Vice President, Program Management

About the Role

As the Vice President, Program Management, you enable Wiley's AI & Data Analytics Business Unit (AI&DA) to move at market speed by improving visibility, strengthening decision‑making, and maintaining delivery discipline without adding unnecessary governance.

You will report to the Chief AI & Data Analytics Officer and operate across all areas of the business both within AI&DA and across Wiley. This role requires someone who is comfortable operating without formal authority, skilled at surfacing uncomfortable truths before they become crises, and disciplined enough to run a rigorous delivery framework in an organization that is simultaneously forming, building, and selling.

In a business unit targeting $500M in five years from a standing start, the cost of undetected delivery risk is high. This role exists to keep that cost manageable and the certainty of business success high.

• Leads a small, focused team of program and project managers
• Integrated Delivery
  
  Roadmap:
  
  Own a single cross‑functional delivery roadmap (Product, Engineering, Data Science, Commercial, Shared Services) with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and status.
• Cross‑Functional Dependency Management: Translate commercial commitments into functional dependencies, align dependency owners on clear commitments, and drive resolution of cross‑functional dependencies as needed.
• Risk Identification & Escalation: Own and operate a live, prioritized risk register (delivery, capacity, dependency, and commercial‑commitment risks) that escalates risk, decisions needed, and delivery progress.
• Customer Commitment Visibility: Identify and track commercial‑to‑functional dependencies to enable faster and more reliable customer commitment timelines.
• Operating Cadence Infrastructure: Sets delivery standards and cadence, consistent with Wiley's Delivery and Change Excellence practice. Work with Business Operations to align financial and operational planning and reporting cycles.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Engages and aligns senior stakeholders across functions without direct authority.

• Enterprise Program Management: 8+ years of program management experience, with at least 4 years managing cross‑functional delivery in a complex, fast‑moving technology or data organization.
• Dependency &
  
  Risk Management:
  
  Demonstrated expertise in cross‑functional dependency management and commercial and delivery risk identification.
• Skilled Influencer: Proven ability to drive accountability and delivery discipline through influence, credibility, and the quality of the visibility you create. Trusted by senior stakeholders to tell them what they need to hear.
• Applied Judgement: Demonstrated ability to distinguish severity of business impact due to delivery risk to elevate to the appropriate c‑suite, senior leadership, or team level and drive mitigation resolution.
• Business and Technical Fluency: Sufficient understanding of the dependency structure of a cloud‑native data platform, an AI/ML pipeline, and a SaaS product to ask the right questions about what depends on what, and to recognize when a technical risk has commercial consequences.
• Commercial Awareness: Demonstrated ability to connect delivery milestones to customer outcomes and to quantify commercial impact when dates or scope move.
• Making Order from Ambiguity: Comfortable bringing structure without needing the picture to be complete and managing interdependencies across a landscape that will evolve, holding structure loosely and rebuilding it as priorities shift.

• Integrated Delivery
  
  Roadmap:
  
  A single, cross‑functional roadmap is operational and used within 45 days; major milestones have agreed definitions of done within 60 days.
• Dependency Coverage: Material cross‑functional dependencies (including commercial‑to‑functional) are captured with owners and dates within 45 days and kept current.
• Risk Cadence: Delivery health and risk review cadence is established within 30 days, drives decisions, and is sustained throughout the year.
• Delivery Tracking: The joint tracker is continuously current and trusted by Product, Technology, Shared…