Strategic Program Manager

Clickstop•Urbana, IA

16h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Strategic Program Manager manages one of the Strategy team’s three portfolios—a group of related departments and the mission-critical annual priorities that connect their work to Clickstop’s 10-year roadmap. Rather than directly executing the work, the Strategic Program Manager holds the full picture, partnering with department leaders to ensure the highest-priority initiatives are clearly scoped, sequenced, resourced, aligned, and progressing toward measurable outcomes. Serving as the bridge between Clickstop’s strategic vision and team-level execution, this role brings the structure, cadence, and cross-functional alignment needed to turn priorities into results. By embedding within teams and maintaining clarity around what matters, what it will take, and how progress is measured, the Strategic Program Manager enables leaders to make confident decisions, stay focused on leading their teams, and successfully deliver the initiatives that move Clickstop’s long-term strategy forward. "The Strategy team exists to help us keep the momentum we've built over our first 20 years while being intentional about where we're headed. That means turning big ideas into real plans and making sure the things that matter get done. You'll be surrounded by people who hold a high bar, say 'tell me more' when you bring a new idea, and trust you to run with it." - Lauren Gilbertson, VP of Strategy

Requirements

Translating Ambiguity into Action: Exceptional ability to synthesize high-level ideas into clear, structured execution plans.
Influence Without Authority: Builds trust quickly with leaders and teams and holds initiatives accountable without owning the work or the reporting line.
Judgment Under Competing Priorities: Comfortable saying no, sequencing trade-offs, and communicating a prioritization decision to leaders and teams.
Framework Fluency: Picks up planning methodologies and project management frameworks quickly and applies them pragmatically rather than rigidly.
Experience in project and/or stakeholder management.
Candidates without a CAPM or PMP will be positioned to complete the CAPM within their first year.

Responsibilities

Facilitate and coordinate execution inside teams without owning the subject matter or the tasks, building deep context on team constraints to remove friction and resolve process issues.
Drive alignment across multi-departmental initiatives, managing dependencies, bottlenecks, and resource constraints early and convening stakeholders to resolve them.
Assess the system a project operates within and distinguish issues that need an underlying process fix from those solvable within the project.
Trace recurring friction to its root cause and recommend the structural change rather than a project-level workaround.
Own change management for strategic initiatives, preparing employees for new processes and ways of working and sustaining adoption after launch.
Own portfolio-level updates that keep stakeholders, adjacent teams, and the company informed.
Serve as the intake point for the assigned portfolio, evaluating, theming, and qualifying emerging requests from its departments.
Partner with leadership and subject-matter experts to translate strategic priorities into actionable roadmaps with clear boundaries, milestones, success metrics, and ownership.
Lead quarterly planning and reprioritization cycles alongside leadership, ensuring resource allocation matches shifting business needs without losing sight of active commitments.
Establish transparent tracking, status cadences, and visibility across all initiatives in the portfolio.
Lead retrospectives and post-implementation reviews to capture learnings and refine workflows.
Coach leaders and teams on planning frameworks and deploy scalable templates and standards that raise project management capability organization-wide.