Executive Director, Program Management, Customer Experience

About the company

The company helps teachers bring delight and rigor to students every day. We have become a leader in K–12 literacy, biliteracy, math, and science by building inspiring teaching and learning experiences based on research. The company Classroom platform combines curriculum, assessment, and supplemental learning into one coherent high-quality instructional system. A pioneer in education since 2000, the company has developed deep relationships in states and districts by partnering with educators to drive implementation quality and improved outcomes. Today, the company serves more than 18 million students and teachers across all 50 states and on six continents. For more information, visit the company [link for members]

Job Description

The Executive Director (ED), Program Management, Customer Experience is an executive leadership role responsible for leading the portfolio-wide strategy, delivery governance, and operational execution of program management across the Customer Experience organization. Sitting above the Associate Director tier, this role provides strategic oversight of all project and program management activities, ensuring alignment with enterprise-wide strategic goals in Customer Experience.

The ED oversees Associate Directors and Program Managers supporting initiatives across the full customer journey. This leader is directly responsible for establishing standard processes, shaping and keeping a pulse on how teams engage on projects, and ensuring all projects deliver against our CX and the company charge. The ED sets the tone for engaging stakeholders; they lead strategic cross-functional partnerships across the company, including teams such as Product, Engineering, Operations, Finance, Sales, and executive leadership to scale delivery and elevate execution maturity across the enterprise.

This leader translates strategy, retrospectives, and portfolio insights into clear operating models with defined ownership, measurable outcomes, and scalable processes. The ED creates the conditions for teams to execute with clarity while preserving the judgment to adapt when circumstances change.

Essential Responsibilities

Portfolio Governance, Strategy & Cross-Functional Alignment (30%)

• Formulate and execute the overarching PMO and Program Management vision for the Customer Experience organization, ensuring portfolio priorities directly align with broader enterprise goals.

• Establish scalable delivery frameworks, governance standards, and operational risk-mitigation strategies across all CX initiatives, including Professional Development and high-volume contractor deployment workflows.

• Serve as the escalation backstop for ownership and scope: name the owner when work arrives without one, approve role and ownership agreements at the manager level, and carry the renegotiation with senior partners so project managers don't hold this boundary alone.

• Champion executive-level alignment across cross-functional leadership—including Product, Engineering, Operations, Finance, Sales, and Customer Support—to drive shared accountability, clear handoffs, and resource optimization.

• Maintain a centralized roadmap of program priorities and portfolio health, balancing competing demands, technical constraints, capacity models, and business ROI.

Program Management Excellence & Operational Scaling (30%)

• Ensure standards are adopted, not just launched: every standard has a named owner, reaches the person who needs it when needed, and is confirmed in use. Process and operating-model changes are implemented with stakeholder feedback, clear enablement, adoption measures, and a defined post-launch review so continuous improvement becomes a durable standard of working rather than one-time interventions.

• Serve as the principal enterprise authority on program management standards, introducing, embedding, and refining modern Agile, Lean, and PMP methodologies across the organization.

• Oversee high-visibility, business-critical initiatives across all verticals within CX and occasionally run projects for the C-suite.

• Drive portfolio readiness and quality metrics, proactively diagnosing systemic execution bottlenecks to minimize project friction, rework, and scope drift.

• Oversee program-level change management processes, establishing clear frameworks for executive stakeholder communications, risk escalation, and operational enablement.

• Lead decision-oriented governance and working sessions with clear agendas, time boxes, participants, pre-work, decision points, and expected outputs.

• Establish meeting norms, ongoing communication cadences, and practical mechanisms for gathering feedback and building buy-in.

• Make work findable and transferable: require plans, decisions, rationale, owners, dependencies, risks, handoffs, templates, and next steps to be documented in shared locations. Maintain decision and issue logs so another leader can understand, continue, or audit the work without relying on private context.

Performance Analytics, Portfolio Health & Insights (15%)

• Define, track, and report on core program delivery metrics, performance indicators (KPIs), and operational SLAs to provide executive leadership with transparent visibility into portfolio health.

• Partner with CX Data, Systems, and Operations teams to build scalable dashboarding solutions that track resource utilization, implementation milestones, and delivery predictability.

