Director, Product & Portfolio Management

Career Area:
Technology, Digital and Data

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team that cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live.

Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

The Director, Product and Portfolio Management is a senior leader accountable for shaping, governing, and delivering a complex portfolio of Caterpillar machine technology initiatives. This role plays a critical role in early scoping and solutioning, while also owning program and portfolio management to ensure disciplined execution, alignment, and value realization across the machine hardware and software ecosystem.

• Own portfolio intake, prioritization, sequencing, and governance across platform and engineering initiatives.
• Establish and lead portfolio operating rhythms (quarterly planning, monthly portfolio reviews, dependency and risk reviews, roadmap alignment).
• Drive transparency across scope, progress, milestones, risks, dependencies, capacity, and financials.
• Ensure alignment between portfolio priorities and Platform Engineering strategy, balancing innovation, reuse, capacity, and time-to-value.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Finance on investment decisions, trade-offs, and funding alignment.
• Establish and oversee benefits realization practices to ensure delivery outcomes translate into measurable business value and sustained adoption.

• Drive scope-related decisions across all phases of initiatives, from intake through delivery.
• Champion Platform First solutions, prioritizing reuse, extensibility, and cross-platform integration.
• Align and manage cross-program dependencies and synergies to reduce duplication and accelerate value.
• Ensure work streams are led by accountable leaders who clearly articulate project needs, outcomes, and constraints.
• Serve as a senior partner to Product Management to ensure platform and product roadmaps are aligned and mutually reinforcing.

• Ensure deep understanding of the customer problem being solved and the intended business outcomes.
• Assess, clarify, refine, and augment product requirements to enable integrated, end-to-end experiences.
• Evaluate cross-product and cross-platform impacts; pivot solutions to maximize functional reuse.
• Conduct complexity assessments to determine the level of solutioning, architectural rigor, and delivery approach required.
• Drive scope alignment with Product Management and Engineering leadership.
• Define the engineering delivery approach appropriate to the scope and complexity.
• Establish and govern project tracking artifacts in Azure Dev Ops (ADO).
• Ensure solutioning requests are properly captured and managed in ADO.
• Lead early decomposition of Product Management epics into feature-level requirements, wireframes, and initial delivery artifacts.

• Provide Platform First solution options, clearly articulating trade-offs, implications, and reuse opportunities.
• Drive alignment and decisions on the preferred solution approach.
• Ensure delivery of POCs, POTs, and High-Level Architectures (HLAs) as required.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to align on go‑to‑market sequencing and software release strategies.
• Drive solution alignment with the designated Engineering Champion and Architecture partners.
• Define and validate the engineering delivery approach for execution.
• Develop Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) cost estimates and unconstrained delivery schedules.
• Secure Product Management and stakeholder consensus to proceed into execution.

• Lead the design and continuous improvement of program and project management methodologies for complex, multi‑team platform initiatives.
• Define and maintain a clear delivery operating model, including decision rights,…