Senior Digital Platform Strategist

Gate City Bank•Fargo, ND

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Digital Platform Strategist acts as the connection between digital technologies and operational stakeholders, ensuring the Bank’s digital banking platform suite is effectively governed, coordinated, and continuously improved. This role consolidates decentralized insights (vendor roadmaps, production trends, stakeholder needs, and interdependency impacts) into clear short to mid-term roadmap recommendations aligned to strategic goals. The role leads day-to-day coordination for platform governance, release readiness, change management protocols, and cross-functional alignment, and is comfortable constructively challenging stakeholder thinking to help the Bank achieve operational and strategic objectives. This role partners with departmental subject matter experts to translate platform needs into prioritized epics/user stories and successful go-to-market execution.

Requirements

A bachelor’s degree (B.A.) in a related field, such as Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or Business; 8+ years of related experience supporting technology systems; or an equivalent combination of education and experience is required.
Superior written communication skills.
Excellent oral communication skills, to include influencing, negotiating, listening, and cross-departmental collaboration to produce desired results.
Ability to interpret and use data for complex multi-departmental and multi-system decision-making.
Strong analytical and critical thinking skills.
Strong organizational skills, and a proven ability to manage multiple products in production, pre-prod, quality, staging, and development environments with varying technologies and lifecycles with a high degree of accuracy
Hands-on, “roll up your sleeves” mindset, with the ability to be a driver and change agent in an organization.
Successful history in leading complex, large-scale projects, budgets, and operations in a fast-paced environment.
Experience in Agile/Lean methodologies and can lead groups to adjust as needed across various traditional and Agile methods.
Expertise leading digital platforms and capabilities (web/mobile), with an emphasis on delivering measurable improvements in customer experience, adoption, operational efficiency, and risk reduction.
Understanding of Customer Experience and UX/UI best practices and how to explain and apply them.
Develops and delivers quarterly (or routine) platform roadmap recommendations, including clear options, dependencies, sequencing, and alignment with stakeholder priorities and strategic objectives.
Coordinates and ensures release readiness and go-to-market execution, including communication planning, stakeholder alignment, and adoption support to drive successful implementation.
Monitors platform performance and stability, identifying recurring issues, escalating risks as appropriate, and recommending remediation actions to improve overall system reliability.
Partners with Digital Business Analyst(s) to define, track, and analyze KPIs, translating insights into actionable recommendations that support business and strategic goals.
Creates and maintains high-quality documentation, ensuring effective knowledge transfer, improved team resiliency, and reduced dependency on single points of failure.

Nice To Haves

A Master’s Degree is preferred.
Desired: CCMP (Certified Change Management Professional); PMP (Project Management Professional); or CSPO/PSPO (Scrum Product Owner)
Preferred: CCXP; ITIL 4 Foundation; SAFe POPM; UX training/certification (e.g., Nielsen Norman Group coursework); or Lean Six Sigma Green Belt

Responsibilities

Proactively collaborate with stakeholders and vendors to create and refresh the platform roadmap and capability plan (short- to mid-term), gathering and prioritizing new requests.
Facilitate roadmap working sessions; produce options, tradeoffs, dependencies, and recommendations.
Partner with subject matter experts and delivery teams (where applicable) to translate approved items into sequenced epics/user stories and release plans.
Write high-level business cases based on tangible financial results, market research, and intangible operational benefits, collaborating with the Digital Business Analyst on opportunities for additional research efforts.
Deploy implementation and change management best practices with a human-centered design approach, delivering high-quality outputs on time and to expectations.
Works on assigned projects independently or as a member of a team to advance the Bank’s operational best practices and minimize risk; collaborates using Agile/Lean practices to implement new and/or enhance existing products, services, or programs.
This role may draft or refine epics/user stories and acceptance criteria in partnership with SMEs, and technology teams, but is not expected to be the day-to-day Scrum Product Owner for an engineering team unless explicitly assigned for a specific initiative.
Serves as a Project Lead on mid to large sized Digital projects.
Plan, create, and execute the go-to-market plan, communicating with stakeholders on timing, priority, and rollout.
Collaborates with the Digital Business Analyst to develop, align, and routinely monitor digital project’s key performance indicators (KPIs) that support the Bank’s Strategic Plan and goals.
Monitor vendor SLA performance and recurring issues/trends; coordinate escalations and drive root-cause themes and remediation recommendations with internal teams and vendor partners to maintain platform stability.
Facilitate and document discussions to clarify issues, generate possible solutions, present the options, deploy the chosen action and monitor results, and maintain change control reports.
Develop, document, and maintain an understanding of data structure, data integrations, configurations, and system information, collaborating on documentation with the Digital Business Analyst.
Cross-train to maintain several team member backup options, deepening expertise to support the Bank’s business continuity plan.
Develop and maintain productive relationships with team members, leaders, customers, and vendors.
Stay abreast of developments in the digital field and adopt changes to drive improvement.
Influence others and provide education based on experience gained through implementation work.
Maintains professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops, reviewing publications, and establishing professional networks.
Take a leadership role in living the Bank’s culture, leading through influence, building engagement, and partnering across corporate departments and retail branches.
Demonstrate a passion for learning, growing, and experimentation, joining forces with others to take action and further the Bank’s mission.