Interview

Your job involves many people both inside and outside the company.

Connected car service architectures cannot be realized by an automotive OEM only. So we are working together with global large IT companies and Nissan's alliance partners to materialize connected car services. I am in charge of planning, profit management, and partnership business development to realize attractive services. I gather requests of each market through the product development department and overseas regions, and we will work with the relevant internal departments and alliance partners to actualize them and make investment proposals to the company.
Connected car services connect cars and provide services using software, so it is a highly specialized area that requires knowledge of both the technology inside the car and the technology that connects it to the outside. In addition, the speed of change in the world makes our situation complicated. The speed of change is accelerating, and our task of "planning" to predict the future has never been more difficult. It is becoming increasingly important to design services flexibly, given the uncertainty and unpredictability.

What is your important things when it comes to work?

In realizing connected car services, it is important to reduce costs while increasing added value. If all stakeholders try to do what they want, costs will pile up endlessly, and what we really wanted to achieve will not be possible in the end. To avoid such situations, it is necessary to set a simple target that everyone can accept and share.
An example of a target is the phrase “Keep Fresh”. In the traditional automotive industry, quality of products is “paramount”, so our focus is the production process. However, with connected car services, post-production software will continue to provide new experiences, so traditional quality control processes will need to be rethought. "Keep Fresh" is a word that also includes the meaning of trying to get out of the conventional way of thinking. I use these simple words repeatedly like a charm to ensure that everyone shares the same vision and works as one team.