Senior Program Manager

Points North•, (Multiple States)

1d•$135,000 - $165,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Points North is seeking a Senior Program Manager to support a growing, 60-person SaaS company. This is a hands-on role focused on implementing lightweight structure to manage major product launches, company-wide initiatives, and new product experiments. The role involves evolving program and project governance from its early stages, allowing the successful candidate to define and implement effective processes. The ideal candidate is someone who believes in unobtrusive, effective processes, has experience with lightweight frameworks, and is comfortable owning both product backlogs and cross-functional launches.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in program management, project management, product management, or a combination, with a track record of delivering large, cross-functional initiatives in a software company.
10+ years of experience working in a SaaS company or small, fast-paced environment.
Hands-on experience with Agile software development as it is actually practiced by small, effective teams. Scrum or similar experience is a requirement.
Experience leading operational improvement or organizational change initiatives that spanned multiple departments.
Product management experience: customer discovery, requirements definition, backlog ownership, and prioritization.
Experience building program or portfolio governance from an early stage, in a company that did not already have it.
Comfort with ambiguity and with being the person who creates clarity, rather than the person who waits for it.
Strong written communication. You have written plans, updates, and requirements that people read and acted on.
Fluency with modern collaboration and work-tracking tools (for example Azure DevOps, Jira, or similar, we use Azure DevOps).
Fluency with AI tools such as CoPilot and or Claude and a willingness to judiciously use AI tools as part of your daily work.

Nice To Haves

Experience validating a new product or market is a strong plus.
Experience in a regulated industry, or with payroll, HRIS, or benefits data and the handling requirements that come with it.
Experience leading an AI adoption or similar technology-enablement initiative.

Responsibilities

Enhance lightweight program and project governance for Product and Engineering, and then for the company. Collaboratively structure and then document how work gets proposed, prioritized, tracked, and finished.
Build the minimum that gives leaders the visibility and teams the clarity they need, and then defend that minimum against the natural pull toward more.
Run the largest cross-functional initiatives end to end, including major product launches, operational improvement projects, and company-wide changes.
Own the plan, the dependencies, the risks, the communication, and the follow-through for large initiatives.
Support the adoption of AI tools across the company by finding where AI tooling makes people measurably more effective, helping teams try it, learning what works, and spreading it.
Use AI yourself as a force multiplier in how you plan, communicate, and analyze.
Be the Product Owner for an early-stage product experiment, owning the product side of the experiment for at least six to twelve months.
Talk with internal and external stakeholders to vet which problems are worth solving, decide how to solve them and in what order, write clear requirements the engineer can build from, and build the evidence for whether there is a larger market.
Make priorities visible and tradeoffs explicit, helping leadership see what is in flight, what is competing for the same people, and what it costs to say yes to something new.
Facilitate Agile events and rituals that earn their keep, such as planning, reviews, and retrospectives.
Build the operating cadence for the company, including quarterly planning, status reporting, decision logs, and templates.
Partner with every function (Sales, Customer Success, Support, Implementation, Operations, Managed Services, Finance, Marketing, and People and Culture) to understand how each team works before suggesting improvements.
Close the loop on initiatives by finding out whether they delivered what they promised based on metrics and success criteria.
Run honest retrospectives and share learnings to improve future initiatives.
Continuously learn and grow in program management, product thinking, and company effectiveness.