Product Owner (m/f/d)

The discretionary job title for this position is: Product Owner Costing Library & Quality.

Mission

Facilitate the interface between the Costing Library Product Manager and the Costing & Insights organization, ensuring product direction and customer needs are effectively translated into Costing Library frameworks, guidelines and quality governance, and that delivered calculations meet defined consistency and quality standards. Drive the continuous improvement of Costing Library products through disciplined ticket and customer-feedback management, PI planning, quality KPIs, calculation sanity checks and supporting tools.

Tasks & Responsibilities

1. Costing Library framework, guidelines and product enablement

• Act as the interface between the Product Manager and the Costing & Insights team, facilitating communication, clarifying product expectations and translating product direction into actionable requirements for the Costing organization.
• Establish common standards for how costing library data is produced, reviewed and released, ensuring consistency across vehicles and domains.
• Ensure that product requirements and customer feedback are effectively translated into Costing processes, priorities and quality expectations, in close alignment with the Product Manager and relevant stakeholders.
• Align the Costing Library framework and governance with Costing & Insights methodology and quality priorities, and ensure that agreed changes are clearly communicated, implemented and adopted within the Costing organization.

2. Tickets, customer feedback and PI planning

• Ensure that tickets are consistently qualified, prioritized, assigned and tracked through to resolution or release in a timely manner in line with the defined Customer Ticket SLA.
• Consolidate customer feedback, internal user feedback and recurring quality findings into actionable product requirements and improvement priorities with support of domain leads.
• Lead and coordinate PI planning for the product scope, translating strategic priorities into clear objectives, deliverables, dependencies and acceptance criteria.
• Lead and coordinate implementation of features and improvements, which have been decided during PI planning event.
• Support transparent prioritization and trade-offs across competing product requests by balancing customer value, quality impact, business relevance, effort and delivery capacity. Provides this input to M&I director, C&I director and CSL product manager for decision making.
• Support Domain leads to monitor delivery progress, risks, dependencies and blockers, and ensure timely escalation and resolution of issues that could affect product commitments.

3. Quality framework and consistency KPIs

• Support the Product manager with definition, maintainance and continuous improvement of consistency and quality KPIs for Costing Library products, including clear definitions, targets, measurement methods and acceptance thresholds.
• Establish quality gates and review criteria that provide objective evidence that calculations meet the required standards before release.
• Support product manager on developing quality dashboards and reporting routines to provide transparent visibility of product quality, recurring issues, deviations and improvement actions.
• Identify systemic quality risks and recurring deviations, drive root-cause analysis and ensure that corrective actions are translated into product, methodology or process improvements.

4. Calculation consistency and supporting tools

• Develop or sponsor tools, checks and automation that improve the consistency, repeatability and efficiency of Costing Library calculations and quality reviews.
• Define requirements for calculation-control tools and ensure they are aligned with product guidelines, quality KPIs and user needs.
• Promote standardization of calculation approaches and validation logic across products, reducing manual interpretation and avoidable inconsistencies.
• Partner with domain and subdomain leads and methodology owner to implement scalable solutions that strengthen product quality and productivity.

Key measures & indicators (main KPIs used in the role)

• Achievement of product roadmap and PI objectives, including delivery against committed scope, timing and quality.
• Ticket management performance, including timely qualification, prioritization, resolution and closure of critical tickets.
• Customer feedback response and closure rate, including reduction of recurring customer issues.
• Costing Library consistency and quality KPI performance against defined targets and acceptance thresholds.
• Sanity-check pass rate and number/severity of calculation deviations identified before and after release.
• Reduction of recurring calculation errors, inconsistencies and quality findings.
• Adoption and effectiveness of tools and automated checks developed to improve calculation consistency and quality.

Requirements

Education and Professional Background

• Master's degree in engineering, industrial engineering, economics or a comparable technical discipline.
• 5+ years of experience in automotive cost engineering, benchmarking, engineering services, product management or a related technical environment.
• Demonstrated experience with vehicle or component costing methodologies and the development or governance of repeatable calculation approaches.
• Proven experience managing structured improvement initiatives, quality processes or comparable cross-functional delivery activities.
• Experience with Agile ways of working, PI planning or similar product/program planning frameworks is strongly preferred.
• Experience in customer-facing environments and translating feedback into product requirements is an advantage.

Skills & Abilities

• Strong understanding of automotive costing, cost structures, manufacturing processes and the drivers that influence vehicle and component costs.
• Product ownership mindset: able to define priorities, make trade-offs, maintain a clear roadmap and drive execution through multiple stakeholders.
• Strong quality and analytical mindset, with the ability to review calculations critically, identify anomalies and distinguish isolated errors from systemic issues.
• Ability to define meaningful KPIs, quality gates and acceptance criteria and to use data to drive product decisions.
• Strong customer-orientation and communication skills, with the ability to translate customer feedback into clear and actionable product requirements.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills across Costing, Methodology, Engineering, Data and Software/Product teams.
• Ability to structure complex topics, prioritize effectively and maintain focus on the few issues that materially affect product quality and customer value.
• Advanced tool development skills.
• Professional level in English.
• High attention to detail combined with a pragmatic, solution-oriented approach to product quality and delivery.