Group Program Director

Critical Mass is hiring a Group Program Director to work in our Chicago office!

As the Group Program Director, you are a creative and strategic thinker who loves learning everything there is to know about a client’s brand, business, and customer. You have experience leading multidisciplinary teams, and you know what it takes to deliver a digital experience that can improve the lives of customers while surpassing the goals of clients. Building, managing, and growing positive and productive relationships with your client and your team is second nature to you.

You will be a key figure in our organization, overseeing high-profile tracks of work, managing a large team of Project Managers, and ensuring the seamless execution of projects. Your responsibilities encompass project delivery excellence, account planning, operational leadership, and discipline thought leadership.

Remote work is not an option for this role, and the requirement is to be onsite in Chicago.

You will:

Ensure Project Delivery Excellence by:

• Championing process improvements and best practices.
• Fostering a positive, collaborative work environment.
• Developing solutions to meet client business objectives and team needs.
• Enforcing and supporting accurate project documentation, including project plans, status reports, and meeting minutes.
• Managing and maintaining account group finances, resourcing planning, and recruitment needs
• Seeing the big-picture view, understanding what level of detail should be communicated, including priorities, risks, and issues.
• Confidently leading change processes at the client, employee, and project level.
• Leading and supporting Project Delivery team.
• Communicating effectively with internal and external stakeholders.
• Mitigating and communicating project and program risks.
• Partnering with account leads to drive the work and account with a strong understanding of the client business, goals, and objectives as it applies across projects within the account group.
• Ensuring the overall business and portfolio runs effectively.

Drive Account Planning and Operations by:

• Creating and owning the account roadmap development, aligning all projects into the overall account picture
• Providing career guidance, mentoring, and training to the Delivery team.
• Driving continuous team development to effectively deliver solutions.
• Fostering the skillset of the Project Delivery team through mentoring and training.
• Contributing to client pitches, integrating strategy and business development with delivery capabilities.

You Have:

• 9-12 years-experience managing a variety of digital project types; strategy, digital transformation, complex global site builds, e-commerce, marketing campaigns, new technologies, and immersive content.
• Proven track record of success in program-level management within the digital realm.
• Strong operations background with a focus on ensuring operational excellence.
• Mastery of managing, controlling, and articulating project scope, schedules, budget, and resource management.
• Proven ability in change management, project roadmap development, and revenue forecasting.
• Experience in setting up and launching new processes across accounts.
• Expertise in managing direct reports and leading teams of at least 5+ Project Managers.
• Prowess to delegate tasks, set clear expectations, and provide guidance to ensure team success.
• Aptitude to effectively engaging with clients and serve as a client-facing representative.
• Excellent partnership skills with Client Services and other discipline leads.
• A creative and strategic mindset with a keen eye for detail.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills that transform challenges into viable workable solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to maintain a solutions-oriented mindset with refined decision-making capabilities.
• Mastery of communication, presentation, leadership, facilitation, and negotiation skills.

What We Offer:

• Global maternity and parental leave
• Competitive benefits packages
• Vacation, compassionate leave, sick days, and flex days
• Access to online services for families and new parents
• Extensive winter holiday office closures
• Summer Fridays (off at 3:00 PM local time every Friday)
• Diversity and Inclusion Board with 12 affinity groups
• Internal learning and development programs
• Enterprise-wide employee discounts

At Critical Mass, we value our employees and offer competitive compensation and benefits packages.  If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding opportunity to make a significant impact on the lives of our employees, we encourage you to apply for this exciting position today!

The Talent Team at Critical Mass is focused on ensuring we provide the best training, onboarding, and employee experience possible! Our new hires & employees are the future of our organization, and we want to set you up for long-term success. In an effort to do so, we expect our team to work from an office a minimum of 4 days a week. The ask stems from our want to:

Strengthen opportunity for continuous learning
Improve collaboration and team relationships.
Increase employee engagement

This work model balances the need for individual flexibility while maintaining the relentless customer focus we provide at CM. We understand that not everyone may feel comfortable with this expectation, so we ask that you please let us know immediately if there are any concerns so we can help navigate accordingly.