Lead Technical Program Mgr

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Technical Program Manager to drive business-critical data initiatives across multiple teams within Data Platforms and across the Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology portfolio of digital consumer-facing products.

The successful candidate will partner with Product Management and Engineering to translate business value into actionable plans and execute on the delivery of strategic data initiatives. This role requires technical understanding, attention to detail, a strong sense of accountability and ownership, collaboration, and experience managing across highly complex, workstream teams.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Accountable for driving execution and delivery of extraordinarily high-profile technical, data platform projects from start to finish in a fast-paced and complex environment.
• Develop strong partnerships with engineering, product management, and business partners to drive focus on strategic and tactical program objectives.
• Understand all project domain components, including architecture, tools, and deployment practices that the development team is employing; can explain the purpose of component decisions at a high level.
• Forecast project risks proactively; analyze and drive resolution of key project blockers.
• Develop and execute change management and communication plans and engage with stakeholders to report progress and raise issues.
• Document and communicate key decisions, accomplishments, problems, changes to plan, and go-forward plans for assigned deliverable(s) to internal and external executive stakeholders.
• Ability to lead technical discussions at the organisational level to drive decisions and next steps.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to articulate technical and delivery concepts for a Sr Executive level audience.
• Serve as subject matter expert and "go-to" person for guidance in program management discipline.
• Define, optimise, and manage Agile project management processes at the team-of-teams level.
• Solid grasp of team-of-teams level agile software development lifecycle methodologies, principles, and practices.
• Manage capacity across team-of-teams to balance delivery priorities (business, technical, maintenance, etc.).
• Create a collaborative work environment that cultivates shared understanding, transparency, mastery, autonomy, innovation, and continuous learning.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• 7+ years of practical experience in delivering large-scale data platform projects.
• Experience orchestrating execution across multiple business units or organisations with competing priorities.
• Comfortable building program structure and alignment in ambiguous, fast-evolving environments.
• Experience with and/or current working knowledge of typical consumer data platforms and service technologies at scale for consumer-facing multi-platform streaming and non-streaming digital products.
• Demonstrated ability to drive initiatives forward to completion through collaboration and consensus across functional areas.
• Solid orchestration and problem-solving skills with the ability to focus both strategically and tactically to achieve project goals.
• Must be capable of managing, tracking, and troubleshooting multiple projects in a deadline-driven environment with cross-functional teams, vendors, and partners.
• Experience building broad, large-scale communications plans.
• Love for Data and taking chaos and turning it into something actionable.
• High sense of ownership and a focus on building fast without sacrificing quality.
• Experience in Agile software development with expertise in Scrum methodology and practices.
• Experience with technical Release Management.
• Current knowledge of modern program management, analysis, and reporting tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Airtable.