Group Program Manager, Enterprise PMO

Forward Financing is a financial technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts with team members throughout the United States, Dominican Republic, and Canada. The company is on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. Recognized as a Best Place to Work by Built In Boston and certified as a Great Place To Work®, Forward is investing in its employees, technology, and customer experience – with long-term success in mind every step of the way.

The Group Program Manager - Enterprise PMO is the senior practitioner at the top of the Enterprise PMO, responsible for the intake, governance, reporting, dependency, and capacity discipline the function needs to be a genuine strategic partner to the business.

You will work directly with the VP Product and lead the PMO team. You will own the things that require judgment, experience, and credibility across functions, and you will develop the next generation of PMO talent beneath you.

• Design and own how the PMO runs, including intake, governance frameworks, tooling, and reporting standards. Define the business case standard every initiative must meet before it earns a slot in the portfolio, and hold that standard when senior stakeholders push against it. Ensure Product and PMO operate from a shared system of record to build a model that scales with the business.

• Own portfolio reporting and a single source of truth that leadership can act on. Treat data quality as a first-order problem so that no team maintains a parallel spreadsheet alongside the system of record.

• Surface systemic execution and delivery risk across Engineering, Credit, Fraud, Analytics, Sales, and Marketing early and cross-functionally with a proposed action plan. Build the delivery risk cadence for the PMO from the ground up and identify patterns before they become problems. Own cross-functional dependency management, mapping what each initiative needs from whom before commitments are made rather than after dates slip.

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Analytics to build the forward‑looking initiative roadmap each quarter. Facilitate the sequencing conversation and frame trade‑offs with a commercial lens rather than just a capacity lens, ensuring the PMO has a strong voice in what gets built, in what order, and why.

• Own quarterly resource planning as well as the cross‑portfolio resource view across Engineering and Analytics to surface capacity conflicts and bottlenecks before they become delivery risks. Partner directly with Engineering and Analytics leadership without intermediaries.

• Own the steering committee and portfolio review cadence, ensuring the right decision reaches the right forum at the right time and that leadership has an honest picture of portfolio health, including where it is unflattering.

• Own initiative‑level budget tracking and benefits realization across the portfolio, measuring whether initiatives delivered what their business case claimed and feeding that back into intake. Partner with Finance on portfolio‑level spend visibility, and produce the cost, benefits, and risk inputs behind the monthly portfolio narrative the VP Product delivers to the CEO and directs.

• Manage and develop the project managers directly by coaching on delivery craft, risk framing, and stakeholder communication. Create a visible development path for the PMO team so everyone moves up a rank as the business grows, building a proactive team environment.

• Leverage AI to automate Product Operations work streams around timeline mapping, risk identification, sequencing, task assignment etc.

• (Even if you don’t check every box, but see yourself contributing, please apply.)

• 10+ years in program or portfolio management, with at least 3 years operating at a senior level in fintech, financial services, or a similarly complex environment.

• Demonstrated experience owning the commercial narrative for a portfolio, with a proven track record of building the "so what" story for a C‑suite rather than just a status report.

• Deep fluency in delivery risk identification across multiple business functions, showing an ability to catch systemic patterns before…