Principal Technical Program Manager

The Walt Disney Company • San Francisco, CA

18h • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization responsible for building and advancing the technological backbone for Disney’s media business worldwide. The team combines technology with creativity to develop world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability. The Business Operations team within this organization guides technology strategy, manages day-to-day operations, including project and portfolio management, resource allocation, process management, technical incident management, and administrative support. This specific role is within the DE&E Product & Technology: Business Operations – Technical Program Management organization, focusing on highly complex and high-priority programs, particularly within the Identity Alliance and between other Alliances. The position requires expert program management skills, proactive and detail-oriented work, and the ability to autonomously manage multiple assignments. Candidates must gain domain expertise, clearly communicate schedules, risks, status, and processes to diverse audiences, and collaborate closely with other program managers and technical leads.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant experience
• 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 or equivalent experience required

Nice To Haves

• Formal project management certifications
• Experience working in a media technology environment
• User access and authentication technology domain knowledge, or demonstrated aptitude for learning a technology-based engineering domain

Responsibilities

• Drive activities for large, strategic, technical programs of the highest complexity, risk, and strategic priority
• Develop plans and timelines, accounting for all dependencies
• Forecast and ensure transparency of progress and issues/risks. Proactively drive risk mitigation and contingency planning, along with issue resolution
• Communicate status, updates, and program summaries via presentations, email, and direct communication with key stakeholders and executive leadership
• Ensure that all involved parties understand and accept their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable to their deliverables
• Facilitate all build activities (including QA), as per plan
• Own and proactively drive, track, and report on budgets
• Collaborate with other program management colleagues to coordinate activities across multiple technology teams
• Strong understanding of all program domain technical components, including architecture, tools and deployment practices that development team is employing, including cross-system interactions and dependencies
• Perform capacity planning for teams
• Track and report key program metrics, informing stakeholders as appropriate
• Partner with Product to facilitate advancement of intake pipeline, helping to triage programs to make recommendations to senior leadership
• Serve as subject matter expert and "go to" person for guidance in program management discipline
• Independently manage activities and resolve conflict within associated teams, with minimal influence from management
• Effortlessly sift through “noise” and facilitate discussions and activities with a laser focus towards results
• Navigate the TWDC to effectively drive progress, even when the scope of responsibilities may be unclear
• Exemplify leadership characteristics through collaboration, work ethic, and creative thinking. Strive to inspire others and deliver the best possible outputs
• Coordinate with external vendors, where applicable
• May manage smaller teams of professional employees related to area of focus or expertise
• Define, optimize, and manage Agile ceremonies and processes at the team-of-teams level

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.

What This Job Offers

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