Director, Technical Program Management & Delivery

Director, Technical Program Management & Delivery

Information Technology—St. Louis,MO

POSITION SUMMARY

This role creates the connective layer from envisioning through prioritization, execution, release, and maintenance. The Director, Technical Program Management & Delivery Transformation brings disciplined, scalable Agile and SAFe practices to the organization while helping teams improve flow, manage capacity sustainably, and make delivery status and tradeoffs visible to leaders. The role also leads the SAFe and Agile transformation across the Digital organization — aligning leaders, teams, processes, governance, measures, and tooling around a more predictable, product-oriented delivery model.

The role is intended for a seasoned technical program leader who can build the operating model while also operating effectively within it. This is a delivery-leadership role responsible for improving how work is selected, planned, executed, released, and sustained.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and implement a standardized portfolio-management operating model for the Digital organization.
• Establish the end-to-end lifecycle for demand: envision, assess, prioritize, plan, execute, release, operate, and learn.
• Create one intake and triage funnel for organizational demand, with clear entry criteria, information requirements, decision rights, and ownership.
• Define portfolio forums, participants, inputs, outputs, escalation paths, and decision cadence.
• Establish standard operating procedures, templates, control points, and governance artifacts that are practical for teams to use.
• Ensure portfolio governance improves decision quality and flow without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

Demand shaping and value-based prioritization

• Partner with business, Product & Platforms, Engineering, Architecture, Data, AI, and other leaders to assess incoming demand.
• Translate demand into a consistent view of business value, strategic alignment, risk reduction, regulatory or operational need, effort, dependencies, and capacity impact.
• Facilitate prioritization decisions and make the consequences of those decisions visible.
• Maintain a portfolio backlog and decision log that show what is committed, sequenced, deferred, and why.
• Surface demand that exceeds available capacity and facilitate explicit tradeoff decisions rather than allowing work to enter execution informally.
• Ensure Technology and Engineering are engaged early enough to shape feasibility, architecture, sequencing, technical risk, and delivery approach.

Integrated roadmaps and cross-team delivery

• Build integrated roadmaps across applications, integrations, data, AI, architecture, security, platforms, and related capabilities.
• Identify critical-path dependencies, shared services, constrained skills, external dependencies, and decision points.
• Facilitate cross-team planning and resolve or elevate impediments before they become delivery failures.
• Coordinate sequencing across product releases, technical foundations, platform changes, data readiness, testing, security, and operational readiness.
• Maintain clear ownership of cross-team actions, decisions, risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
• Represent the integrated delivery view in leadership forums and provide concise recommendations when tradeoffs are required.

SAFe and Agile transformation

• Own and continuously refine the SAFe and Agile transformation roadmap, including the target operating model, transition stages, dependencies, and measures of success.
• Apply Agile, Lean, and SAFe principles appropriately to the operating context rather than treating a framework as a checklist.
• Establish or mature portfolio, program, product, and team-level planning cadences, including the roles, forums, artifacts, and decision rights required to sustain them.
• Facilitate quarterly (or equivalent) planning, roadmap alignment, release planning, program syncs, dependency reviews, inspect-and-adapt sessions, and retrospectives.
• Help leaders and teams connect strategy and outcomes to epics, capabilities, features, stories, milestones, and measurable results.
• Assess current Agile maturity, identify organizational constraints, and sequence transformation interventions based on business value and readiness.
• Coach and enable executives, product leaders, program managers, engineering leaders, and delivery teams on flow, work-in-progress management, backlog health, estimation, sequencing, incremental delivery, and sustainable pace.
• Lead change management and adoption, addressing role clarity, incentives, behaviors, governance, and resistance to new ways of working.
• Use empirical data to identify bottlenecks, aging work, rework, unplanned work, and systemic constraints; establish measures for adoption, flow, predictability, quality, value delivery, and team health.
• Promote practices that integrate product discovery, architecture, development, testing, security, deployment, operations, and learning into one delivery lifecycle.

Delivery visibility, governance, and recovery

• Define the minimum information required to manage work at portfolio, program, product, and team levels.
• Establish consistent health indicators and thresholds for scope, schedule, value, capacity, risk, quality, dependencies, and outcomes.
• Lead structured reviews of at-risk initiatives and ensure recovery plans have accountable owners and dates.
• Maintain a clear distinction between decision ownership and coordination responsibility.
• Ensure program reporting is accurate, timely, concise, and decision-oriented.
• Drive follow-through on commitments without creating a shadow management system over engineering teams.
• Facilitate post-delivery reviews and ensure lessons learned improve future planning and execution.

Release and operational readiness

• Establish release-readiness criteria for software, integration, data, AI, and platform capabilities.
• Coordinate readiness across product, engineering, architecture, security, testing, infrastructure, support, training, communications, and business operations.
• Ensure launch decisions are supported by evidence, clear ownership, known risks, support plans, monitoring, rollback or contingency plans, and transition-to-operations criteria.
• Create visibility into production-support readiness and the ownership model after launch.
• Partner with Engineering to strengthen the connection between delivery governance and CI/CD, automated testing, SRE, observability, quality, and operating support.
• Ensure maintenance, defects, technical debt, platform work, and reliability needs remain visible in the portfolio rather than being treated as invisible capacity.

