You are a user experience expert who will partner with product and engineering leadership to create a product strategy and foster a product development culture that enables us to deliver enterprise-grade functionality, with a consumer-grade experience. Your humble judgement, creativity and passion will influence and inspire executives and individual contributors alike to understand and evangelize the business value of creating thoughtful, beautiful and highly integrated products, across multiple brands. This role reports to the Vice President of UX, Woven Alpha.
You will advance the customer-centric organizational mindset and grow the UX function into a strategic and competitive advantage. This role advocates for user centered design practices, data-driven decision making and alluring aesthetics – all while being the conduit to senior executives on the status and rationale on projects across a broad assortment of product families. As part of this, you will work directly with UX Research to validate your team’s designs and evangelize the data-driven design model. Our ideal candidate must be a creative thinker and self-starter who can manage a team, repeatedly driving ideation and execution of work to the highest standards of quality.
This is a fast-paced production environment with the best of the best as your peers. You have a high level of initiative and work with leadership to achieve the company’s vision & Woven City Development. Ultimately, you strive to take your team’s designs from inception to launch.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead, mentor and grow a team of UX Product Designers across all sectors of the Woven City project, to define the UX design process and communication pathways between UX, Product and Engineering.
- Work directly with the SVP of Woven City, VP of User Experience of Woven Alpha and various stakeholders to define UX strategy for Woven City.
- Collaborate with VPs and Directors from other Toyota companies to achieve the team’s goals
- Provide guidance, creative direction, and career mentorship to the UX Strategy team
- Ensure, by working closely with UX Research, appropriate and actionable UXR is being conducted across all phases of the product development design cycle
- Build out practices, sprints, rituals and culture within UX Strategy in context of broader product development teams
- Champion ongoing improvements by considering market analysis, customer feedback, site metrics, and usability findings
- Own the end-to-end product design processes of the team, and how they integrate with other parts of the organization – including PM/engineering, but also our customer-facing teams
- Build long term strategies around mobile design/experience
- Infuse the business’ culture with design thinking. Champion new, creative exercises and processes to help employees in any department have a deeper understanding of our users, and how we can positively impact them
- Work in a fast-paced high growth company whose customers genuinely love the product.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 10+ years of experience leading multidisciplinary UX teams at user-focused technology, or enterprise companies
- Proven expert knowledge of interaction design, UI design and visual design principles and practices
- Bilingual in Japanese and English, both written and spoken at a business level
- Demonstrable success in creating, launching, scaling, and maintaining software products
- Excellent verbal, written, and visual/presentational skills
- Ability to speak the language of business and design simultaneously, while being able to effectively communicate with a variety of audiences
- A proven track record of hiring diverse teams, developing talent, and leading with positivity and inspiration
- An understanding of when and why to apply quantitative and qualitative user research to ensure the best product and design decisions are being made
- A track record of transforming both legacy products and agile software development culture to being more design-centric
- Ability to do work in an environment where product design is empowered by senior leadership to make a difference in a fast-paced high growth company whose customers genuinely love the product
- Strong practical knowledge of user-centered design methodologies and usability principles
- A great sense of humor
If you are currently located at outside of Japan, don't worry, we'll set an interview over Google Hangout Meet or Skype.
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