What We Do

Mapbox is building a live location platform. Our maps represent the ever-evolving world, accessing, aggregating, & adapting anonymous data from millions of sensors & phones in real-time. Mapbox has the exciting opportunity to power devices & products across the next frontier in location-based data. Whether youre watching the delivery of your grocery order on Instacart, tracking your personal best mile on Strava, sending snaps on Snapchat, monitoring your gas budget on Metromile, or checking todays forecast on The Weather Channel, Mapbox is the location & maps within those apps. Were changing how people move by live-mapping the world.

The Navigation team are proud builders of solutions to challenges in the routing space for industries like auto, logistics, outdoors & more. We solve complex geospatial data problems & leverage algorithms & statistical analysis for use cases ranging from turn-by-turn navigation, to delivery route planning for fleets of thousands of trucks. Our services are at the heart of the operations of our customers businesses. We get people & products from start to finish effectively & on time, whether its delivering meals or going on a road trip. Our customers are primarily developers, like us. 

What Youll Do

We're looking for a Technical Product Manager for the Mapbox Japan office to partner with local Mapboxers & a wide variety of customers & internal stakeholders. You'll drive key product decisions, manage customer priorities, lead customer conversations, & launch new features. This role will be the glue between the Japanese market & the global Mapbox organization. You will lead a small team of engineers in Japan to help drive localization efforts & launch new features, capabilities & products in Japan.

We're looking for a creative thinker fascinated by what our customers need & where they & the team are getting stuck. You like to experiment, but love finishing projects even more. You know how to communicate, collaborate, & think about software as a collective effort. You have strong opinions, loosely held. You keep an open mind & welcome debates that surface multiple perspectives. Once a decision is made, you put your personal preferences aside & commit & execute together.

• Work with US/European Product & Engineering teams to align on priority & scope of feature requirements that are unique to the Japan marketplace
• Uncover & understand customer needs & translate them into requirements
• Ability to work well with internal teams, including developers, engineers, architects, quality assurance, & operations. 
• Ensure requirements are fully understood & that implementation plans match expectations
• Follow competitors & conduct capability analysis regularly
• Provide internal & customer training on how to use the product
• Answer incoming questions about the product & its capabilities
• Assess & address technical risks
• Serve as a product evangelist & subject matter expert to the technical/developer community in Japan
• Use database queries to analyze performance indicators, evaluate experiments, etc.
• Define success criteria for testing & product acceptance.
• Facilitate the creation & maintenance of proper product documentation.
• Set KPIs & other metrics for measuring success of our products. Pull these metrics, analyze results, & synthesize learnings to support continuous software improvement.
• Translate strategy into a tactical execution plan
• Regularly engage our customers via video conversations, emails, & in person visits to understand their needs, as well as validate our proposed solutions.
• Build up & share product knowledge across teams, contributing to best practices that grow the entire product team within Mapbox.
• Uphold a culture of collaboration, transparency, creativity, inclusion, & data-driven decisions.

What We Believe are Important Traits for This Role

• 5+ years of proven ability to design & develop sophisticated, innovative, efficient, & durable solutions to complex technological & business problems.
• Professional experience as an engineering manager or technical product manager with people management experience of Japanese employees in Japan.
• An analytical approach: you have strong SQL skills or a willingness to learn, & always use data to properly evaluate the success or failure of features, as well as guide your next steps.
• Tolerance for ambiguity & intrinsic motivation: you gravitate towards chaos. You can weed out whats important in highly ambiguous spaces, & juggle a variety of competing priorities. Even so, you are  proactive around driving solutions to completion.
• Strong English written & verbal communication skills: you can talk & write about complex ideas concisely to a wide audience & walk through decisions with teammates & collaborators. We work backwards, which means that we start product development by writing an FAQ. Writing documents early on clarifies how the world will see the product - not just how we think about it internally.
• You have a desire to share your expertise through documentation, mentorship, & discussion.
• Devotion to systematization, repeatability, efficiency, & measurement: processes, data, & nailing the details are key to how we work.
• Empathy & collaboration: you communicate effectively with others & earn credibility quickly. Youre comfortable giving & receiving feedback in the open. You have a desire to work with individuals with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, & experiences.
• Solid business/strategic intuition: you are able to identify the right business opportunities, make prioritization calls, & devise clear action plans.
• Strong preference for direct experience in navigation, automotive or logistics markets
• Both Japanese & English fluency are strict requirements

What We Value

In addition to our core values, which are not unique to this position & are necessary for Mapbox leaders:

• We value high-performing creative individuals who dig into problems & opportunities.
• We believe in individuals being their whole selves at work. We commit to this through supportive health care, parental leave, flexibility for the things that come up in life, & innovating on how we think about supporting our people.
• We emphasize an environment of teaching & learning to equip employees with the tools needed to be successful in their function & the company.
• We strongly believe in the value of growing a diverse team & encourage people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, & sexual orientations to apply.

By applying for this position, you acknowledge that you have received the Mapbox Non-US Privacy Notice for applicants, which is linked here.  Completing this application requires you to provide personal data, such as your name & contact information, which is mandatory for Mapbox to process your application. 

Mapbox is an EEO Employer - Minority/Female/Veteran/Disabled/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity.

MAPBOX WILL NOT ACCEPT CANDIDATE INTRODUCTIONS FROM 3RD PARTY RECRUITMENT AGENCIES FOR THIS POSITION.