Technical Program Manager-$65/hr

Program Manager – Job Description

Program Managers are responsible for managing programs through the full program life cycle including planning, prioritizing, scoping, requirements elicitation, resourcing, development, testing, and deployment. The VT Program Manager interfaces with individual contributors through director-level resources but will interact with all levels of technology and business leadership.

The ideal candidate is someone who has demonstrated success as a program manager in technology, is passionate about working with our business partners and engineers and improving our processes and tools, and is highly organized, motivated, and creative. An understanding of customer experience is a plus.

Who You Are

• Passionate about quality: You know what it takes to deliver a quality, sustainable product, and you are passionate about high-quality software development and the technology and knowledge that supports it.
• Essentialist: You model how to distill a problem to its essence, making it “as simple as possible, but no simpler.” You eliminate the decorative to deliver a single powerful idea.
• Design focused: You sweat the details to bring a beautiful elegance to everything you put your name to.
• Reliable: You pride yourself on developing reliability in outcomes, timelines, and goals for yourself and your team.
• Team player: You enjoy collaborating with, learning from, and teaching others so everyone becomes better. You assume good intent and contribute to a positive work environment.
• You go confidently: You take risks and trust your instincts to elevate creativity and possibilities in everything you do.

What You’ll Do

• Drive relevant program management deliverables and facilitate effective user/customer conversations
• Transform requirements into feature specs/user stories
• Establish story acceptance criteria for the engineering team
• Actively address ambiguity and change in the product backlog
• Assist in planning and vision refinement sessions with business and engineering teams
• Present convincingly to executives, partners, and users/customers
• Manage product roadmap based on product vision

Primary Responsibilities

• Partner with business stakeholders to understand and contribute to the vision and roadmap with a focus on continuous delivery of value and engineering action
• Own and manage partner relationships for specific engagements
• Work closely with cross-functional teams of business analysts, designers, data engineers, and QA to ensure delivery against the product roadmap
• Build and maintain relationships across organizations, teams, and individuals
• Prioritize development items to align with the roadmap
• Manage releases to ensure delivery and coordinate milestones across teams
• Identify risks, issues, and problems; escalate as appropriate and propose mitigation plans

Required Skills, Experience & Education

• Strong meeting facilitation, communication, and presentation skills
• Ability to clearly communicate across levels and departments in writing, orally, and interpersonally
• Effective problem-solving and analytical skills
• Proven ability to work under pressure to meet deadlines
• Demonstrated ability to multi-task and manage priorities
• Effective planning and execution skills; ability to define and articulate a strong vision, create an actionable roadmap, and drive the team to execute
• Ability to lead by influence without direct authority
• Effective storytelling and presentation skills; able to define a plan and rally the team
• Decisive and able to eloquently defend decisions

Preferred Skills, Experience & Education

• CAPM, PMP, PRINCE2, CSM
• Experience using Smartsheet
• Experience with Jira and Confluence
• Microsoft Office 365 (PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, SharePoint, Outlook)

What You Need to Succeed

• 5 years of technical program management
• Ability to influence executive and senior leaders on product vision, roadmap, and backlog priorities and trade-offs
• Effective communication with business partners and remote team members is mandatory
• Solid understanding of software development lifecycle and agile methodologies
• Skilled in documenting product requirements, writing functional specs, and user stories
• Ability to present convincingly to executives, partners, and users/customers
• Ability to work with internal and external technology partners and integrate input into service technical and product strategy
• Ability to manage issue resolution and mitigate product roadmap risks
• Experience defining roadmaps and delivering using agile software development methodologies
• Ability to build credibility and trust with team members and senior management
• Experience with Project, Program, and Portfolio Management is a plus
• Excellent oral and written presentation skills
• Excellent interpersonal and collaborative skills
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to drive teams toward solutions
• Ability to defuse tension among project team members
• Ability to prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment
• Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision-making skills
• Ability to tolerate stress
• Deep commitment and empathy for the customer; design-thinking skills a plus
• Open-minded, positive attitude, and enjoys working in a fun, high-energy, fast-paced environment