Capacity management

• Develop a practical capacity-management approach that accounts for committed delivery, operational support, unplanned work, technical debt, enablement, and organizational constraints.
• Create a shared view of demand against available capacity across teams and constrained capabilities.
• Help leaders understand the relationship between priority changes, staffing, delivery dates, quality, and sustainable workload.
• Identify systemic causes of overload and burnout, including competing priorities, unmanaged intake, excessive work in progress, unclear ownership, and insufficient capacity visibility.
• Facilitate scenario planning and provide leaders with options when demand exceeds capacity.
• Use portfolio data to support workforce, partner, sequencing, and investment decisions.

Common delivery playbook and RACI

• Define and maintain a common delivery playbook across Product & Platforms, Program Management, Engineering, Architecture, Data, and AI.
• Establish clear RACI models for demand intake, discovery, prioritization, architecture, funding, planning, delivery, release, support, and retirement.
• Clarify the boundaries between Product, Technical Program Management, Engineering, Architecture, and business stakeholders.
• Identify where common standards are required and where teams should retain flexibility.
• Build adoption through coaching, examples, lightweight controls, and visible leadership sponsorship.
• Continuously improve the operating model based on delivery data, team feedback, and business outcomes.

Work-management tooling (requirements-led)

• Translate the portfolio and delivery operating model into clear requirements for work-management tooling.
• Assess whether current tools support enterprise portfolio management, program and project management, product planning, Agile execution, dependency management, capacity management, reporting, release management, and the software development lifecycle.
• Partner with leaders and users to evaluate tool capability, integration, data quality, security, supportability, administration, total cost of ownership, and adoption risk.
• Contribute the organization’s requirements into enterprise tooling decisions and define a phased adoption approach for the operating model.
• Establish standards for how work is represented, connected, updated, governed, and reported.
• Avoid treating a proof of concept or custom-built application as an enterprise platform without a clear operating, support, security, reliability, and ownership model.
• Ensure tooling enables the operating model; it must not become a substitute for consistent processes, decision rights, or accountability.

Executive reporting and communication

• Create a concise portfolio reporting package for leaders.
• Report on outcomes, priority work, delivery confidence, capacity pressure, dependencies, risks, decisions needed, release readiness, and operational health.
• Convert complex technical and delivery information into clear executive choices and recommendations.
• Use trends and leading indicators — not only milestone status — to identify emerging problems.
• Establish a single source of truth for portfolio-level reporting and clearly identify data-quality limitations.
• Tailor communication to the audience while maintaining consistent underlying definitions and measures.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, business, project/program management, or a related field; equivalent experience may be considered.
• Minimum 10 or more years of progressive experience in technical program management, portfolio management, product delivery, software engineering operations, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex, cross-functional technology or software programs involving multiple teams, products, platforms, vendors, and senior stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience leading an enterprise Agile and/or SAFe transformation across a digital, technology, or product organization, including changes to operating model, roles, governance, planning cadence, metrics, and behaviors.
• Deep practical experience with Agile software and product development lifecycle methods, including planning, discovery, design, development, testing, deployment, operations, and continuous improvement.
• Expert-level knowledge of Agile and scaled-Agile practices, with hands-on experience applying SAFe or a comparable scaling model in an enterprise environment.
• Demonstrated experience with Lean Portfolio Management, value-based prioritization, roadmap planning, capacity management, dependency management, incremental delivery, and release planning.
• Strong understanding of modern engineering practices, including source control, CI/CD, automated testing, quality engineering, cloud/platform delivery, observability, SRE, and production support. The role does not need to be the deepest technical specialist but must be credible with engineering leaders and practitioners.
• Experience creating and operating portfolio dashboards, executive reporting, health metrics, RAID management, decision logs, and governance processes.
• Experience designing or improving delivery operating models, standard operating procedures, RACI, decision rights, and cross-functional ways of working.
• Experience evaluating or implementing enterprise work-management and delivery tools; familiarity with platforms such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Rally, Planview, or comparable tools is beneficial.
• Experience leading organizational change, coaching teams and leaders, and improving adoption of new ways of working.
• Experience translating Agile and SAFe principles into practical enterprise transformation plans, with executive sponsorship, change-management discipline, role-based enablement, and measurable adoption outcomes.
• Strong written, verbal, facilitation, negotiation, and executive communication skills.
• SAFe certification, particularly SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC), Lean Portfolio Management, or an equivalent scaled-Agile credential.
• PMP, PMI-ACP, Certified Scrum Professional, Professional Scrum Master, or comparable certification.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience supporting enterprise portfolio-management tool selection, implementation, data migration, or adoption.
• Experience working in a matrixed organization with internal teams, strategic partners, and vendor delivery resources.
• Experience building metrics that measure flow, predictability, quality, value realization, and operational readiness.
• Achieves results through influence, structure, follow-through, and disciplined prioritization. Identify current sources of truth, duplicate reporting, informal intake paths, capacity constraints, and major decision bottlenecks.
• Establish a baseline of active work, upcoming demand, delivery health, dependencies, and operational commitments.
• Formalize the first version of the delivery playbook and standard operating procedures.
• Establish a prioritized improvement roadmap with measurable outcomes, owners, and timing.
• Begin adoption coaching with leaders and teams.
• Contribute the organization’s requirements into enterprise work-management tooling decisions and define the adoption approach, along with the next phase of operating-model maturity.

McCarthy is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, including disability and protected veteran status.