Manager, Enterprise Innovation

Job Description

Work Arrangement

This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report to the Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan three times per week, at minimum.

The Role

As the Ideate Manager within Enterprise Innovation, you will lead a team in early-stage concept discovery and inception to accelerate internal innovation projects and new business concepts that support our strategic goals of revenue growth, step changes in company efficiency, and ensuring the future resiliency of General Motors. This is a Fortune 50 intrapreneurial role, requiring a bias to action, strategic mindset, excellent internal stakeholder engagement skills, non-linear judgment, deep comfort with ambiguity and substantial experience with coarse decision-making.

Adopting Lean startup philosophy, you will lead your team in the core incubation of early problem discovery to fuel GM growth opportunities by writing Lean canvas business models that address early customer desirability, technical feasibility, and commercial viability. As a leader in the Global Innovation Ideation team, you will be responsible for sourcing the top-of-funnel innovation portfolio by fostering innovation opportunities with internal business unit partners.

What You’ll Do (Responsibilities)

• Lead a team in early-stage problem discovery, opportunity analysis, and concept definition.

• For each project, within time-boxed constraints, you will guide your team members as they take projects through a customer-driven and data-centric viability assessment process involving:

  • Grass-roots customer empathy and initial market research using interviews, focus groups, surveys, and secondary sources leveraging existing insights whenever possible.

  • Defining initial customer persona and problem hypotheses using human-centered design principles.

  • Designing and deploying low-fidelity hypothesis testing to rapidly validate, iterate and generate critical insights that refine the customer definition and pain/gain/unmet opportunity spectrum.

  • Conducting SAM market sizing and build simplified financial models with ranged scenarios that justifies an investment thesis.

  • Writing stress-tested business model lean canvasses for each recommended opportunity.

• Build relationships and partner with GM Business Units across the enterprise to gain early stakeholder buy-in for new concepts and line of business growth acceleration.

• Partner with Global Innovation's executive leadership to perform go/no-go analyses related to Global Innovation's project portfolio.

• Evaluate and source new ideas through proactive internal fostering and external innovation scouting.

• Exhibit courage and objectivity to ascertain when an idea is not worth pursuing and take action to pause or pivot.

Additional Job Description

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• 3+ years people leader experience.

• 3+ years’ experience leading teams in assessing the market potential of new products or businesses; example roles would include corporate strategy, corporate ventures, intrapreneurship, new market entry, and product management.

• 10+ years’ experience working in an enterprise environment or similar.

• Demonstrated experience in helping to define initial product offerings or solutions as well as redefining or pivoting solutions in their early stages.

• Demonstrated experience establishing data-driven decision-making processes to assess opportunities.

• Highly collaborative, team player with an ability to coordinate cross-functional teams towards common goals, with strong cultural awareness.

• Experience developing people, with skills in coaching, mentoring, and teaching on the job.

• Able to rapidly, but rigorously, assess and size nascent opportunities (often in markets that don't yet exist) with 80/20 focus.

• Able to drive strong relationships and efficient data sharing across related groups within GM.

• Able to recognize and capitalize on weak signals in the market to proactively identify opportunities.

• Able to build a psychologically safe team environment that inspires creativity and fosters trust with your business partners.

• Able to travel required (10%)

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

• Adept at navigating within GM, with a strong internal network.

• Commercialization experience in growing a startup business at or outside of GM.

• Familiarity with, and enthusiasm for, emerging technologies.

• Familiarity with Le