Project Manager, MarComm

The Organization

XQ Institute is the nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking the high school experience so that every student graduates ready to succeed in life. We work in communities throughout the country, with individual schools and entire school systems, to help them dream big about what high school could be, turn their innovative ideas into action, and create more rigorous and equitable schools.

The Opportunity

Reporting to XQ’s CMO, we are seeking a Senior Project Manager who is high-skilled and experienced in managing multiple complex, multimedia projects from idea inception to execution with excellence. The ideal candidate is meticulously-organized and detail-oriented, with proven experience both building and maintaining day-to-day flexible workflows as well as long-term project planning and execution in a fast-paced collaborative work environment. The position requires a minimum of four days a week in the XQ office in Oakland, California. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Skillfully constructs and manages detailed work plans with proficient use of XQ’s systems, including Notion, Airtable, Miro, Google Suite, etc with clearly defined project scope, goals, deliverables, timelines, and milestones
• Leads the daily, real-time management and upkeep of the content calendar, including creating, managing, and populating calendar fields for the successful planning, executing, and tracking of content across projects and teams
• Continuously monitor and improve project management processes and practices, using industry best practices to optimize project delivery and improve overall organizational efficiency 
• Lead the proactive identification and elimination of obstacles to effectively facilitate cross-functional collaboration, teamwork, and open communication
• Facilitates smooth and timely development, production, and dissemination of written, digital, print, video/multimedia, and other editorial products in fast-paced environment that requires flexibility and adaptability, ensuring timely delivery of outcomes with a balance and room for creative and innovative approaches to delivery
• Manages and tracks roles, responsibilities, and assignments of internal staff and external contributors to content production, review, and publication to ensure role clarity

• Manage communication of project status, risks, and issues to key stakeholders, including the Senior Leaders, ensuring that they are informed and engaged throughout the project lifecycle, including overall timelines and key milestones with clear articulation of dependencies and tradeoffs
• Lead development of project documentation in line with project playbook, ensuring that project is rigorously planned and excellently executed
• Develops and tracks project budgets, and provides input to quarterly and annual budgeting process to ensure optimal resource allocation towards org goals 
• Coordinates content team schedules and calendars, including managing the weekly team meetings and agendas and cross-team meetings and agendas
• Organizes and manages content in shared systems and establishes and maintains effective systems for organizing, storing, and retrieving content for XQ-wide use
• Creates and manages project communication channels in Slack

• Plans, organizes, and assumes responsibility for project-related meetings and presentations including the creation of project-related memos, decks and presentation collateral
• Identifies gaps in XQ workstreams, actively proposes solutions, and moves between teams to fill ad-hoc needs and capacity issues
• Manage and lead project teams, fostering creativity and promoting collaboration, including regularly meeting with teams and individuals across XQ to ensure collaboration and ongoing line of sight across all content needs
• Contribute as member of the content team to draft, proof, review, revise at various stages of the creation process as needed
• Develops and coordinates new Scopes of Work and contracts in partnership with Legal and Operations, including sourcing and managing vendors to ensure quality and cost-effective production
• Serves as in-office liaison to other teams for off-site content team members
• Collaborate with the Head of Content and cross-functional teams to plan, execute, and deliver content projects and campaigns, ensuring they meet XQ's goals and objective
• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders, including content creators, designers, developers, and vendors, to ensure that all project tasks are completed on time and to a high standard of quality
• Collaborate with School and Products teams to identify content and insights to be highlighted through XQ’s visual language and storytelling voice, tailoring content to target audiences to take action