Director of Strategic Program Management

We have more good ideas than people to execute them. We are hiring a Director of Strategic Program Management to own the company's portfolio of initiatives: every project we've committed to, who is on it, when it will land, what it costs, and whether it is delivering what we expected.

This is a build-from-scratch role
. There's no team under you on day one and no system waiting for you. You'll build the initiative inventory, the planning standards, the operating cadence, and the reporting, then run them every month until they are second nature across the company. The cadence, templates, tools, and metrics are yours to design.

You are accountable for two things
. Keeping our projects on time and giving leadership a quantitative answer on whether each one is delivering a return. That means holding initiative owners to the timelines and results they signed up for, and saying clearly when a project should be stopped, resized, or accelerated. Accountability applies to everyone, including the CEO.

You will report to the COO and work directly with the CEO, the CRO, and every functional leader.

• Run a single intake so every new idea, whether from leadership, a partner, or the front line, is captured and framed before anyone starts work
• Build and maintain a single inventory of every initiative, with owner, scope, timeline, budget, staffing, and expected outcome, including approved work that has quietly stalled
• Track who is working on what and at what allocation, and surface capacity conflicts before they cause slippage. When something new is funded, make clear what waits or what we need to hire

• Set lightweight planning standards (charters, milestones, dependencies, risks, decisions) sized for a 30-person company, not an enterprise PMO
• Partner with initiative owners to build plans, track milestones and dependencies, and clear blockers across product, technology, marketing, sales, operations, and compliance
• Step in directly to run the most critical cross-functional programs, such as acquisition integrations
• Close every project with a handoff to a named owner, with ongoing metrics, and a short debrief on what we learned

• Before work is funded, require a short written brief from each owner: the goal, the investment case, what has to be true, the budget in people and dollars, success metrics, and stop conditions. You recommend; the executive team decides
• Report monthly on schedule, spend, and results against the original case: what is on time, what is slipping, and what is paying off
• Recommend which initiatives to stop, resize, or accelerate, with the numbers behind it. When a project hits its stop conditions, you call it, and continuing takes an explicit leadership decision

• Own a monthly portfolio review covering the last 30 days and the next 90; prepare the materials, run the meeting, and drive each item to a decision
• Track every commitment made in that room and report against it the following month
• Raise problems early and have the direct conversation with the owner, without escalating by reflex or softening it into nothing
• Use AI tools and automation aggressively so your time goes to judgment, not to chasing and reformatting updates

• Meet every functional leader and understand what their teams are working on and why
• Deliver a complete inventory of active and stalled initiatives, each with an owner, timeline, estimated cost, and staffing, along with your first written read on what you see
• Put intake, written briefs with stop conditions, and a tracking standard in place, with milestones, success metrics, and expected ROI documented for every active initiative
• Run at least two monthly portfolio reviews with materials you produced, and report on the commitments made in them
• Make at least one recommendation to stop, resize, or accelerate an initiative, backed by the data

• 8+ years in program management, project management, PMO leadership, or a similar operational discipline, with ownership of multiple concurrent, cross-functional initiatives
• A track record of delivering programs on time, the ability to get a room of independent leaders pointed the same way, and the backbone to hold them to it without direct authority
• Working command of planning methods and tools (Agile and waterfall, dependency and risk management, resource planning) and the judgment to scale them down for a small company. You bring a…