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
- Bachelors 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.
Behavioral Assessment
In addition to supplying your resume, we ask that you complete our Behavioral Assessment through Predictive Index at the following link:
https://assessment.predictiveindex.com/bo/B3WV/PrincipalProgramManager_Jul2026_154237
Tips:
- Complete the assessment in a quiet place, free from interruption, in one session.
- Take as much time as you wish to complete the assessment - it typically takes less than 7 minutes.
- Please use one of the following browsers: Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.