Director, Value Stream Continuous Improvement

This Director role will focus on Value Stream Continuous Improvement and reports to the Head of Payments Technology Center of Excellence. You will be responsible for leading initiatives that drive measurable business value, operational resilience, and organizational excellence. This role is critical to the Payments Technology Center of Excellence effort to support the entire technology leadership team to:

• Modernize the environment

• Scale the Operation to comfortably meet revenue growth

• Collaborative innovation

• Drive growth with a stable platform and efficient integration expansion 

• Deliver against our product roadmap 

• Modernization of our payments platform

The Director, Value Stream Continuous Improvement will be responsible for leading cross-functional initiatives that drive measurable business value, operational resilience, and organizational excellence. This position collaborates with the entire Center of Excellence to emphasize the integration of Lean/Agile practices, process improvement, and value stream mapping with key objectives that drive the integration of value stream mapping, PDLC/SDLC governance, and Most Important Things (MITs), Key Performance Indications (KPIs), and success measures into DevOps practices, governance, and continuous improvement.

Key areas of focus include:

• Orchestrate continuous improvement initiatives to optimize the Payments Value Stream so that the Payments organization is positioned to deliver on its business and technology goals

•  Lead Value Stream Mapping initiatives, emphasizing systems thinking, continuous improvement, and lean-agile principles to build and reinforce predictable and resilient capabilities for delivery and operations

• Ensure the technology platform is positioned to support business growth while maintaining a balance between speed of delivery, quality, and risk management.

•  Instill a culture of continuous improvement and innovation within the hearts and minds our teams throughout the organization

•  Lead the execution of payments technology initiatives, overseeing the delivery management function to ensure efficient, high-quality execution of key projects.

• Define and track KPIs that measure customer value, platform scalability, platform performance, efficiency, and business impact.

• Mitigate operational risk through robust governance frameworks and streamlined processes.

• Encourage a culture of continuous improvement to ensure ongoing innovation and competitiveness.

• Act as a key driver of transformation, ensuring alignment between operational processes, technology, and strategic business outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Encourage teams to adopt a platform/product-owner mentality, making decisions as if they own the Profit & Loss (P&L).

• Promote rapid, light-weight and iterative experimental approaches to continuous improvement initiatives

• Collaborate with engineering and operations teams to optimize deployment processes, improve uptime, and ensure that platform performance KPIs are met.

• Monitor and manage KPIs to ensure those target measures can and will be met and continue to measure what’s most important for the organization success measures that reflect both product and platform performance.

• Foster a culture of ownership within and across teams, ensuring that process improvements are fit-for-purpose, sustainable, and align with the broader P&L organizational goals.

• Align Value Streams with product roadmaps, ensuring seamless integration of platform performance with customer-facing initiatives.

• Incorporate product management principles to align Value Streams with customer value and business outcomes.

• Empower teams to think beyond processes and own their outcomes, driving decision-making that supports innovation, customer impact, and revenue growth.

• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration across Value Streams to establish a strong coalition of change champions that will drive the maximization of customer and business value. optimize delivery pipelines for maximum customer and business value.

• Identify people change management opportunities and facilitate engagement and learning sessions for adoption.

• Embed people change management into transformation initiatives.

• Drive architecture and process-oriented design to enhance scalability and efficiency.

• Build a people-first culture that aligns with global CoE values, emphasizing career growth and motivation.

• This is a people leader role

• Travel is required, based on p