Lead Technical Program Mgr

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DEET), we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also redefining Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to improve flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

• Innovation: We develop and complete groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

This is a Lead Technical Program Manager position within the DE&E Technology: Business Operations - Global Program Management organization. The Lead Technical Program Manager will focus on the planning and execution of programs in the Content Operations organization inside (DE&E Tech) business unit. DE&E Tech creates products, platforms, and innovations for The Walt Disney Company by driving the strategic development and use of technology, building scalable systems and products to empower our businesses and engage consumers. With global scale, local presence, and deep technological excellence, DE&E Tech helps The Walt Disney Company optimize technology, platforms, and resources, while bringing creative ideas to life and creating industry-shaping approaches.

This position requires validated experience in technical program management. Ideal candidates must be highly proactive, diligent, be able to work through unknowns, identify paths to success to ensure delivery, and autonomously work on multiple assignments that span the department. They must be capable of digging into technical details and clearly communicating schedules, risks, status, and processes to a variety of business and technical audiences. They will partner closely with project managers, scrum leads and technical leads to coordinate schedules and deliverables. They will also work with Product and various Engineering teams to facilitate and support Agile ceremonies and mentor scrum teams on Agile standard processes and principles to enable the delivery of high value product increments to our users.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the delivery of projects from concept to completion by collaborating with engineering teams, product management and developing detailed project plans from development to deployment.

• Facilitate technical meetings; follow the discussions in order to summarize and gather outcomes.

• Track team progress against deliverables and work with the team to identify solutions to get back on-track when the team falls behind schedule.

• Work with development team(s) to create delivery timelines, and partner across various workstreams and business leaders to sequence the work based on priorities and dependencies. Track and report key program metrics, informing partners as appropriate.

• Identify scope of technical inputs and outputs as dependencies for engineering teams, resolve gaps and create program landmarks that ensure work is sequenced across teams.

• Collaborate with other TPMs to understand cross-team dependencies, prioritize work to avoid impediments, identify single points of failure for discussion and decision.

• Attend project meetings and communicate program progress against defined breakthroughs and delivery risks to various levels of executive leadership.

• Ensure transparency to status, issue resolution, and risk mitigation. Proactively drive risk mitigation and contingency planning, along with issue resolution.

• Ensure that all involved parties understand and accept their roles and responsibilities.

• Drive decisions by asking the right questions, displaying technical foresight and subject matter expertise.

• Ability to handle multiple team requests and balance that against contending priorities and committed work.

• Partner with finance teams to integrate all activity against achievements to not only track spend but also cost savings both projected and recognized.

• Independently run activities and resolve conflict within associated teams, with minimal influence from management.

• Sift through “noise” and facilitate discussions with a laser focus towards outcomes and results.

• Be ready to lead teams to perform Agile ceremonies, such as daily stand-ups, sprint planning's, backlog refinements, retrospectives, and demos for 2-3 teams concurrently.

• Provide guidance to teams on Agile efficiency, support their self-organization and Agile methodology knowledge growth.

• Provide guidance to teams towards data-driven decisions, using tools and techniques (i.e., Burndown Charts, Epic Reports, Version Reports) to maintain metrics that provide visibility for the team and use those metrics to identify team needs.

Qualifications :

• 7+ years of experience handling large-scale, strategic, software development programs in a well-established global technology organization.

• Shown experience in working in complex, matrixed environment leading multiple collaborators.

• Demonstrated ability with Agile project management in a hands-on role, good skills and knowledge of servant leadership, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and growing clarity.

• Technical knowledge of architecture and development practices.

• Experience in leading teams through improvement through process re-engineering.

• Hands-on experience with the software development life cycle.

• Excellent people management skills, including the ability to influence various audience and levels.

• Demonstrated tenacity and comfortable with ambiguity.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with an ability to adjust presentations to accommodate different audiences at various levels.

• Must understand the impact of injecting requests to the team's backlog.

• Advanced knowledge of tools including Atlassian Suite (JIRA/Confluence), MS Office (SharePoint, Teams) Keynote, PowerPoint and Google suite.

• Be flexible to work outside of regular office hours to accommodate important meetings in different time zones.

• Analytical attitude to troubleshoot complex technical issues and facilitate consensus driven decisions in response to technical challenges with minimal direction.

• Ability to understand program/project requirements and how they relate to content supply chain systems.

• Established experience with supply chain systems that support content operation functions (e.g., title management, content planning, order management, metadata management, avails management, rights management, and/or participations & residuals).

The hiring range for this position in California is $149,300 to $200,200 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.