Role Summary
The Global PMO Director is a *** employee assigned full time to the YUM Brands BYTE program. The role leads a team of five (5) Delivery Leads (Senior Technical Program Managers), each running BYTE platform delivery for one or more markets such as KFC Canada, KFC SOPAC and KFC UK. The Director reports to the YUM Global Program Director (Gloria Escobar) rolling up to Jatin Chandwani (Chief Growth Officer @ YUM).
This is not a delivery role for any one market. The Director stays on top of every market at once, knows enough about each to discuss issues credibly with executives, spots risk before it lands on a status slide, and steps in when a Delivery Lead needs help or is out. The job is to make the whole portfolio predictable without getting stuck in the weeds of any one workstream.
Most of the people this role depends on, including YUM product owners, BYTE engineering, vendors and market teams, do not report to it. Results come from influence, clear communication and steady follow-through rather than formal authority.
Key Responsibilities
- Portfolio oversight of the Delivery Leads
- Know the current state of every market: next milestone, critical path, top three risks, and what is blocked and on whom. Have a group meeting of all the leads once a week. And one-on-one chat with them on Teams and Slack as required.
- Check (review selectively) each Delivery Lead's plan, RAID log and Jira boards weekly, and challenge dates that look optimistic or dependencies that have no owner.
- Spot patterns across markets, such as the same integration defect, timeline over extending, vendor delay or access issue showing up in two places and fix them once for everyone.
- Coach Delivery Leads on planning, escalation and executive communication. Raise performance concerns early with the *** account leadership. Review their LT update pptx and their SteerCo presentation decks.
- Backup and hands-on support
- Cover a market directly when its Delivery Lead is on leave, overloaded or facing a critical go-live, including running its standups and representing it in SteerCo.
- Step into a stuck issue when a Delivery Lead cannot move it alone, typically a cross-team dependency, a vendor escalation or a disagreement on scope.
- Keep enough context on each market, through notes, Confluence and regular check-ins, that coverage can start the same day without a long handover.
- Governance and reporting
- Monitor and own the program reporting rhythm with the delivery lead: weekly leadership status reports, monthly SteerCo decks and ad hoc executive summaries for each market.
- Review every status slide before it goes to leadership. Cut PM-level detail, surface buried risks, check that each risk has an owner and a date, and make sure the story is consistent across markets.
- Maintain the PMO standards the Delivery Leads work to: RAID management, Jira hygiene and due date accountability, Confluence structure, milestone and dependency tracking.
- Prepare pre-reads with YUM executives before SteerCo, capture their feedback, and make sure it is reflected in the final material.
- Release and go-live readiness
- Track each market through discovery, localization, build, SIT, UAT, PVT, pilot, phased channel go-live, hyper care and handoff to support.
- Confirm that go/no-go criteria, cutover plans and hyper care exit criteria exist and are agreed before each launch.
- Look across market go-live dates for resource and environment conflicts and raise them early.
- Stakeholder management
- Act as the single PMO point of contact for the YUM Global Program Director and senior YUM product and technology leaders.
- Build working relationships with BYTE engineering and product leads, market leadership teams, and partners such as payment providers, aggregators and agencies.
- Handle escalations calmly and without blame. State the issue, the owner of the fix and the date, and follow it to closure.
- Continuous improvement
- Turn lessons from each market launch into repeatable playbooks so the next market takes less time, especially in SIT, UAT and the waterfall go-live across channels.
- Look for automation in reporting and tracking, such as Jira to status report pipelines, to reduce manual work for the Delivery Leads.
- Support the *** account team on staffing plans, onboarding new Delivery Leads and PMO Analysts, and account growth conversations with YUM.
Operating Cadence and Meetings
The Director should expect four to six hours of meetings a day across time zones (North America, UK and Europe, Australia and New Zealand). Some early morning and late evening calls are part of the role.
- Delivery Lead huddle | Daily, 15 to 30 min | Chair | Blockers, new risks and today's escalations across all markets
- One-on-ones with each Delivery Lead Weekly | Chair | Plan and RAID review, coaching, support needed
- Market standups and working sessions | As needed, daily for a covered market | Attend or chair when covering | Stay close to markets near go-live or in trouble
- Program leadership sync with YUM Global Program Director | Weekly | Present | Portfolio status, decisions needed, escalations
- Leadership status report review | Weekly | Owner | Review and finalize every market's status before it goes out
- BYTE product and engineering syncs | Weekly | Attend | Release plans, defect priorities, cross-market dependencies
- Release and go/no-go reviews | Per release or launch | Attend, often facilitate | Confirm readiness against agreed criteria
- SteerCo pre-reads with YUM executives | Monthly, before each SteerCo | Lead | Walk executives through material and capture feedback
- Market SteerCo | Monthly per market | Present or support the Delivery Lead | Executive status, risks and decisions
- *** account and delivery reviews | Biweekly or monthly | Present | Staffing, financials, delivery health, client feedback
Technical Knowledge Required
The Director does not write code or configure systems but must understand them well enough to ask the right question, judge whether a date is realistic and explain an issue to an executive in two sentences. Previous development experience or hands-on coding would help.
Understanding End-to-End Software Delivery Lifecycle
- Agile and hybrid delivery: sprints, release trains, backlog and dependency management across several product teams.
- The full testing path: unit, integration and SIT, UAT, PVT, pilot, and what a good exit criterion looks like at each stage.
- Environment strategy (dev, staging, production), release management, cutover planning and rollback.
- Defect triage: telling a configuration issue from a code defect from a data problem and knowing who owns each.
Working Knowledge of Digital Ordering and Restaurant Technology (QSR)
- How orders flow from Web, App, Kiosk and delivery aggregators through an order injection layer into POS systems such as Client Aloha and Oracle Micros.
- Menu management: product and bundle build, modifiers, dayparts, pricing tiers, localization, and the cost of dual entry between systems.
- Payments: payment service providers, end-to-end payment flows by channel, refunds and reconciliation.
- Delivery aggregators (Uber Eats, DoorDash and others), delivery-as-a-service and dispatch platforms.
- Supporting platforms: CMS such as Contentful, CRM and messaging such as Braze, transactional email, store and location data, and customer surveys.
- Market localization: language, currency, tax, promotions and regulatory requirements.
Integration and Data
- APIs, middleware and event-driven integration at a conceptual level, enough to follow an architecture review.
- Data migration from legacy platforms, including custom.