Lead Engineer – Category Innovation

POSITION SUMMARY:

The Category Technology Lead Engineer – identifies and coordinates the development of solutions that drive competitive differentiation in our home cleaning systems and provides the necessary technical leadership to enable effective design strategies.

In this key role, he/she will serve as a recognized leader in defining both state of the art and creative category solutions in order to anticipate and develop technologies for existing and future design opportunities, while working closely with the legal services team to tactically plan and develop intellectual property (IP) rights.

This person will also be a critical link in technical communications both within Product Development and Marketing to benchmark and verify technical aspects of identified competitive product.

This includes close partnerships with category P&L owners as well as patent attorneys and engineering leadership.

POSITION PROFILE:                     
Oversee and guide the activities from and engineering aspect related to category technology, internal and external benchmarking, innovation forecasting and IP fencing for assigned product category(ies).

Develop strong working relationships with inside and outside counsel Understand existing patent landscapes and systematically work to create value-add areas of IP coverage for future time-horizons Ability to partner and facilitate product strategy sessions with outside design and/or legal firms based on category knowledge, engineering possibilities and legal counsel.

Guide technical teams to implement applicable ideas/technologies by determining the best product characteristics and trade-offs through the lens of product development and legal counsel.

Create process to evaluate competitive products routinely and systematically to the right level of rigor, evaluating the key metrics related to performance, quality, consumer experience, etc Partner with BISSELL product approval and test (PAT) department to ensure products within category (internal and external) can be adequately evaluated and suggest/forecast needed evaluation methods or equipment.

Work closely with other departments (i.e.

Marketing, Industrial Design, Consumer Experience, Legal) to determine emerging trends, needs, and insight based on various cross-functional input.

Ability to quickly strategize, plan and react to newly published competitive category IP – working closely with various legal counsels and engineering support departments.

May be required to perform other duties as assigned.