Principal Program Manager

Principal Program Manager

Major Areas of Responsibility / Essential Functions

• Own end-to-end delivery of a portfolio of concurrent, high-complexity programs, aligning scope, schedule, cost, and quality with organizational strategy.
• Establish and continuously champion program management standards, tools, and governance across the organization.
• Serve as the primary program-level interface to executive leadership, translating program status, risk, and trade-offs into clear business decisions.
• Lead cross-functional teams (engineering, product management, quality, operations, supply chain, and marketing) without formal authority, driving accountability and alignment.

Specific Responsibilities

• Build and maintain integrated master schedules across hardware, firmware, and software workstreams, modeling scenarios and stress-testing critical paths.
• Lead proactive risk management: identify, quantify, and mitigate program risk, flagging emerging issues before they impact delivery.
• Conduct resource capacity planning and demand forecasting across the program portfolio to anticipate bottlenecks.
• Own program financials: budget, cost tracking, and forecast-to-actual variance reporting.
• Allocate resources, budget, and hours across the program portfolio, and proactively adjust allocations as priorities, risks, or constraints shift.
• Drive structured after-action reviews and retrospectives; convert lessons learned into process improvements and playbooks.
• Translate product and business requirements into detailed, phase-gated implementation plans.
• Track, evaluate, and communicate the impact of program-level changes, maintaining a clear decision and change log for stakeholders.
• Prepare status reports, executive summaries, meeting notes, and program documentation, using AI tools to accelerate drafting where helpful, with sound judgment on review and accuracy before distribution.
• Evaluate and pilot new program and project management tools, capabilities, and workflows; recommend adoption where they create measurable efficiency or quality gains.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Exceptional communication, organization, and executive-level documentation skills; able to distill complex, multi-workstream programs into clear narratives for senior leadership.
• Demonstrated strategic leadership, sound judgment, and interpersonal influence across all levels of the organization, including without direct authority.
• Proven ability to operate effectively in a fast-changing, ambiguous environment and to bring structure to complexity.
• Strong working fluency with AI-enabled productivity tools and a demonstrated track record of applying them to improve program outcomes.
• Comfort using data and analytics to drive proactive rather than reactive program management.
• Positively influences managers, peers, cross-functional teams, vendors, and customers; skilled at building consensus among competing priorities.
• Deep commitment to quality and to internal and external customer outcomes.
• Advanced proficiency in modern program/project management platforms (e.g., Atlassian, Monday.com, Microsoft Project or equivalent) and collaboration tools.
• Able to operate with a high degree of autonomy and minimal direct supervision, while keeping stakeholders appropriately informed.
• Curiosity and adaptability toward emerging tools and ways of working, with a bias toward experimentation balanced by rigorous risk and quality review.

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree required (engineering or related technical field strongly preferred; advanced degree a plus).
• Typically requires ten or more years of related experience, including significant experience leading complex new-product development programs and managing multiple concurrent, high-complexity programs at a portfolio level.
• Project Management Certification (PMP) or Agile/SAFe certification a plus.

Physical Demands

None specified.

Work Environment

Hybrid — 3 days onsite in Schaumburg, IL, 2 days WFH.