Sr. Director, Program Management - Product Development Lifecycle

San Diego, CA

The Sr. Director of the Program Management office is a proactive leader who will own the Product Development Processes used across the company to deliver exceptional experiences for customers and creators. This person is a simplifier who judiciously adds, refines, and removes processes to ensure they serve the end goal of accelerating the teams that use them. This person will have proven success in leading product development teams and process development – they must have experience rolling up their sleeves to deliver products and services. They will have led the transformation of global program management organizations, developing collaborative high- performance teams to achieve higher-valued added activities, while leveraging program management methodologies.

The Sr. Director of Program Management will have excellent leadership, analytical, and planning skills. They will drive the rhythm of the business for the Program team, cross functional leadership, and senior executives across the company to ensure the processes they define result in a single source of truth, transparency, and timely action/decisions by leaders. This person will identify the tools required to support the processes they define and deliver. They will be metric oriented and ensure the work they do has measurable impact so the organization knows when processes are effective; leading to accelerated time to market, increased quality, and exceeding projected value realization.

Key Responsibilities Include:
 

Build and Lead Teams:

• Attract, encourage, develop, and retain a high-performing geographically distributed program management team.
• Lead a team of talented program managers overseeing the processes for complex, full-stack, outcome-driven projects across Hardware, Software, and Services.

Strategic Program Management:

• Develop and influence program delivery strategy, balancing consistency with the autonomy and flexibility.
• Optimize product development best practices.
• Establish the required rhythms so that all teams are informed, decisions are timely, and action is taken to keep teams unblocked.

Communication and Collaboration:

• Proactively communicate opportunities and risk with senior executives, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams.
• Collaborate with key leadership stakeholders to assess and streamline processes, mitigating risks and generating efficiencies.
• Evangelize the value of the product development processes to driving business outcomes.

Efficiency and Innovation:

• Ensure processes expose efficiencies and linkages between projects by identifying shared services.
• Lead efforts to continuously measure and evolve internal program processes with an objective of accelerating PMO, Engineering, Product, Design, and Quality.
• Identify ways to do more with less.
• Embrace and build a culture of collaboration - where good ideas come from all parts of the organization.

Leadership and Culture:

• Support the transformation of the current program management office to higher-valued added activities across the product lifecycle.
• Act with a sense of ownership and urgency to remove unnecessary steps 
• Embrace a culture of accountability across the teams that you work with.
• Foster and model a diverse and inclusive work environment across teams.
• Looks around corners to identify problems before they occur. Ensures the mechanisms are in place to ensure mitigation is built into the process and not reliant on good intentions.

Qualifications & Requirements:

• 10+ years’ experience as a technical program manager and/or combination of engineering and program management experience.
• 5+ years leading product development process definition and implementation.
• Demonstrated leadership qualities, including a history of working across different organizational levels - including the most senior leaders.
• Proven experience in defining and implementing new product development processes and understanding diverse geographical and cultural needs.
• In-depth expertise in program structure design.
• Expertise in leveraging data and technology to measure progress and ensure success at a scalable level.
• Proven track record in advocating for and implementing new investments in technology, especially in data utilization for program management.
• Previous success in driving change across a broad set of internal and external constituents.
• Demonstrated ability to honor and respect the past while effectively focusing on continuous improvement and avoiding stagnation.
• Experience defining the vision and strategy and leading highly performant teams to successful implementation.
• Extensive experience in managing strategic change and holds a clear vision of “what it takes” to manage and successfully deliver programs across a highly distributed global organization.
• Broad experience with tools and techniques, methods, and implementation in planning, execution, change control, etc.
• Knowledge of game industry or digital entertainment (preferred experience)