Program Manager III

This is a Full Time Job


The Direct To Consumer Group is a technology company within the broader Discovery brand. We are building a global streaming video platform (OTT), and a suite of applications to support all of our network’s brands globally. We are building modern container- based microservices operated on AWS. Our platform covers everything from search, catalogue, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and much more. We build user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications. We build for connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles for a large footprint of Discovery owned networks. (Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, DPlay, and many more) This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to Discovery’s future.

Discovery is looking for a Senior Program Manager to join our team. We are looking for that rare candidate with exemplary written and verbal communication skills, strong organizational skills, and the ability to enforce processes, steer program roadmap and manage multiple projects at one time.

Responsibilities

The ideal candidate communicates clearly with both internal and external stakeholders, organizes project timelines, secures commitments, manages risks, identifies the critical path, spots edge cases, reviews metrics & data, and monitors operations. The ideal candidate is a strong self-starter and therefore can drill into business data and research results to identify clear direction and focus for their tasks, projects and programs. They continue to move forward in the face of ambiguity and imperfect knowledge.

The ideal candidate has had experience working with multiple partners and maintaining partner relationships. They have demonstrated experience leading medium to large projects. They have experience in project management and agile development methodologies with a proven track record of delivering results. They must be able to thrive and succeed in an entrepreneurial environment and not be hindered by ambiguity or competing priorities. You are a key influencer in your team’s strategy and contribute significantly to team planning. You show good judgement making trade-offs between immediate and long-term business needs.

Competencies

1. Proactive Problem-solving: First and foremost, you are a problem-solver. You work tirelessly to keep work streams on track, to unblock software development, and to ensure that the best possible outcome is achieved for the business. You are eager, confident, and able to use all the tools at your disposal to solve whatever problems crop up.
2. Active Learning: You are here to learn and grow. Your industry knowledge will never be complete, and you are hungry to learn more and to share what you have learned with your peers and the team(s) that you influence.
3. Efficient & Effective: You are here to solve business problems and help our customers, not to prepare reports or oversee meetings. You find the most effective way to use our precious internal resources to achieve the best outcome. You find the most effective means to communicate clearly and concisely to all interested stakeholders. You are a simplifier and a productivity multiplier for others around you.
4. Exemplary Communication: Your written and verbal communication skills are top notch. You can distill key points out of complex technical descriptions to share with non-technical stakeholders, adapting your language and style of communication depending on the audience. You can clearly articulate decisions that have been made and supporting materials that back them. You are confident and capable of speaking to both the business operations or technical decisions. You communicate through data, dates, and facts using narrative and emotion judiciously.
5. Adaptable: You communicate clearly, analyze technical designs, organize project timelines, secure commitments, manage risks, identify the critical path, spot edge cases, triage bugs, review metrics & data, and monitor launch operations. You switch effortlessly between these modes adapting yourself to the needs of your work streams.
6. Self-starter: You are a strong self-starter and therefore have the ability to drill into business data and research results to identify clear direction and focus for your projects and programs. You continue to move forward in the face of ambiguity and imperfect knowledge. You do not suffer from “analysis paralysis.”
7. Open & Decisive: You proactively share information to teach and inform your stakeholders. You are valued for the decisions that you make in pursuit of your program. You are driven by your own impact, the positive outcomes that you drive. You share freely all that you learn so that others around you can be more effective.

Requirements

1. Experience in project management in the technology realm.
2. Lead planning, execution and delivery of projects across multiple global teams (product and technology).
3. Communicate clearly, analyze technical designs, organize project timelines, secure commitments, manage risks, identify the critical path, spot edge cases, triage bugs, review metrics and data, and monitor launch operations for large software projects
4. Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs.
5. You have a solid understanding of software development methods like CI/CD, Agile Scrum, Waterfall, etc.
6. You have shipped multiple high impact projects and used data to assess their impact.
7. You have experience with all phases of project delivery from concept to production, including defining features and deliverables, securing team commitments, establishing a project charter, handling all communication and reporting, overseeing development & deployment, and performing retrospective assessment using data and key performance indicators.
8. You have demonstrated the ability to make decisions for more than one project or program area showing that your judgment is fungible, and you must be able to handle more than one project simultaneously and successfully.
9. You have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to understand organizational and corporate goals and ensured that your projects delivered what was required to hit these goals.
10. You must have experience with JIRA, Confluence, Smartsheet and Google or Microsoft Suite of products.
11. Must have the legal right to work in the country hired.

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Comfortable and experienced in leading project teams in a cloud and operations environment.
2. Knowledge of operational practices, workflows, and support models for engineering teams. Understanding of incident management, release management, change management, and launch readiness.

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