🕒 2 days ago
Coordinate programme and project governance, maintain PMO systems and documentation, uphold data quality, and drive continuous improvement to support effective delivery and informed decision-making.
Customer Program Manager
📅 Oct 13, 2025
📍 🇯🇵 Tokyo - Hybrid🎹 Mid-level📮 Program Manager📢 🇯🇵 Japanese Required📢 🇬🇧 English Required💼 Full-Time
Project ManagementProduct Lifecycle ManagementCustomer Relationship ManagementRisk Mitigation
📜 Description
- Manage post-sales activities and delivery of customer programs for Automotive and enterprise clients in Japan.
- Collaborate with internal teams to ensure product delivery meets and exceeds customer expectations.
- Establish and nurture strong relationships with customers, working closely with account managers to address escalations.
- Facilitate cross-functional meetings, documenting critical communications and engaging with engineering and product units.
🛠️ Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field; extensive experience in the software development lifecycle is essential.
- Minimum of 5 years of professional experience in project management and product lifecycle management with a focus on complex projects.
- Strong knowledge of the automotive & enterprise industry trends and their implications for strategic development.
- Excellent communication, influencing and presentation skills; mastery of English and Japanese is a must (Korean or another major language is a plus).
- Dynamic, outgoing, pro-active, results oriented, autonomous, hands-on, creative thinking, highly motivated professional with a can-do attitude, comfortable working in a changing environment
- Willingness to travel internationally as required.
- Demonstrated autonomy, proactiveness, commercial acumen, and comfort in operating with ambiguity.
- Savvy user of Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, …)
✨ Benefits
- A competitive compensation package, of course.
- Time to support life outside of work, with enhanced parental leave plus paid leave to care for loved ones and volunteer in local
- Improve your home office with a setup budget and get extra support with a monthly allowance.
- Enjoy options to work from your home country and abroad for a set number of days each year, to visit family and friends
- Take the holidays you want with a competitive holiday plan, plus an extra day off to celebrate your birthday.
- Join annual events like our Hackathon and DevDays to bring your ideas to life with talented teammates from around the world.
- Become a part of our inclusive global culture and have the chance to collaborate with a diverse community – we have over 80 nationalities
- Find out more about our global benefits and enjoy additional local benefits tailored to your location.
Full job description
What we offer
A competitive compensation package, of course.
Time and resources to grow and develop, including a personal development budget and paid leave for learning days, as well as paid access to e-learning resources such as O’Reilly and LinkedIn Learning.
Time to support life outside of work, with enhanced parental leave plus paid leave to care for loved ones and volunteer in local communities.
Work flexibility, where TomTom’ers, in agreement with their manager and team, use both the office and home to focus, collaborate, learn and socialize. It’s all about getting the best out of both worlds – we ask TomTom’ers to come to the office two days a week, and the remaining three are free to be worked in either location.
Improve your home office with a setup budget and get extra support with a monthly allowance.
Enjoy options to work from your home country and abroad for a set number of days each year, to visit family and friends, or to simply explore the world we’re mapping.
Take the holidays you want with a competitive holiday plan, plus an extra day off to celebrate your birthday.
Join annual events like our Hackathon and DevDays to bring your ideas to life with talented teammates from around the world.
Become a part of our inclusive global culture and have the chance to collaborate with a diverse community – we have over 80 nationalities at TomTom!
Find out more about our global benefits and enjoy additional local benefits tailored to your location.
Meet your team
We’re TomTom Automotive. On our team, your work – together with our 30+ years of experience in delivering connected navigation software, traffic information and highly accurate digital maps – will accelerate the future of driving. Car manufacturers trust us to provide the modular components they need to create competitive, tailor-made infotainment systems, and the mapping technology that are enabling self-driving cars to see beyond their sensors.
At TomTom...
You’ll help people find their way in the world. In 2004, TomTom revolutionized how the world moves with the introduction of the first portable navigation device. Now, we intend to do it again by engineering the first-ever real-time map, the smartest and most useful map on the planet.
Work with a team of 3,300+ unique, curious and passionate problem-solvers. Together, we’ll open up a world of possibilities for car manufacturers, enterprises and developers to help people understand and get closer to the world around them.
After you apply
Our recruitment team will work hard to give you a meaningful experience throughout your journey with us, no matter the outcome. Your application will be screened closely and you can rest assured that all follow-up actions will be thorough, from assessments and interviews all the way through onboarding. To find out more about our application process, check out our hiring FAQs.
TomTom is an equal opportunity employer
TomTom is where you can find your place in the world. Every day we welcome, nurture and celebrate differences. Why? Because your uniqueness is what makes you, you. No matter your culture or background, you’ll find your impact at TomTom. Research also shows that sometimes women and underrepresented communities can be hesitant to apply for positions unless they believe they meet 100% of the criteria. If you can relate to this, please know that we’d love to hear from you.
The impact you'll make
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Lead the account on our side: one plan for the customer across pre-sales, delivery and operations, one voice toward the customer's engineers and managers, and the TomTom colleagues on the account working to it.
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Build the account plan with the account manager: where the customer's business is going, which of our technologies fit which program, and the two or three opportunities we go after this year. You bring the technical and customer side of the pipeline; the account manager closes it.
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Open the next conversation before the customer asks: take our divisions' roadmaps to the customer as proposals, run the strategic reviews with the customer's program leadership, and turn what you learn there into qualified opportunities.
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Know the customer's problem, organization and constraints better than anyone at TomTom, and turn insights into decisions our divisions can take.
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Shape the solution with our product managers before anything is committed, so that what we promise fits what the customer needs and what we can build; no date goes to the customer without the delivery capacity behind it.
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Be the customer's first technical adviser after release: read a defect trend for what it does to their KPI, advise which release to take and when, explain what an update means for their fleet.
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Catch changes early. When the customer's priorities, platform or launch plan move, you turn it into a change request before it turns into a surprise.
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Grow the account: adoption and usage today, expansion we can trace to something you did, the next need shaped before the request for quotation is written.
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Hold the relationship at every level, from the engineer who integrates our software to the manager who decides the next program, and be the one contact the customer knows for everything they do not know whom to ask.
What you'll need
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A technical foundation: a degree in engineering or computer science, or equivalent experience, and hands-on familiarity with embedded automotive software, navigation or ADAS.
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Seven years or more with Japanese automotive OEMs or Tier 1 suppliers on complex programs, in program management, solution engineering or pre-sales, with at least one program you led end to end.
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A record of growing an account or winning a program as the technical lead next to Sales: you can name the deal, your part in it and what the customer bought because of it.
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Fluent Japanese and English, in the meeting room and in writing.
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Standing with the customer: you are credible with an engineering lead, a program director and a purchasing head, and you can say no before a date is confirmed.
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Business acumen: you see how our technology creates value in the customer's business and can say it in their terms.
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Leadership without a reporting line: you align colleagues, partners and divisions around one plan, and people follow you because you are right and prepared.
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Autonomy and comfort with change. We are building this team as we go, and the role grows with you.
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Willingness to travel occasionally to Europe and within Asia.
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