DFF - Associate Strategy and Performance Manager
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Job summary
Dubai Future Foundation seeks an Associate Strategy and Performance Manager to translate vision into actionable MP/OKR mandates, align portfolio with moonshots, and drive governance, FP&A, and digital transformation. You will collaborate with Finance and HR to align budgets with growth plans, ensuring delivery on time and within budget.
You will join a high-impact team responsible for strategic planning, capital allocation, and process design that keeps Dubai 10 years ahead through disciplined
Qualifications
- 3–5 years of experience spanning strategy and delivery
- Project/portfolio management certification (PMP, PRINCE2, PgMP, or Agile/Scrum) is an advantage
- Strong dual capability: connect work to vision and moonshots with delivery discipline
- Solid FP&A and financial acumen—budgets, forecasts, and variances
- Experience in operating-model design and/or enterprise digital transformation
- Excellent problem-solving and communication skills
Responsibilities
- Translate strategy into clear mandates for project teams
- Manage portfolio governance, prioritisation, and stage gates
- Develop and supervise OKR-based scorecards across the portfolio
- Monitor budgets, forecasts, and capital allocation; support HR alignment
- Design and evolve operating models and processes; drive lean and agile improvements
- Produce executive-ready briefings and dashboards; manage stakeholder relations
- Identify risks, dependencies, and ensure timely delivery across projects
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) was established in 2016 to institutionalize future‑shaping for Dubai and strengthen the city’s position as a leading global city of the future. The Foundation works in partnership with government and private‑sector entities to imagine, design and accelerate Dubai’s future. Its work spans five strategic areas: future foresight, knowledge dissemination, capacity building, future design and future acceleration. At the heart of DFF’s mandate is turning future‑focused ideas and opportunities into tangible outcomes. The Foundation embraces risk‑taking, agility and foresight as key attributes in navigating emerging opportunities and challenges. DFF is guided by a core belief that leading in the present is not enough; the future must be actively imagined, designed and executed.
Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) aims to realize the wise vision of Dubai’s leadership to keep Dubai 10 years ahead, institutionalizing future‑oriented thinking and forward‑looking methodologies that position Dubai as the leading city of the future.
In collaboration with government entities, global institutions, startups, and innovators, DFF drives collective efforts to imagine, design, and execute the best possible future for humanity.
Under the supervision of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of DFF, the Foundation oversees a portfolio of initiatives that include the Museum of the Future, Area 2071, Dubai Future Accelerators, Dubai Future Labs, Dubai Future Academy, Dubai Future Forum, Dubai Centre for AI, and the Dubai RDI Program.
Through these platforms, DFF institutionalizes foresight, enables innovation, builds talent, and designs the systems and industries that will keep Dubai 10 years ahead in every dimension of its future.
For more information on the initiatives, projects, and programs of Dubai Future Foundation, please visit: www.dubaifuture.ae
The Associate Strategy and Performance Manager reports directly to the Senior Strategy Manager, Strategy and Performance, within the Strategy and Strategic Capital Department at DFF.
This vertical focuses on delivering with intention — owning strategic planning‑cycle management, portfolio governance, the institutional PMO, capital allocation, operating‑model and process design, enterprise digital transformation, and the performance frameworks that keep DFF’s initiatives aligned, funded, resourced, and on track.
This role is the bridge between DFF’s strategy and its delivery. By translating moonshots into mandates, holding the portfolio accountable against measurable goals, keeping a disciplined eye on capital and human‑capital alignment, and modernising how DFF operates, you ensure leadership can steer every initiative toward measurable, well‑funded, well‑resourced impact — and that the organisation itself stays fit to keep Dubai 10 years ahead.
As the Associate Strategy and Performance Manager, you will act as the connective tissue between leadership intent and execution — translating DFF’s vision, moonshots, and annual priorities into clear mandates, and surfacing project realities, risks, and trade‑offs back to leadership in decision‑ready form.
Your remit runs beyond individual projects: you will help shape DFF’s operating model, support its digital transformation and adoption of new tools, and partner with Finance and HR to keep capital and human‑capital growth aligned to budget.
The role demands a rare dual capability — the strategic mindset to connect every initiative to DFF’s moonshots, and the delivery and financial discipline to make sure it actually ships, on budget and on impact.
- Build a deep, current understanding of DFF’s needs at both the corporate level (vision, moonshots, annual priorities) and the project level (objectives, constraints, dependencies, delivery status).
- Engage continuously with project teams to understand their needs first‑hand and anticipate problems before they escalate.
- Translate high‑level strategic direction into clear, actionable mandates for project teams, and surface project‑level realities, risks, and trade‑offs back to leadership in a structured, decision‑ready form.
- Maintain a living, enterprise‑wide view of the portfolio so leadership always has an accurate picture of what is in flight, what it is delivering, and where it stands against strategy.
- Align efforts across the portfolio — identifying overlaps, gaps, dependencies, and synergies — and ensure every initiative is explicitly mapped to DFF’s moonshots, challenging or escalating efforts that drift.
- Establish and run portfolio governance — prioritisation frameworks, stage gates, and decision forums — that keep resources flowing to the highest‑impact work.
- Conduct analysis on the innovation funnel and initiative readiness, advising which initiatives are ready to advance, pause, or stop.
- Manage cross‑project dependencies and resolve conflicts in scope, timing, or resourcing before they compromise delivery.
- Coordinate directly with project owners and verticals to monitor progress, remove blockers, and unblock initiatives where they are stuck, and drive a consistent cadence of portfolio reviews, status reporting, and milestone tracking.
- Set, review, and approve project and portfolio goals — ensuring they are ambitious, measurable, and explicitly tied to DFF’s moonshots — and hold initiatives accountable against them.
- Develop and supervise OKR‑based scorecards across the portfolio, cascading objectives from corporate strategy down to initiative level and keeping them current.
- Track and maintain portfolio‑level KPIs and scorecards, giving leadership a clear, current view of where the portfolio stands against target.
- Translate delivery and performance data into early‑warning indicators, flagging at‑risk initiatives and recommending course corrections with supporting analysis.
- Build and maintain a clear FP&A view of each project — budgets, spend, forecasts, and variance — and consolidate these into a portfolio‑level financial picture.
- Partner closely with Finance to support DFF’s annual budget cycles, building the bottom‑up and top‑down inputs that connect portfolio plans to budget.
- Work with HR to ensure DFF’s human‑capital growth and headcount plans stay aligned with budgets and portfolio priorities.
- Support capital‑allocation decisions — helping leadership direct funding to the highest‑return initiatives and challenging spend that is not earning its place.
- Apply business‑case discipline, linking project spend to expected impact and strategic return, and translate financial data into clear delivery decisions.
- Help design and evolve DFF’s operating model — structures, roles, decision rights, and ways of working — so the organisation is set up to deliver against strategy.
- Document and critically assess DFF’s existing strategic and operational processes, mapping how work actually flows across the organisation.
- Design, optimise, and institutionalise processes that improve clarity, consistency, and speed of execution, and lead process re‑engineering initiatives end‑to‑end — diagnosis, redesign, and change adoption.
- Apply lean, agile, and design‑thinking methodologies to continuously improve how DFF plans, governs, and delivers.
- Support DFF’s digital transformation agenda at the enterprise level — extending the PMO’s mandate beyond individual projects to how the organisation operates as a whole.
- Support the adoption of new tools and platforms across DFF, helping drive and measure uptake so investments translate into real change in ways of working.
- Map processes to DFF’s available tools, identify where tooling is underused, duplicated, or missing, and optimise the process–tool fit.
- Work natively with AI tools and emerging technologies, and develop or meaningfully contribute to new AI‑enabled solutions that enhance how DFF operates.
- Establish and maintain PMO standards, templates, and reporting frameworks that bring consistency to how projects are planned, tracked, and communicated.
- Develop and own a central project‑management dashboard as the single source of truth on portfolio status, milestones, financials, and risks, keeping it continuously and accurately updated.
- Produce executive‑ready briefings, portfolio reviews, and board‑level presentations that turn dashboard data into clear, persuasive decisions and recommendations.
- Identify, track, and mitigate portfolio‑level risks and issues, maintaining clear escalation paths and decision logs.
- Manage relationships with internal stakeholders across seniority levels, building trust and driving alignment.
DFF offers a dynamic and mission‑driven environment that values collaboration, excellence, and measurable impact.
You will work alongside multidisciplinary teams passionate about execution, innovation, and the future of Dubai. Expect diverse challenges, high‑level exposure, and the opportunity to contribute directly to shaping Dubai’s readiness for the future.
- Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Finance, Economics, or a related discipline; an advanced degree (MBA, MSc) is a plus.
- 3–5 years of experience spanning both strategy and delivery — for example, experience with a top‑tier consulting firm (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, Accenture Strategy, or equivalent) combined with PMO, programme/project management, or strategy‑execution roles.
- Project/portfolio management certification (PMP, PRINCE2, PgMP, or Agile/Scrum) is an advantage.
- Strong dual capability: the strategic mindset to connect work to vision and moonshots, combined with the delivery discipline to ensure execution.
- Solid FP&A and financial acumen — comfortable with budgets, forecasts, and variances, supporting annual budget cycles and capital‑allocation decisions, and keeping human‑capital growth aligned with budget.
- Experience in operating‑model design and/or enterprise digital transformation, including driving the adoption of new tools and platforms across an organisation, is highly valued.
- Exceptional structured problem‑solving skills, with the ability to break ambiguous and complex challenges into clear hypotheses and actionable plans.
- Proven ability to orchestrate across multiple projects, teams, and stakeholders simultaneously while maintaining a coherent portfolio view.
- Strong process‑design capability, with the ability to diagnose how work flows, redesign processes, and embed sustainable improvements.
- Practical fluency with OKRs, KPIs, project/portfolio‑management, and collaboration tools, with a strong understanding of matching the right tool to the right process.
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with excellent PowerPoint and Excel capabilities to develop executive‑ready presentations, dashboards, and analyses. Familiarity with BI and data‑visualisation platforms is an advantage.
- Ability to work natively with AI tools and emerging technologies, and to contribute meaningfully to developing new AI‑enabled solutions.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity with a strong bias for action, able to move quickly with incomplete information and iterate toward the right solution.
- Strong cross‑functional collaboration skills across diverse teams, cultures, and levels of seniority. Arabic is an asset.
- High attention to detail, strong ownership, and accountability.
- Emirati candidates are preferred.
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