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 Apple & Android organization inside the Global Program Management 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 and detail oriented, be able to work in fast-paced and ambiguous environments, identify creative paths to successfully deliver, and autonomously work on multiple assignments that span across the Android Mobile and Android TV domains. They must be capable of digging into technical details and clearly communicating schedules, risks, status, and processes to a variety of business/technical and internal/external audiences. They will partner closely with technical program managers, technical leads, and Engineering/Program leadership to coordinate deliverables and articulate team progress. They will also work with Product, QA and across partner Engineering teams to facilitate and support Agile ceremonies and iterate upon internal team processes to enable the delivery of high value product increments to our users.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and execute to deliver projects from concept to completion by collaborating with engineering, product management, QA by developing detailed project plans from development to deployment.

• Facilitate technical meetings and problem solving break-outs; follow and comprehend  highly technical discussions in order to summarize, raise risks, identify owners, and gather outcomes.

• Track team progress (on the pillar team level and holistically for Android) against deliverables and work with the team to identify solutions to get back on-track, generate proposals for descoping, or craft leadership communications 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.

• Serve as the point of contact for Android partners, ensuring timely issue mitigation, open communication on scheduled releases, and continued rapport with external partners.

• 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.

• Mentor and show strong collaboration with 3-4 other TPMs working within the Android Mobile space, serving Engagement, Playback, Platform and Onboarding, Commerce and Identity pillars 

• Be ready to lead teams to perform Agile ceremonies, such as daily stand-ups, sprint plannings, 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, specifically pertaining to the Android platform.

• 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.