Senior Program Manager - Product Portfolio & Digital Transformation

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 Responsiblities:

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.