Senior Manager - Digital Portfolio Management Operations

American Express•Phoenix, AZ

About The Position

At American Express, our culture is built on a 175-year history of innovation, shared values and Leadership Behaviors, and an unwavering commitment to back our customers, communities, and colleagues. As part of Team Amex, you'll experience this powerful backing with comprehensive support for your holistic well-being and many opportunities to learn new skills, develop as a leader, and grow your career. Here, your voice and ideas matter, your work makes an impact, and together, you will help us define the future of American Express. How you will make an impact in this role? The Enterprise Ways of Working team (EWoW) is responsible for leading multi-year strategic programs that cut across multiple product teams as well as accelerating strategic alignment and planning across Enterprise Centers of Excellence (COEs) and Technology, to elevate transparency and drive business and customer outcomes. As a Senior Manager, Cross Portfolio Operations within the Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) team, you will play a critical role in enabling effective portfolio planning, execution, and decision-making across technology. This role serves as a strategic connector between portfolio strategy, process, data, and tooling—driving clarity in complex environments and ensuring portfolio practices evolve alongside business and technology needs.

Requirements

5+ years in Product Management, Program Management, Change Management, Portfolio Management, Operations, or related roles within technology or digital environments at large matrixed organizations.
Self-starter with excellent strategic thinking skills. Comfortable navigating ambiguity and mastery of distilling strategy from white space.
Proven experience translating business and portfolio planning needs into clear tooling, data, and product requirements in partnership with technology and delivery teams.
Experience defining product roadmaps, prioritizing a backlog, and driving adoption of new or evolving tooling capabilities.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey complex concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence and align leaders across Portfolio, Product, and Technology.
Proficiency in leveraging AI tools (such as Copilot and ChatGPT) to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and generate actionable insights. Ability to apply AI effectively for content creation, data analysis, and problem-solving.
Strong process-oriented mindset with the ability to quickly synthesize complex operations and a passion for driving continuous improvement.
Ability to work in an extremely fast paced environment, pivot context quickly, and balance multiple competing deliverables.
Excellent at fostering strong partner relationships and resourceful in nature.
A positive, can-do attitude, and a sense of humor!

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with portfolio management tools (Clarity/The Hub), TBM practices (Apptio), and analytics platforms (Power BI).
Expert in PowerPoint, design, and visual storytelling—able to translate complex ideas into engaging and impactful presentations.
Demonstrated expertise in all forms of communication, stakeholder engagement, and comfortable facilitating in a large, matrixed organization.

Responsibilities

Define portfolio strategy and implement process improvements that support iterative and annual planning while continuously evolving and adapting towards greater industry best practices, team goals and vision.
Serve as a key subject matter expert for the end-to-end portfolio management processes & tooling, and identify opportunities to streamline through process improvement, automation, integration, and improved user flows across portfolio, financial, and work management tools.
Support the adoption and evolution of portfolio tooling - ensuring portfolio managers understand expectations, changes, and new capabilities.
Translate portfolio planning and operational needs into clear tooling requirements, partnering with enterprise tooling, portfolio, leadership, and delivery teams as needed.
Ensure alignment between portfolio planning needs and tooling roadmaps to enable clear communication, effective execution, and delivery of strategic objectives.
Define and maintain data standards, field requirements, workflows, and configuration rules to ensure consistency, accuracy, and usability across planning and execution systems.
Lead the definition and evolution of advanced, AI-enabled tooling to improve scope quality, partnering with delivery teams to shape roadmaps, prioritize enhancements, and drive measurable planning improvements.
Craft clear, visually compelling presentations/PowerPoint decks to distill complex processes into engaging stories for various audience levels.
Translate ambiguity into concise directions and define strategy, using visual storytelling to communicate actionable insights and recommendations.
Create executive-level materials using advanced design principles and strategic use of white space.

Benefits

Competitive base salaries
Bonus incentives
6%25 Company Match on retirement savings plan
Free financial coaching and financial well-being support
Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability benefits
Flexible working model with hybrid, onsite or virtual arrangements depending on role and business need
20+ weeks paid parental leave for all parents, regardless of gender, offered for pregnancy, adoption or surrogacy
Free access to global on-site wellness centers staffed with nurses and doctors (depending on location)
Free and confidential counseling support through our Healthy Minds program
Career development and training opportunities