• Drive data-informed decision-making across the PM organization, utilizing quantitative metrics to evaluate program impact, resource allocation, and continuous process improvements.

Team Leadership, Mentorship & Organizational Capability (25%)

• Lead, recruit, and coach a high-performing management organization, directly supervising Associate Directors and indirect PM teams.

• Establish performance standards, career development pathways, and structured accountability to foster a culture of continuous learning, leadership, and execution rigor.

• Build a scalable organizational structure with clear operating rhythms, role clarity, and efficient team allocation aligned with strategic growth objectives.

• Model inclusive, collaborative leadership that cultivates psychological safety, trust, and operational excellence across distributed teams.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Within the first 12–18 months, the ED, Program Management will have

• Unified and standardized the program management delivery methodology across all Customer Experience teams, resulting in improved delivery predictability and execution rigor.

• Established executive-level portfolio health reporting and dashboards in collaboration with CX systems teams, bringing full visibility to timelines, risks, and resource constraints.

• Strengthened strategic handoffs and alignment between CX, Product, Engineering, Sales, Business Systems, Data, and Finance, noticeably reducing friction in complex cross-functional implementations.

• Built a high-functioning leadership tier (including ADs) with clear growth paths, strong operational discipline, and high team engagement.

• Optimized cross-functional workflows supporting high-volume execution.

• Embedded an operating model in which initiatives begin with clear objectives, scope, roles, decision rights, success measures, and known assumptions; portfolio trade-offs are made transparently; and decisions, dependencies, and handoffs remain findable as teams and priorities change.

Required Qualifications

Minimum Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience.

• 8+ years of program, project, or portfolio management experience in a complex, fast-paced environment.

• 7+ years of direct people management experience, including experience managing people managers or Associate Director-level leaders.

• Advanced knowledge of project management methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, Lean) and enterprise portfolio tooling (e.g., Smartsheet, Jira, Asana).

• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise-wide cross-functional initiatives involving Product, Engineering, Finance, Operations, and Sales.

• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple complex initiatives simultaneously, maintain attention to high-volume details, reprioritize when conditions change, and communicate missed details or emerging risks early with a clear recovery plan.

• Demonstrated strength in executive communication, facilitation, decision framing, and concise written documentation, including presenting problems with options and recommendations rather than escalating problems without a path forward.

• PMP, Lean Six Sigma, Agile CSM, or equivalent project management certification.

Preferred Education and Experience

• Master’s Degree or MBA preferred.

• Experience in EdTech, K–12 education, digital production, or content development ecosystems.

• Proven experience managing large-scale contractor/field-service hiring, onboarding, or scheduling operations.

• Experience integrating project management workflows with CRM and enterprise platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Gainsight).

Individuals who are successful in this role are

• Strategic Portfolio Thinkers: Exceptional capacity to step back from tactical details to align delivery roadmaps with executive business goals.

• Systems & Process Architects: Skilled at spotting friction points, codifying processes, and driving continuous improvement at scale.

• Calm, Decisive Leaders: Able to bring structure and clarity to complex, high-ambiguity environments and rapid organizational changes.

• Master Cross-Functional Influencers: Skilled at building consensus, managing matrixed dependencies, and navigating diverse stakeholder expectations with tact and authority.

• Data-Informed Executives: Rely on objective operational metrics and data analysis to justify strategy and drive accountability.

• Developer of Talent: Passionate about growing and mentoring leaders, fostering psychological safety, and elevating team performance.

• Seeks clarity: Raises red flags early, asks the questions that define the work, and names assumptions to gain alignment.

• Holds the scope: Values the balance of the teams’ capacity, makes trade-offs explicit, and responds to pressure with options, judgment, and transparent renegotiation rather than silent overcommitment.

• Documents transparently: Builds documentation, decision records, ownership, and handoffs that allow work to outlive the people who initiated it and enable others to execute without unnecessary dependency.

The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The company makes employment decisions based on qualifications and merit, and does not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability status, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic or status.

The company is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities, including disabled veterans. If you have a disability and need an accommodation in connection with the application or hiring process, please email [link for members]

If you are selected for employment, a background check will be required. As required by state and local laws and district policies, you may be required to provide additional documentation, such as proof of vaccination, or submit to enhanced background screening, such as fingerprinting.

The company is an E-Verify participant.