Design Program Manager

Bentley Systems • Quebec, QC

12h • Hybrid

About The Position

Bentley Systems is the infrastructure engineering software company, advancing the world’s infrastructure—sustaining both the global economy and the environment. Within Bentley, the Design organization shapes meaningful experiences—from brand to in-product interactions—with clarity, coherence, and craft. An integral part of the Design organization is the Design Strategy & Operations team, responsible for the planning, processes, and operational foundations that enable it to work effectively. From strategic planning to project management, resource management, and tooling, the team ensures designers can focus on delivering great user experiences. The Design Program Manager orchestrates programs of work across the Design organization. Rather than managing a single project end-to-end, this role manages the portfolio: the intake pipeline, resource allocation across competing demands, governance rhythms, and the cross-team coordination that keeps the whole function moving. This means connecting requests for design resource to broader objectives, balancing capacity against demand, surfacing trade-offs to leadership, and establishing the cadences and standards that make delivery predictable at scale. This role brings structure, visibility, and strategic alignment to how the Design organization plans and delivers its work, so the team can consistently do its best work on what matters most.

Requirements

• 6+ years of program or project management experience, preferably within a digital design, creative agency, or modern software product environment.
• Demonstrated track record of successfully managing a portfolio of work or multiple concurrent programs, rather than just single isolated projects.
• Solid understanding of modern design processes, terminologies, and deliverables (UX, UI, Brand, and Visual design).
• Proficiency with modern collaboration and program management tools (e.g., ClickUp, Aha!, Azure DevOps).
• Strong critical thinking and confidence to challenge assumptions, negotiate priorities, and build trust with senior leadership.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Professional project/program management certification (e.g., PMP, PgMP, Agile/Scrum, PRINCE2).
• Experience with data visualization and operational metrics reporting.

Responsibilities

• Own the intake and prioritization pipeline, ensuring incoming work is triaged, scoped, and sequenced against strategic priorities and capacity.
• Maintain a clear, current view of all active and upcoming programs and projects across the Design function.
• Connect individual projects to broader organizational objectives, ensuring effort is concentrated on the highest-value work.
• Establish and run the governance rhythms (planning cycles, reviews, prioritization forums) that keep the portfolio aligned and on track.
• Manage allocation of design resources across competing demands, balancing capacity against the pipeline of work.
• Provide visibility into who is working on what, where capacity is constrained, and where trade-offs are needed.
• Partner with design leads to forecast demand and plan resourcing ahead of need.
• Coordinate dependencies and hand-offs across designers, cross-functional partners, and parallel workstreams.
• Operate across delivery models, running some work through a centralized intake model and embedding in agile teams and squads for others, managing sprints and backlogs and adapting ways of working to fit each context.
• Establish consistent delivery standards, ceremonies, and ways of working across programs.
• Monitor health across the portfolio, proactively addressing slippage, bottlenecks, and risk before they impact delivery.
• Track program-level KPIs related to throughput, capacity utilization, quality, and stakeholder engagement.
• Identify, log, and actively manage risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies across the portfolio.
• Develop mitigation and contingency plans, escalating to sponsors and leadership where appropriate.
• Anticipate systemic blockers and resolve them before they cascade across programs.
• Act as a central point of contact and source of truth for portfolio status across designers, stakeholders, and senior leadership.
• Provide regular, clear, and accurate progress updates at both project and program level.
• Constructively challenge scope, priorities, and trade-offs, holding the line on what serves the strategy rather than the loudest request.
• Bring an independent point of view to decisions, advising leadership rather than just relaying information.
• Facilitate decision-making by surfacing the right information to the right people at the right time.
• Manage changes to scope, priority, or resourcing through clear, structured governance and change control.
• Assess the impact of changes across the portfolio and ensure decisions are made with full visibility of trade-offs.
• Run program reviews and retrospectives to capture lessons learned and apply them across future work.
• Drive the ongoing improvement of program and operational management practice within the Design Team.

Benefits

• An attractive salary and benefits package.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior