Program Manager

What we do

Smart Cat designs, builds, and delivers software for clients across Europe and the US. On our larger engagements we're rarely the only vendor, several teams from several companies build against the same platform and ship into the same production environment.

This role is the point where all of that comes together. You'll sit with the client's stakeholders when priorities are set, and you'll own everything that happens after: the release calendar, the readiness process, and the call on whether something goes out. It's a role built on knowing where every team actually stands and making that visible to the people who decide what happens next.

• Program ownership across the account. You hold the single view of every initiative in flight across all vendors, what's happening, who owns it, and how the pieces depend on each other. When something in one workstream affects another, you're the one who catches it early and gets the right people talking before it becomes a problem. You keep a regular program status going to Smart Cat and client leadership: where things stand, what changed since last time, and what needs a decision from them.
• Priorities, together with the client. You run the regular priority discussions with client stakeholders, our delivery managers, and the leads from other vendors. You bring the real state of every team into that room: what's finished, what's blocked, what's realistic. So decisions are made against facts rather than optimism.
• Planning and risk. You turn agreed priorities into a plan with milestones people can be held to, and you keep a live view of what could derail it. Risks get named early, with an owner and a mitigation, not raised for the first time in the week they land.
• Capacity and sequencing. Several vendors competing for the same delivery window is a resource problem before it is a schedule problem. You see where the conflicts are forming and get them resolved, or escalated, while there is still room to move.
• The release calendar. One plan everyone can look at: what's shipping, who's shipping it, when, and what it depends on. When priorities change, you make the consequences visible.
• Release readiness. You decide what has to be true before anything goes to production test evidence, environment state, migration and rollback plans, configuration, monitoring, sign-offs and you run the go/no-go.
• Quality across teams. "Ready for production" should mean the same thing whether the feature came from our team or someone else's. You work with QA leads and engineering managers to keep it that way.
• Incidents. When something goes wrong you get the right people on it, keep track of what's known, drive it to a decision, and keep stakeholders informed. You also make sure incidents are recognised as incidents in the first place that alerting fires, that things get registered, and that a postmortem follows.
• Improving how we work. Post-release reviews and post-program, run without blame and kept short, with the conclusions actually fed back into how things run next time.

On the engagement you work closely with the Account Manager, and on the client side with senior stakeholders up to executive level. You won't be alone in this, the delivery managers and engineering managers on the account are your closest counterparts, and they cover the day-to-day when you're out. You own the go/no-go and you can hold a release, including when that is unpopular.

• 5+ years in program management, technical program management or delivery management, running several related work streams at once rather than one project at a time
• Experience coordinating delivery across several teams, and across company lines
• Presence in senior rooms.…