About the Role
The Program Specialist IV (Direct LoB) will own end-to-end operational excellence, stakeholder alignment, and program management for Japan's Direct Merchant business. This role serves as the primary CommOps point of contact for Direct workflows, ensuring stable day-to-day operations, scalable process design, and readiness for product launches and merchant-facing policy changes.
The candidate will be responsible for maintaining and improving key support metrics (CSAT, Contact Rate, Automation Rate, etc), driving VOC insights, leading cross-functional initiatives, and ensuring operational continuity across Sales, Account Management, BPO vendors, Product, and Operations teams. As YoY Direct trips grow and new retail/logistics use cases expand, this role is critical to sustaining reliability, partner trust, and business growth.
Your Impact in Role:
- Manage program governance for Direct-related initiatives, ensuring smooth launch readiness, scalable adoption, and high-quality merchant and customer experiences.
- Drive incident and escalation management, serving as the first-line contact during outages, major campaigns, and merchant-impacting events.
- Analyze operational data (CTGs, trends, inflow) to identify issues, propose improvements, and guide cross-functional teams toward actionable solutions.
- Develop and maintain standardized operating procedures, training, and documentation to support BPO and partner teams.
- Collaborate with Product teams to surface VOC, identify feature gaps, submit bug/UX requests, and influence the roadmap for Japan's Direct business.
- Lead BPO/vendor management for Direct workflows, ensuring performance, quality, and compliance across all support channels.
- Support commercial growth initiatives, including retail expansion (Momo, PChome, Yamato), grocery use cases, contract renewals with national merchants, and new delivery models (3W, DP pickup, microDC).
- Partner with local and regional leadership to align on strategy, prioritize operational gaps, and ensure Direct LoB projects contribute to 2025 strategic pillars.
- Create and present insights to leadership, translating operational data into business impact and recommending structural improvements.
The Experience You'll Bring:
- Fluency in English; business-level Japanese strongly preferred.
- Proven ability to analyze operational data, identify root causes, and translate insights into scalable solutions.
- Experience in program or project management within a complex, cross-functional environment.
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence without authority.
- Experience working with or managing BPO/vendor teams, ensuring high-quality execution.
- Ability to operate in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and independently drive initiatives from ideation to execution.
- Familiarity with operational workflows, product processes, and support ecosystems in high-growth businesses.
- Comfortable leveraging AI tools and automation frameworks to drive operational efficiency.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Prior experience within Japan's Merchant, Retail, Logistics, or Delivery industries.
- Deep understanding of Uber's Merchant ecosystem or experience supporting Japan-based merchants.
- Track record of standing up or scaling operations in a global or regional organization.
- Experience leading product-readiness initiatives and cross-functional launch planning.
- Strong business acumen and ability to connect operational levers to broader commercial outcomes.
- Previous ownership of highly complex workflows with multiple dependencies.
- Strategic thinking with the ability to balance quick wins with long-term scalability.
