Job details

Program Manager, Product

Piano Overview

Piano’s Digital Experience Cloud empowers organizations to understand and influence customer behavior. By unifying customer data, analyzing behavior metrics and creating personalized customer journeys, Piano helps brands launch campaigns and products faster, strengthen customer engagement and drive personalization at scale from a single platform. Headquartered in Amsterdam with offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, Piano serves a global client base, including Air France, the BBC, CBS, IBM, Kirin Holdings, Jaguar Land Rover, LinkedIn, Nielsen, The Wall Street Journal and more. Piano has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing, most innovative technology companies in the world by World Economic Forum, Red Herring, Inc. and Deloitte. For more information, visit piano.io.

Position Overview

We are looking for a Program Manager to strengthen our Product team’s operation - enabling us to efficiently specify and ship new, innovative products and features to deliver on Piano’s vision and strategic ambitions. The Product team oversees 6 products and specifies the development work delivered on by more than 200 engineers. In this role, you will have a central position in the Piano Product team, being a close collaborator with the senior product leadership in managing the team's operations. You will collaborate closely with dedicated engineering teams establishing and managing processes across our two functions, and lead larger roadmap project initiatives. This role will report to VP, Product.

Primary Responsibilities:

Own the Product team’s project plans making up our product delivery roadmap:
- Support senior leadership in roadmap resource planning on a recurring basis.
- Oversee a portfolio of roadmap feature projects, ensuring that Product team members define and maintain each project with clearly defined milestones, tasks and delivery timelines.

Support Product team members including Product Managers and Business Analyst with initial project planning, including coaching milestone definition, project task breakdown, and estimating delivery timelines.
- Own reporting on roadmap project status in a manner that is easily available for the wider Piano organization via a standardized dashboard
- Ensure weekly project status is provided to senior leadership in a timely manner in an easy to consume format.
- Track Product team resource allocation and create status dashboards for executive consumption to ensure senior leadership are continuously informed about overall team resource allocation.

Own process management in the Product team to ensure that the team collaborate and communicate efficiently with key stakeholders and the wider Piano organization
- Maintain a backlog of potential improvement initiatives for the Product team that can help strengthen the team operation, stakeholder collaboration, or communication with the wider Piano organization
- Prioritize process improvement backlog on a recurring basis in collaboration with senior leadership to align on process improvement initiatives to invest in when
- Own and lead process improvement projects from start to finish (e.g. how do we standardize feature intake for a product domain with multiple development team)
- Be a champion for standardization and continuous improvement of processes, collaboration and communication practices

Be the bridge between dedicated Product and Engineering teams - responsible to ensure that the teams implement processes that foster efficient collaboration between our two functions
- Oversee the resource allocation planning for dedicated product domains, ensuring that each domain has a clear resource plan updated on a weekly basis
- Facilitate retrospectives across product and development teams to identify new and push forward existing process improvement initiatives

Lead large-scale, strategic roadmap initiatives as designated by product leadership.
- End-to-end ownership of program management for the assigned initiative
- Oversee project communication channels to ensure internal and external stakeholders are kept accurately and consistently informed.
- Define program organization, including workstreams, resource allocation, meeting structures, with support from product leadership
- Own the creation of program plans, including program risks, milestones, task breakdowns and delivery timelines
- Continuously manage program execution, including facilitating continuous collaboration between workstreams, document decisions, identify and resolves blockers, stakeholder communication, flag risks or program challenges to product leadership, and ensure the overall project is delivered in a timely manner

Key relationships
- Senior product leadership
- Product team
- Dedicated engineering teams
- Product marketing
- Select additional internal and client stakeholders, program-based

KPI’s
- Creation and maintenance of product portfolio resource and delivery plan
- Delivery of weekly reporting
- Successfully deliver and establish key process improvement projects
- Successfully deliver on key roadmap initiatives
- Positive feedback from internal stakeholders across product and engineering

Qualifications & Skills:

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience

4+ years experience as a SaaS project manager, program manager or similar, where methodologies within Agile development, Waterfall, RAD etc. is familiar territory
Experience with project management tools is a must (e.g., resource allocation/staffing, Gantt charting, JIRA/engineering ticketing systems)
Advanced project management, prioritization and planning skills
Structured, disciplined, with attention to detail and ability to meet deadlines
Process oriented, with the ability to identify improvement opportunities, design and implement new processes
Strong facilitator with the ability to influence others
Clear, concise and polished communicator in person and in writing
Familiarity with web based technologies and data management is a plus
Familiarity with user experience and web design principles is a plus

We are looking for candidates who:

Thrive under pressure in an open, dynamic, fun-spirited and collaborative environment

Are comfortable working directly with a wide variety of stakeholders from senior management, engineers to clients
Are able to coordinate across different teams and people in different time zones and cultural backgrounds
Like to plan, lead by example and work with an attitude of ‘it’s up to me to make change happen’
Hit deadlines and display courage under pressure

Perks at Piano