Strategy & Planning Manager

Strategy & Planning Manager

The Strategic Enterprise PMO in Cisco's Office of the CEO sits at the center of Cisco's most critical enterprise priorities. We work directly with C-level executives and senior leaders to turn strategy into action, accelerate durable growth, and manage enterprise-level risk.

This Strategy & Planning Manager is not a traditional PMO role. Our team is brought into high-stakes, cross-company initiatives where speed, structure, judgment, and accountability matter. We clarify complex problems, align senior stakeholders, build operating models, drive decisions, and keep execution moving across Cisco.

You will be part of a high-caliber team with direct exposure to executive decision-making and the opportunity to shape how Cisco delivers its most important work. You are a practical operator who creates clarity quickly, communicates with sound judgment, and with the ability to drive progress across matrixed teams.

Typical duties include:

• Help drive strategic initiatives tied to Cisco's enterprise priorities, including AI-era cyber defense, global business acceleration, and competitive go-to-market execution.
• Translate executive direction into clear work streams, owners, milestones, risks, dependencies and next steps
• Create structure in ambiguous work by helping define decision rights, escalation paths, operating cadences, executive updates, and sustainable operating models.
• Coordinate across product, sales, strategy, finance, legal, marketing, communications, operations, government affairs, and other functions
• Prepare executive-ready updates that summarize progress, risks, blockers, decisions needed and recommendations.
• Support portfolio discipline across intake, execution, operating model readiness, and business handoff.
• Build scalable, AI-enabled ways of working across templates, dashboards, reporting, workflows, and executive summaries.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree and 7+ years of experience in strategy, business operations, program management, consulting, or a related field
• Support of enterprise-level initiatives and business leadership teams
• Strong PowerPoint, Excel, project/program management, and communication skills
• Experience preparing leadership updates, dashboards, or decision materials
• Ability to work across U.S. and international time zones, as needed
• Ability to manage confidential and high-sensitivity information

Preferred qualifications:

• MBA or advanced degree
• Experience in a technology company, management consulting firm, enterprise PMO, strategy, or business operations role managing programs in matrixed organizations
• Strong analytical, synthesis, and storytelling skills
• Hands-on experience with tools such as Asana, Airtable, Cursor, Codex, LLM chat models, AI agents, dashboards, workflow automation, or similar productivity platforms
• Ability to use AI tools to summarize inputs, draft executive updates, identify risks, automate workflows, and improve portfolio visibility
• Familiarity with go-to-market, product, security, AI, infrastructure, or competitive strategy initiatives

At Cisco, we're revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We've been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you'll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.