Product Manager , CRM Lifecycle Communications & Automation

Lincoln Motor Company; Dearborn (MI); Hybrid; USD 100,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Vehicle discount program

Tuition assistance

Paid time off & holidays

Flexible family care days

Job summary

Ford Motor Company is seeking a Product Manager for Lifecycle Communications & Automation in Dearborn. You will own CRM journeys, optimize communications across email, in-app, and SMS, and coordinate with marketing, data, and engineering teams.

Role requires strong CRM design knowledge, Salesforce Marketing Cloud proficiency, and AI-driven delivery improvements. Hybrid onsite four+ days per week with relocation support for qualified candidates.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 3+ years in product management within CRM delivery/marketing tech.
• Translate requirements into clear user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate UATs, releases, and troubleshoot production issues.
• Understand data, integrations and customer events in journey execution.

Responsibilities

• Own lifecycle communications and journey delivery across channels.
• Translate business needs into clear user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate delivery with stakeholders across marketing, data, and engineering.
• Define rules governing triggers, timing, eligibility, and journey entry/exit.

Skills

CRM product management

Backlog management

User stories & acceptance criteria

Cross-functional collaboration

Data-driven decision making

A/B testing & optimization

AI/automation in delivery

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Journey Builder

Automation Studio

Data Extensions

Job description

We made history and now we work to transform the future - for our customers, our communities and our families. You'll see your work on the road every day, helping people move freely and pursue their dreams. At Ford, you can build more than vehicles. Come build what matters.

Enterprise Technology

plays a critical part in shaping the future of mobility. If you're looking for the chance to leverage advanced technology to redefine the transportation landscape, enhance the customer experience and improve people’s lives, this is the opportunity for you. Join us and challenge your IT expertise and analytical skills to help create vehicles that are as smart as you are.

In this position

As the Product Manager for Lifecycle Communications & Automation, you will own the day-to-day delivery, reliability, and optimization of CRM journeys that keep customers informed and engaged throughout their relationship with Ford.

Your portfolio will include triggered communications, vehicle order status communications for customers and dealership stakeholders, and eCommerce-triggered journeys. These communications span channels such as email, in-app messaging, and SMS. You will translate business needs into clear requirements, manage communication rules and triggers, and coordinate delivery across business, marketing, data, analytics, and engineering teams.

Reporting to the Sr. Product Manager of Journey Enablement & Decisioning, you will also provide operational backup for AI-powered journey activations. Your ownership of ongoing delivery, performance optimization, and scalable quality-control practices will enable the Sr. Product Manager to focus on strategic decisioning capabilities and more complex personalization initiatives.

This is a hands‑on product management role for someone who combines strong CRM Journey design knowledge (preferably in Salesforce Marketing Cloud), disciplined execution, analytical thinking, and curiosity about practical applications of AI. Success means delivering reliable communications, learning what improves journey outcomes, and scaling capabilities without a corresponding increase in manual effort.

Based in Dearborn, MI, this is a hybrid position with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week. Relocation assistance may be available for qualified candidates.

