Senior Manager, Project Management, External Growth & Innovation

About This Role:

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Project Management to architect the operating model for our External Growth & Innovation team. You lead the operating rhythm and systems of a team responsible for executing high-impact innovation, strategic partnerships and enterprise modernization initiatives across the North American commercial organization.

This role is designed for an experienced project management expert who sets the standards by which the team operates and advises senior leadership on how to balance rigor with the agility innovation demands. You bring depth in project and portfolio management, a track record of building processes and functions from the ground up, and the judgment to know when precedent applies and when a new approach is required. You will serve as a trusted advisor and report to the Vice President of External Growth & Innovation, while advising senior cross-functional and external stakeholders.

What You’ll Do:

You will define and continuously evolve the systems and standards that govern how the team plans, prioritizes, and delivers — and you will guide others in adopting them:

• Master Tracker: Establish the data model, governance, and quality standards for the team’s project database, ensuring it is reliable enough to drive executive dashboards and resourcing decisions.
• Innovation Dashboard: Design and own the “at-a-glance” view of the innovation portfolio, including criteria for scale, sustain, or sunset decisions. Advise the VP and leadership team on portfolio-level patterns and tradeoffs.
• Team Forecasting: Build the methodology for forecasting team capacity against project milestones, and guide leaders in using it to make resourcing and sequencing decisions.
• Project Charters: Set the standard for how charters are developed and used to align stakeholders, accelerate decision points, and create durable institutional knowledge.

Project Execution & Cross-Functional Alignment

• Strategic Advisory: Serve as a trusted advisor to the Vice President and cross-functional leaders on project portfolio strategy, resource allocation, and process design. Provide counsel on broad-ranging projects where your subject matter expertise shapes the path forward.
• External Stakeholder Engagement: Act as a point of contact for key external partners, vendors, and innovators — synthesizing market signals and vendor trends into actionable intelligence for leadership.

• Business Case Development: Convert technical and operational information into compelling business context and advice. Lead the development of business cases used to assess, test, and scale emerging technologies.

• Cross-Team Orchestration: Serve as the central node for alignment across a complex network of internal stakeholders, ensuring decisions, deliverables, and dependencies are surfaced and resolved. Guides others in resolving complex problems in a specialized area; takes a new perspective on existing solutions or solves problems where precedent does not exist.

• Approval & Review Processes: Lead projects through enterprise stakeholder review processes, anticipating risks, integrating feedback, and securing alignment and approvals on tight timelines.

• Functional Project Leadership: Lead functional teams or workstreams with moderate-to-high resource requirements, risk, and complexity — including problems where precedent does not exist and a new perspective on existing solutions is required.

• Signature Events: Oversee the operational and experiential execution of 2–3 annual signature events that bring partners, innovators, and internal stakeholders together.

Qualifications:

Required Skills

• 7+ years of progressive experience in project, program, or portfolio management, with demonstrated impact in complex, matrixed organizations.
• Recognized expertise within the project management discipline, with a track record of setting standards that others adopt.
• Proven ability to build functions, processes, and operating models from the ground up.
• Demonstrated success advising senior leaders and key external stakeholders on broad-ranging, high-stakes projects.
• Ability to convert technical and operational information into compelling business context, written communication, and executive-ready advice.
• Strong financial and analytical orientation, with the judgment to interpret internal and external business challenges and recommend best practices.
• Ability to work independently on complex problems, with guidance required only in highly ambiguous situations.
• Deep curiosity about emerging project management approaches, including