Lead Technical Program Manager
About The Position
Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization focused on building and advancing the technological backbone for Disney’s media business. The team combines technology with creativity to create world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive innovation and scalability. Technologists in this group design and build products and platforms that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses. The Business Operations team guides technology strategy, drives day-to-day operations, and manages projects, portfolios, resources, and processes. This role is specifically aligned with the GCI Foundational Platform, Orchestration, and Performance teams, focusing on availability, scaling, performance, reliability, and observability, with the goal of meeting 99.999% operational excellence key performance requirements.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience managing large-scale, strategic, software development programs in a well-established global technology organization.
- Proven ability to facilitate effective communication across disparate teams.
- Evidence of strong planning, delivery, and problem-solving skills.
- Superb written and verbal communications, presentation skills, and meeting facilitation skills (especially when working with senior leadership).
- BA/BS required.
- Proficient in technology and comfortable acting as a program strategist for a development team.
- Ability to move and adapt quickly as needs change.
- Maintain a pulse on development progress and manage change over the lifecycle of a project.
- Proven experience in delivering large, ambiguous, and highly technical programs.
- Highly proactive, detail-oriented, and able to autonomously work on multiple assignments.
- Capable of digging into technical details and clearly communicating schedules, risks, status, and processes to a variety of business and technical audiences.
- Ability to partner closely with product managers and technical leads to coordinate schedules and deliverables.
- Strong technical architecture aptitude is essential.
Responsibilities
- Deliver projects from concept to completion by collaborating with engineering teams, product management, design, and other cross-functional stakeholders.
- Understand architectural and design specifications. Suggest alternate solutions that achieve business goals and/or drive alternate solution development via collaborative mechanisms such as story mapping and whiteboarding.
- Facilitate technical meetings; follow the discussions to summarize and capture outcomes.
- Facilitate team agile ceremonies (standups, grooming, team retrospective and planning sessions) and ensure they are effective and efficient.
- Track team progress against results and determine solutions to get back on-track when things fall behind schedule.
- Engage with the development teams to build delivery timelines of feature sets for projects and be able to sequence the work based on priorities.
- Collaborate with other TPMs to understand cross-team dependencies and prioritize the work to avoid impediments.
- Attend project meetings and be ready represent engineering teams in communicating team progress, risks, and mitigation plans.
- Prioritize multiple team requests and balance that against other priorities and committed work. Must understand the impact of injecting these requests to the team’s backlog.
- Ensure that all involved parties understand and accept their roles and responsibilities.
- Navigate the TWDC to effectively drive progress, even when the scope of responsibilities may be unclear.
- Track and report key program metrics, informing stakeholders as appropriate.
- Facilitate all build activities (including QA and UAT), as per plan (where applicable).
- Proactively drive, track, and report on budgets.
- Collaborate with other program management colleagues to coordinate activities across multiple technology teams.
- Effortlessly sift through “noise” and facilitate discussions and activities with a laser focus towards results.
- Exemplify leadership characteristics through collaboration, work ethic, and creative thinking. Strive to inspire others and deliver the best possible outputs.
Benefits
- A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
