Head of Product Management - DC Severe-Duty Conventional

About the role

Reporting to the President of Autocar, the Head of Product Management – DC Severe-Duty Conventional is accountable for making the Autocar DC-64 Class 8 severe-duty conventional truck the undisputed market leader in every severe vocation Autocar chooses to serve. This role owns the umbrella DC product strategy, defining vocation strategies, product requirements, customer value models, competitive differentiation, and a multigenerational product roadmap that drive profitable growth and sustainable competitive advantage.

What You Will Own

• Own the Voice of the Application: Spend substantial time where trucks work—riding routes, visiting jobsites, observing loading/unloading, sitting with drivers, working with technicians, and collaborating with body companies. Build a structured, vocation-specific application knowledge base covering duty cycle, operating environment, and economic drivers, replacing opinion with application data.
• Serve as the Authority on Each DC Vocation: Establish distinct product strategies for each vocation (e.g., concrete/mixer, dump/construction, refuse/roll-off, logging/severe haul). For every target vocation, develop a requirements document, competitive benchmark, and economic value proposition. Align Engineering, Operations, Supply Chain, Quality, Sales, Marketing, Service, and Application Engineering around vocation-specific strategies and priorities.
• Own Vocation Value Proposition: Steward the DC’s vocation-specific value propositions, ensuring they are grounded in measurable product advantages, application data, customer economics, and competitive benchmarking. Align product requirements, roadmap priorities, and investments to strengthen Autocar’s competitive advantage in each target vocation.
• Build the DC Application Intelligence Database: Create and own a proprietary database of operating information from customer trucks—miles, hours, PTO and idle time, payload, fuel, fault codes, component failures, maintenance and repair events, downtime, and driver/technician observations. Use this intelligence to determine which specifications produce the best lifecycle economics for each application.
• Own Competitive Product Intelligence: Maintain detailed, application-level benchmarking against competitors (e.g., Mack, Peterbilt, Kenworth, Freightliner, Western Star, International, Volvo). Acquire, drive, and measure competitor trucks where justified to identify where Autocar is objectively better or worse and translate gaps into product priorities.
• Own Product Requirements: Define what problem must be solved, for which customer/vocation/application, why it matters, and required performance, while Engineering determines how to engineer the solution. Ensure every requirement traces customer/vocation → use case → problem → evidence → required performance → customer value → competitive benchmark → priority.
• Own the DC Multigenerational Product Roadmap: Maintain a rolling 3-to-5-year product roadmap prioritizing investments based on customer value, market opportunity, competitive differentiation, economic return, complexity, risk, and capital requirements. Recommend and prioritize improvements and technologies that create the greatest competitive advantage.
• Make “Always Up” Quantifiable: Translate the “Always Up” promise into measurable product requirements and customer economics across reliability, repairability, and availability. Demonstrate how improved uptime delivers more productive hours and greater lifecycle value.
• Own Product Economics and Customer ROIC: Quantify the customer value of product decisions—including productivity, avoided downtime, maintenance, fuel, labor, useful life, residual value, and safety—against incremental acquisition cost. Partner with Finance and Sales to develop TCO, payback, and ROIC tools that demonstrate the total cost of ownership advantage.
• Own the Product Tools: Turn application intelligence into scalable tools, including Customer Application, Intelligent Spec’ing, TCO/ROIC, Competitive Comparison, Body Integration, and Application Library tools. Enable mass customization through proprietary application knowledge, proven engineering rules, and reusable configurations.
• Drive Body Integration as a Competitive Advantage: Identify and build strategic relationships with key body and equipment manufacturers. Establish standard integration requirements, engineering interfaces, and application best practices to ensure chassis, body, controls, data, and service function as one integrated vocational tool.
• Connect Customer, Sales and Engineering & Close the Loop: Serve as the connective tissue between Customer, Sales, Product, Engineering, Body Builders, Operations, Quality, and Service. Ensure product decisions are driven by customer evidence, application data, market opportunity, competitive differentiation, and economic value. Establish a closed-loop system: field observation → data → root cause → requirement → engineering → validation → production → field measurement.

Who You Are

• Required:
  • 10+ years in heavy-duty commercial vehicles, vocational equipment, off-highway equipment, or closely related industrial equipment.
  • Deep understanding of Class 8 vocational applications.
  • Experience working with fleets, drivers, technicians, and body/equipment manufacturers.
  • Strong quantitative capability, including lifecycle economics, TCO, ROIC, customer value analysis, and data-driven business case development.
  • Demonstrated ability to translate field/application requirements into engineered products.
  • Strong understanding of chassis, powertrain, axle, suspension, braking, electrical, and body integration.
  • Ability to interpret telematics, warranty, reliability, and field-performance data.
  • Technically strong enough to challenge Engineering and commercially strong enough to challenge Sales.
  • Willingness to spend substantial time with customers and trucks in actual operating environments.
  • Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams and external partners around a common product strategy and deliver measurable business results.
  • Willing to relocate to Autocar’s flagship facility in Birmingham, Alabama.
• Strongly Preferred:
  • Experience across several severe-duty vocations: refuse, concrete mixers, dump, heavy construction, roll-off, logging, or severe haul.
  • Background from a truck OEM, major body/equipment manufacturer, large sophisticated fleet, vocational engineering organization, or heavy-equipment OEM.
• Personal Characteristics:
  • Application obsessed—understands how the customer’s operation works, what drives productivity and uptime, and where Autocar can create measurable economic value.
  • Data driven—bases decisions on customer evidence, field data, and economic analysis.
  • Technically credible—questions and judgments are respected by peers and partners.
  • Commercially sophisticated—understands that engineering only matters if it creates customer and Autocar economic value.
  • Field oriented—spends time at landfills, quarries, concrete operations, logging sites, or maintenance shops to gain customer and application insight.
  • Skeptical—tests assumptions against actual customer evidence.
  • Competitive—wants to know why Autocar wins or loses.
  • Decisive and influential—aligns teams and partners around a common strategy and force-ranks priorities.
  • Systems oriented—converts tribal knowledge into repeatable tools, rules, and data.
  • Customer obsessed without being customer dictated—uses customer requests as evidence to identify underlying application problems and scalable product opportunities.

What You’ll Get

• Competitive compensation that recognizes skills, experience, and impact.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life and AD&D insurance, plus short-term and long-term disability.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Paid time off (PTO) and company holidays.
• A high-impact role with relocation support to Birmingham, Alabama.