Ethan Snyder

Background

About Ethan Snyder

Ethan Snyder is an automotive strategist with a history of success channeling industry curiosity to impact business planning and product development. He currently serves as Director, Strategic Projects at Hyundai Motor America. He joined Rivian in 2018, prior to reveal of R1T and R1S, and spent nearly 6 years building Product Planning and Market Research functions from scratch. Known earlier in his career for insightful competitive analysis as a Product Planner with Infiniti, he worked on virtually every vehicle in the portfolio. This included upstream concept development for Q50 and next generation crossovers, QX80 minor change, quality standards, and special editions. Snyder has broad-based experience developing global relationships, and influencing, coaching and leading others. He is an expert in using automotive planning resources including JD Power PIN, and Strategic Vision NVES to generate rich, cohesive, and persuasive “executive friendly” presentations. In April of 2016 he earned an MBA with Distinction from the University Of Michigan. For his Multidisciplinary Action Project, Ethan traveled to Limerick, Ireland and led a team of physicians to develop a strategic marketing plan for a start-up physical therapy mobile application launching in the UK. Ethan began his career at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) as an Information Management business partner. At J&J he conceived and implemented an enterprise-wide initiative to improve the level of accessibility on company websites for people with disabilities. Later he led a global medical affairs effort to automate clinical trial reviews. Prompted by a lifelong love of cars, Snyder was fortunate to transition to a dream job in Automotive in 2007. He found that many of the fundamental skills he developed at J&J, most notably how to develop a deep understanding of customer needs, were directly transferable to his work as a Product Planner. Ethan Snyder currently resides in Southern California. His passions include family, running, music, and automotive restoration. Personal Email: ebsnyder@umich.edu