Job Description:
Product Development Specialist
The Impact You’ll Make in this Role
As a Product Development Specialist, you will have the opportunity to tap into your curiosity and collaborate with some of the most innovative people around the world.
3M Electrical Markets Division (EMD) is seeking a creative, diligent, and collaborative product development engineer to lead and support product development initiatives from concept through commercialization. This role is responsible for applying technical expertise, customer insight, and structured product development practices to create differentiated solutions that meet business, market, regulatory, and manufacturing requirements. It requires broad technical knowledge as well as the ability to work with people from various functions and geographies. The ideal candidate is a passionate person who strives to bring new products to market, enjoys working with various technologies for various applications, takes pride in leading and completing projects with creativity and rigor, and is motivated by building relevant new business platforms and sustaining existing platforms.
Here, you will make an impact by:
- Translating customer needs and market requirements into technical product specifications.
- Designing, planning, and executing experiments to evaluate materials, formulations, processes, or product performance.
- Developing prototypes, conducting feasibility studies, and supporting scale-up activities.
- Exploring and developing novel technologies/approaches to enable accelerated business growth and ensure competitiveness.
- Travelling occasionally to manufacturing facilities to develop and validate material specifications and enable NPI commercialization.
- Contributing to change management as it relates to product design changes driven by product modification, application development, life cycle management, product/quality improvement, supply changes, regulatory requirements, and cost reduction.
- Collaborating with cross-functional teams to identify and solve complex problems and to apply/implement new or modified chemistries.
- Reviewing and developing intellectual property at the business level, including proprietary advances, ROIs, patents, trade secrets, etc. Documenting experimental data and observations in technical notebooks or electronic files.
Your Skills and Expertise
To set you up for success in this role from day one, 3M requires (at a minimum) the following qualifications:
- Master’s degree (completed and verified prior to start) in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, Polymer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field AND three (3) years of experience in product development, materials development, process development, technical service, application engineering, or a related technical function.
OR
- Ph.D. (completed and verified prior to start) in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, Polymer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field AND one (1) year of experience in product development, materials development, process development, technical service, application engineering, or a related technical function.
Additional qualifications that could help you succeed even further in this role include:
- Experience developing products for electronics, advanced materials, films, liners, adhesives, coatings, specialty chemicals, RFID, tapes, or related markets.
- Knowledge of product commercialization processes, stage-gate development, or design control practices.
- Experience with statistical tools, design of experiments, or data analysis software.
- Familiarity with scale-up, manufacturing transfer, or process capability evaluation.
- Experience working directly with customers or translating voice-of-customer input into technical requirements.
- Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects and priorities.
- Strong understanding of quality systems, product specifications, and technical documentation practices.
- Ability to identify innovation opportunities and contribute to intellectual property generation.
- Good understanding of solvent coating and drying of polymers, molding, adhesive curing; corona treating; extrusion coating; e-beam curing
- Good understanding of statistical methods for data analysis.
- Familiar with the following processes: RM substitutions (and the 3M change management process), NPI process, SKU creation, BOM creation, PFMEA, DFMEA, HOQ, test method development, MSA, capability studies, data analysis (e.g., in Minitab or Excel), root cause analysis, Six Sigma.
- Ability to work with minimal supervision (self-motivated) and in teams
- Ability to conform to shifting demands, timelines, and priorities
- Willingness to travel (within the US mainly)
- Demonstrated ability to apply scientific or engineering principles to solve technical problems.
- Experience planning experiments, analyzing data, and documenting technical results.
- Ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Work location:
- This role follows an on-site working model, requiring the employee to work at least four days a week at the 3M Center in Austin, TX.
Travel: May include up to 15% domestic and international
Relocation Assistance: May be authorized
Must be legally authorized to work in country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B status).
