Principal Program Manager

Essential Functions

• Develop and prioritize the projects that support strategic initiatives across the Enterprise/Shared Services, Retail, Digital, Data & Marketing technology functions, and continuously ensure resources, funding, and other dependencies are aligned to drive progress toward business outcomes.
• Strategize, implement, and maintain program initiatives that adhere to organizational goals
• Develop program assessment protocols for evaluation and improvement.
• Maintain organizational standards of satisfaction, quality, and performance
• Oversee multiple project teams, ensuring program goals are reached
• Manage budget and funding channels
• Manage and escalate critical decision making, anticipate and mitigate potential risks, explore and implement contingency plans, and ensure cross-functional alignment across the program.
• Facilitate and drive communications across stakeholders (e.g., individual brand leadership, franchisees, investors, etc.) to ensure transparency of program progress, value delivery, and risks, and provide appropriate and timely status updates to our executive team.
• Identify and drive operational improvements across commercial, technology and brand teams to foster agile ways of working, process efficiency, and resource allocation.
• Implement and own knowledge sharing best practices in order to drive clarity, understanding, and communication of relevant details within the portfolio.
• Build trusted relationships across executives, team members, and franchisees and develop a feedback loop to collect, synthesize, and share the 'pulse' on how strategic initiatives are impacting the organization with initiative sponsors.
• Partner with functional leads to define and maintain overall program metrics, value measurement and reporting on progress toward outcomes.
• Develop/adopt framework(s) to:
  • Govern program progress across all projects/workstreams.
  • Document, communicate, and track workstream progress, dependencies, issues, risks, expectations, etc. across parties.
  • Create audience-specific program communications (i.e., status, risks, issues, resources, data, etc.)
  • Elevate / discuss / decide any open questions, risks, issues, etc. that require leadership action.
  • Track timeline, resource needs, SLAs, budget, spend, etc.

• Implement continuous improvement measures for the PMO

Job Summary

As a Principal Program Manager, you will be expected to partner with technical and functional leadership to plan, direct and execute strategic initiatives. You will be expected to guide multiple project teams across multiple initiatives to ensure business outcomes are achieved. This includes program risk and issue management, change management, communications management, and stakeholder management.

Work Experience

• 10+ years of general work experience
• 5+ years in a senior program management role or 9+ years of senior project management experience.
• Significant experience at a consumer-facing brand in a highly matrixed organization.
• 5+ years in managing global technology vendors in Outcome based commercial models.
• 5+ years in technology financial management of $50m+ annual budgets.
• Experience leading major programs and change initiative(s) across multiple internal teams and 3rd party vendors.

Skills & Abilities

• Ability to present and convey key insights effectively to executive management.
• Strong soft skills and the ability to flex communication style to multiple audience types and bring clarity to ambiguous or uncertain deadlines or actions.
• Ability to "connect the dots" across initiatives and teams and assess the impact of other in-flight initiatives on the Commercial portfolio.
• Experience in financial planning and value realization tracking for cross P&L initiatives.
• Strong leadership skills with ability to motivate teams outside of your direct purview.
• Clear and natural predisposition on driving operational excellence and new operating models, with a proven track record of consistent and sustainable focus on execution.
• Familiarity and experience implementing and optimizing agile development practices (e.g., Sprint Planning, Jira, Confluence, etc.).
• Adept in vendor management, SOW negotiation, and program plan development.