General Ledger & Periodic Accounting Product Manager

Ford • Dearborn, MI

11h • $115,500 - $218,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

The GL & PA Product Manager owns and drives six critical areas for the product group: our Agile journey and maturity, dependency management across the product group, consistency across product teams, communications, health metrics and dashboards, and aligned strategic roadmaps. This role partners closely with the GL & PA product group leader on overall business direction and priorities, while owning how that direction gets executed, standardized, and communicated across the group day to day.
This role works as a peer alongside the Product Managers and Product Owners who each own their individual product lines and delivery teams. It does not run any single product line's backlog or delivery team; instead, this person sets the standard for how the whole product group operates — owning dependency management and a streamlined intake and prioritization process across product lines and with other i-ERP product groups, and owning the roadmap alignment and health metrics that keep the group focused and accountable.
This person will build and lead a small team, including at least one direct report, to bring their vision for Jira standards, roadmap artifacts, and health dashboards to life — giving the group leader, peers, and senior leadership a clear, trustworthy view of where things stand at all times.
This person is the group's lead voice on our Agile journey and on communicating our achievements — championing Agile practices and maturity across teams, and clearly articulating how the group's work contributes to the bottom line and maximizes the value of Ford's investment in SAP. They set and enforce the standard for how Jira is used consistently across GL & PA product teams, and they own the day-to-day effort to keep all product lines on track against critical program milestones, escalating and resolving issues and risks as needed.
This person will also partner closely with our SAP and SaaS implementation and technology partners to ensure Ford is fully leveraging the capabilities of the products we already own and have implemented — rather than defaulting to custom builds or under-utilizing existing investments.
This is a role for a leader who wants real ownership of how a product group operates — someone who thrives on bringing order to complexity at scale, building the tools, standards, and narrative that make a team's progress visible and credible, and who is energized by managing and developing a small team while still influencing peers without formal authority over their teams.

Requirements

• 5-7 years of application delivery experience within SAP or other large-scale COTS implementation programs.
• Functional exposure to Finance processes, particularly General Ledger, Period-End/Periodic Accounting, and the monthly/quarterly financial close process; exposure to Billing, Accounts Receivable, Tax, and/or Warranty areas is a plus.
• Demonstrated experience owning and setting standards for how a team or group operates (e.g., Agile practices, tooling, reporting) rather than simply following direction.
• Proven experience managing cross-team and cross-product dependencies in a complex, multi-workstream program environment.
• Direct experience with, or strong knowledge of, the financial close cycle and the drivers of close-cycle duration, with the ability to build that into a product group roadmap.
• Technical acumen sufficient to understand and critically evaluate solution design in S/4HANA, and to assess whether existing SAP/SaaS product capabilities can meet a business need before recommending custom development.
• Demonstrated ability to design and run a structured intake, prioritization, and dependency-management process across multiple teams or product lines (rather than managing a single team's backlog).
• Hands-on experience configuring and administering Jira (or similar tools) to drive consistency and build dashboards/reporting across multiple teams.
• Strong grounding in Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) with experience coaching or mentoring others in Agile practices.
• Familiarity with engineering/delivery performance metrics (e.g., MTTx, automated test coverage, quality, predictability) and using them to drive improvement across a portfolio of teams.
• Ability to stretch and drive delivery against aggressive, non-negotiable launch timelines.
• Strong influencing skills, with the ability to align diverse peer stakeholders (Product Managers, Product Owners, implementation/technology partners, and program leadership) around a shared plan, without formal authority over their teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated ability to translate technical/program work into a clear, compelling narrative for varied audiences, including senior leadership.

Nice To Haves

• Experience operating within a global ERP template/rollout model spanning multiple countries or regions.
• Experience directly leading or contributing to a financial close optimization or close-cycle reduction initiative.
• Experience presenting business impact, ROI, or program achievements to executive or senior leadership audiences.
• Formal Agile coaching experience or certification (e.g., SAFe Program Consultant, Certified Scrum Professional, Agile Coach).
• A collaborative, low-ego approach to navigating complex, matrixed decision-making environments where influence — not direct authority — drives outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own dependency management across the GL & PA product group — proactively identifying, tracking, and driving resolution of dependencies within the GL & PA product group (across its individual product lines) and with other i-ERP product groups (e.g., Tax, Billing, Accounts Receivable, and other Plan to Report [PTR] product areas). This role is the accountable owner of the dependency management process and the primary point of coordination across teams, though it does not directly own the underlying delivery work of other product lines.
• Own the creation and alignment of strategic roadmaps for the GL & PA product group that support key business enablers, with a specific focus on reducing the time required to complete monthly and quarterly financial close, in partnership with the group leader and the Product Managers/Owners who own the underlying product lines.
• Own and drive the GL & PA product group's Agile journey — setting the standard for Agile maturity, and teaching, coaching, and mentoring Agile practices across teams.
• Own and enforce consistency standards for how Jira is configured and used across GL & PA product teams, including shared structures, fields, and conventions.
• Build and lead a small team, including at least one direct report, to design and maintain Jira dashboards, roadmap artifacts, and product group health dashboards.
• Own the product group's communications and storytelling — determining how and when the group's achievements, business impact, and contribution to the bottom line are communicated to delivery teams, peers, and senior leadership.
• Own the health metrics program for the product group, including MTTx metrics (e.g., mean time to detect/resolve/restore), automated test coverage, quality, and delivery predictability, and drive improvement actions from those insights in partnership with product line owners.
• Build, own, and continuously improve a streamlined intake and prioritization process for work requests across the GL & PA product group, providing a consistent, transparent front door for new asks regardless of which product line they ultimately land on.
• Own the day-to-day effort to keep all GL & PA product lines and teams on track against critical program milestones, proactively identifying risk and escalating and resolving as needed.
• Partner with SAP and SaaS partners/vendors to ensure Ford is fully leveraging existing implemented products and capabilities across the product group, identifying underused functionality before product lines pursue new build or custom development.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed