Job Purpose:
This role is responsible to lead portfolio-wide execution and governance across strategic product and technology programs. The role provides a single senior orchestration point across Business, Product, Engineering, QA, Production Support, Cloud / Infrastructure, InfoSec, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Finance and partners. The incumbent must combine strong subject command with executive presence, structured problem solving and the authority to challenge commitments, resolve cross-functional conflicts and drive timely decisions.
Key Responsibilities:
- a) Portfolio strategy translation: Convert approved business and product priorities into an integrated execution plan, with outcomes, milestones, dependencies, decision points, investment needs and accountable owners.
- b) Executive stakeholder management: Build trusted relationships with senior Business and Technology leaders. Frame issues clearly, align divergent viewpoints, secure decisions and maintain confidence through fact-based, proactive communication and tracking with proper timelines and RCAs as applicable.
- c) Integrated planning and prioritization: Lead, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly and rolling planning across product pillars. Reconcile capacity, regulatory commitments, business-critical dates, technical dependencies and vendor plans; expose trade-offs for leadership decision.
- d) Governance and decision architecture: Design and chair reviews, SteerCos and escalation forums. Ensure each forum has a clear purpose, accurate inputs, decision rights, actions, owners and closure discipline.
- e) Delivery assurance: Independently assess programme health beyond reported RAG status. Validate critical path, milestones, resource assumptions, quality gates, readiness and benefits dependencies.
- f) Cross-programme dependency management: Identify shared services, platform, data, API, security, infrastructure and partner dependencies; assign ownership and resolve sequencing conflicts before they affect delivery.
- g) Risk, issue and escalation management: Maintain an executive RAID view, drive mitigation and trigger escalation at the right point. Distinguish decisions, risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies; prevent silent slippage.
- h) Commercial and vendor governance: Govern delivery obligations, milestones, resource commitments, change requests, SLA performance, commercials and escalations for implementation and managed-service partners.
- i) Financial governance: Track approved business cases, programme budgets, forecasts, purchase dependencies, change costs and benefit assumptions in partnership with Finance and procurement owners.
- j) Release and operational governance: Ensure major releases have business, QA, Engineering, security, infrastructure, support and rollback readiness. Review recurring incidents, RCA closure and stability actions without taking over functional ownership.
- k) Regulatory and audit readiness: Ensure traceability of mandatory commitments, approvals, evidence, controls, risks and closure for regulatory, compliance and audit programmes.
- l) Capability and standards: Establish consistent planning, status reporting, RAID, dependency, release-readiness and decision-log standards. Coach Program Managers to become outcome-led leaders rather than coordinators.
Requirements:
- Bachelors degree in Engineering, Technology, Business, Finance or a related discipline; postgraduate qualification is desirable.
- Programme / project certification such as PMP, PRINCE2, SAFe, Scrum or equivalent is desirable, but demonstrated delivery leadership is more important than certification alone.
- Proven leadership of multiple, concurrent, high-complexity programmes involving business, product, engineering, operations and external partners.
- Strong understanding of lending journeys and lifecycle, including acquisition, underwriting, disbursement, servicing, collections, customer channels and partner integrations.
- Working command of agile, hybrid and milestone-based delivery; ability to challenge plans, dependencies, solution assumptions and release readiness.
- Experience with executive governance, programme financials, vendor contracts, implementation partners, risk management and organisational change.
- Ability to understand architecture, APIs, data flows, environments, security, cloud / infrastructure and production support sufficiently to ask the right questions and drive accountable closure.
- Experience in regulated financial services is strongly preferred.