What You'll Do

• Own Lifecycle Communications and Journey Delivery
• Manage the day-to-day delivery and continuous improvement of subscription transactional communications, vehicle order status communications, and eCommerce-triggered journeys.
• Own and prioritize the product backlog, balancing new requirements, enhancements, defects, and operational improvements.
• Translate business needs into clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Coordinate delivery across business stakeholders, marketing operations, data teams, and engineering.
• Communicate delivery progress, dependencies, risks, and decisions to stakeholders.
• Manage Communication Rules and Product Changes
• Define and maintain rules governing communication eligibility, triggering events, timing, exclusions, and journey entry and exit.
• Partner with subscription product teams to assess how bundled offerings affect existing communications and coordinate the necessary updates.
• Ensure vehicle order status communications reflect relevant vehicle-build milestones and order updates for their intended recipients.
• Manage eCommerce-triggered communications based on customer actions and business requirements.
• Identify cross-journey dependencies and help prevent duplicate, conflicting, outdated, or incorrectly timed messages.
• Maintain clear documentation of business logic, data dependencies, and changes.
• Enable Execution Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Apply Salesforce Marketing Cloud expertise to assess feasibility, refine requirements, and troubleshoot journey behavior with delivery teams.
• Partner on the configuration and validation of journeys, automations, audiences, data extensions, and triggered communications.
• Understand how customer information, subscription status, vehicle order updates, and eCommerce events influence journey execution.
• Coordinate user acceptance testing, release readiness, and post-launch validation.
• Identify opportunities to simplify workflows and improve the maintainability of existing journeys.
• Measure Journey Performance and Drive Test-and-Learn Optimization
• Define journey objectives and success measures with business, marketing, and analytics partners, covering engagement, conversion, customer experience, and operational reliability.
• Partner with marketing, analytics, and delivery teams to design and execute A/B tests and, where appropriate, holdout-based experiments to assess incremental impact.
• Translate performance insights into improvements to journey logic, audiences, triggers, frequency, and channel coordination.
• Scale Quality Control and Operational Reliability
• Establish repeatable quality-control practices, including test scenarios, regression coverage, and release checklists.
• Validate communication logic across product combinations, customer scenarios, data exceptions, timing rules, and exclusions.
• Partner with technical teams to improve monitoring and identify missed triggers, unexpected audience volumes, duplicate messages, and other execution issues.
• Coordinate issue triage, root-cause analysis, remediation, and preventive improvements.
• Develop reusable playbooks and automated checks that allow quality control to scale without a corresponding increase in manual effort.
• Apply AI and Automation to Improve Delivery
• Identify practical opportunities to use approved AI tools and automation for requirements development, test-case generation, documentation, and quality analysis.
• Test and refine approaches that reduce repetitive work while maintaining human review and appropriate data safeguards.
• Partner with engineering and operations teams to turn successful approaches into reusable capabilities.
• Measure improvements in delivery speed, manual effort, test coverage, and defect prevention.
• Support AI-Powered Journey Activations
• Provide operational backup for AI-powered journey activations, including requirements clarification, testing, release coordination, monitoring, and issue triage.
• Collaborate with internal teams and external technology partners within established decisioning strategies and escalation processes.
• Maintain working knowledge of journey workflows and dependencies to support continuity during peak delivery periods or coverage needs.
• Use operational insights and stakeholder feedback to recommend improvements to journey reliability, efficiency, and customer experience.

You’ll have

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience
• 3+ years of experience in product management within CRM (Salesforce preferred) delivery/ marketing technology/ lifecycle communications, or similar area. Experience will include:
  • Experience managing backlogs, defining user stories and acceptance criteria, prioritizing competing needs, and coordinating cross-functional delivery.
  • Ability to translate complex eligibility, timing, triggering, and exclusion requirements into clear, testable communication logic.
  • Experience coordinating user acceptance testing, validating releases, troubleshooting production issues, and driving improvements in quality and reliability.
  • Ability to understand how data, integrations, and customer events influence journey execution and collaborate effectively with engineering and data teams.
  • Experience defining hypotheses, coordinating A/B tests, evaluating results, and applying learnings to improve.
  • Understanding of how email, in-app messaging, and SMS work together within lifecycle journeys, including channel-specific performance measures and customer-experience considerations.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clarify requirements, manage dependencies, and explain issues to business and technical stakeholders.
  • Ability to independently manage day-to-day priorities, elevate risks appropriately, and follow through on delivery and issue resolution.
• 6+ months of experience using AI and automation to improve productivity and quality, with a commitment to validating outputs and protecting sensitive information.

Even better, you may have

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Business Administration, Information Systems, or a related field
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud proficiency and hands‑on experience with Journey Builder, Automation Studio, audience and data-extension management, and triggered communications.
• Experience with transactional communications, eCommerce-triggered journeys, or ownership communications.
• Experience with SQL, AMPscript, APIs, or event-driven integrations supporting automated communications.
• Familiarity with holdout groups, incremental lift measurement, statistical significance, and common measurement limitations.
• Experience with CRM reporting, dashboarding or business intelligence tools, and SQL for exploring journey performance.
• Experience testing communication timing, frequency, channel selection, and sequencing to improve outcomes while limiting customer fatigue.
• Experience developing automated checks, reusable test scenarios, regression testing, or monitoring that reduces manual effort.
• Experience using AI tools for requirements development, test-case generation, documentation, or quality analysis.
• Familiarity with AI-powered personalization, next-best-action decisioning, or dynamically orchestrated customer journeys.
• Experience with Salesforce Data Cloud and its integration with marketing and journey execution.
• Experience updating communication logic for bundled offerings, subscription changes, or other cross-product dependencies.
• Relevant Salesforce Marketing Cloud certifications are a plus.
  • Relevant Salesforce Marketing Cloud certifications are a plus.

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder...or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp‑up programs, subsidized back‑up childcare and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

This position is a salary grade 7 or 8 and ranges from $99,600-$192,900.

Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.

This position is hybrid with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week.