Senior Director, R&D Program Management Office

About the role:

The R&D PMO is responsible for managing highly cross-functional and extremely complex strategic initiatives for the R&D organization at Samsara, such as launching new hardware products, building new partnership programs or rolling out new products, pricing packages. 

In this role, as leader of the R&D PMO you will partner closely with many teams, leaders and other program management functions across Samsara, from R&D to Sales, Marketing and Finance. You will directly influence and strengthen the PMO contributions across Samsara, generating concrete program management contributions, maintaining a high level of program management value-add, and scaling the team. You will be proud to work on high-quality innovative products that are changing the world of physical operations and delivering real-life impact for our customers. The ideal candidate brings a unique blend of strong strategic and execution skills, who is excited about rolling up their sleeves to work hand in hand with our team of technical program managers to build for the long term. You have experience with process development, change management, and can help solve tough operational problems.

• Partner with and guide cross functional teams across product management, engineering, go-to-market, finance, program management and other functions, in order to drive execution of key strategic R&D programs, such as new product launches
• Lead the program management teams to successfully establish complete end-to-end program plans with well-defined success criteria and effectively track success measures directly impacting our customers 
• Spearhead and manage highly complex programs, with multiple projects and workstreams, by coordinating across many stakeholders and other program managers in order to create a well-coordinated, cohesive and comprehensive operating plan for such programs.
• Enable effective cross-functional collaboration across R&D teams (Software, Firmware, Hardware) and Go-to-Market teams (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success), by ensuring continuous alignment on program objectives and success measures
• Design and manage program communications plans that ensure executive level visibility and transparency on program objectives and status.
• Build program frameworks and operational processes that increase the efficiency and quality of execution of the PMO TPM team. 
• Deeply understand the business health and key performance metrics and bring a customer first focus to programs. Deep dive regularly into data and metrics to identify risks and opportunities and follow through with action-oriented insights.
• Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles (Focus on Customer Success, Build for the Long Term, Adopt a Growth Mindset, Be Inclusive, Win as a Team) as we scale globally and across new offices
• Hire, develop and lead an inclusive, engaged, and high performing team.

Minimum requirements for this role:

• 8+ years of experience as a Program Manager leader partnering closely with engineering and product teams, as well as other go to market teams; experience providing coaching and mentoring to advance program management (technical, agile or general) skill set of the team
• Able to clearly articulate the value-add of  program management to engineering and product organizations; experience being an advocate for program management
• Experience developing and managing engineering or product portfolio planning and tracking processes and cadences
• Exceptional communication skills - Comfortable presenting to executives, internal stakeholders and external customers. Able to successfully adapt your style and leverage strong listening skills to inform your approach
• Strong leader, comfortable engaging with people at all levels; successfully manages via influence
• A natural problem-solver and strategic thinker; able to bring clarity to chaos and navigate through ambiguity
• Experience successfully rolling out changes within a team and across multiple organizations; comfortable with adapting to change 
• Highly collaborative, and partner-oriented professionally, working effectively with multiple cross-functional teams. across Product, Engineering, Hardware, Finance, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing
• Versed in planning and tracking tools such as Microsoft Project, Airtable, SmartSheets, JIRA and Confluence
• A natural problem solver and strategic thinker, who has a passion for creating a structured approach to solving complex problems, breaking down ambiguous problems and turning them into actionable solutions

An ideal candidate also has:

• BS in a relevant technical field e.g. EE, ME, or CS
• MBA or consulting experience  is a plus