This job might no longer be available.

Associate Director, Project Planning

Team Name:

Job Title:

Requisition ID:

Job Description:

Associate Director, Project Planning

Team: Battle.net & Online Products, Operations

Location: Irvine, CA; Austin, Tx; Remote

Hiring Manager: Melissa Meyer

The Battle.net & Online Products (B&OP) organization is home to 300+ engineers, product managers, and designers focused on the technology that powers Blizzard Entertainment’s games. Whether you’re playing one of our titles, chatting with friends, or just shopping online, B&OP ensures that our players are immersed in engaging, exciting, and secure experiences. B&OP is responsible for several platform products that are shared among all of Blizzard’s games.

We are looking for an Associate Director of Project Planning to lead the Delivery Team within B&OP.

In this role, you will lead and execute planning processes and support initiatives for the Battle.net organization, and will build partnerships with key stakeholders (engineers, product managers, etc) to plan, execute, deliver, and report consolidated results to Senior Leadership.

You will act as a champion for continuous improvement while architecting world class processes and tools that maximize the efficiency, predictability, and visibility of our development teams. You will establish and build strong relationships between partner teams; drive key strategic initiatives from initiation to launch across B&OP and dependent teams; and act as a champion for continuous improvement while working to maximize the efficiency, predictability, and visibility of our projects.

You are a seasoned technical partner with prior experience with large scale compliance initiatives, a passion for building great experiences, and the ability to create successful partnerships across organizations.

You have experience managing multiple product development teams through all aspects of the product lifecycle including planning, implementation, testing, release, and operations. By blending your project management experience with superior collaboration and alignment skills, you will empower a department of hundreds of Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers to create epic entertainment experiences.

This role reports to the Sr. Director, Operations of Battle.net & Online Products group.

Responsibilities:

• Build and Lead a Healthy & Effective Team of Project Managers: Hire, coach, motivate and inspire a team of project managers; creating an environment that promotes positive communication, collaboration, curiosity, and growth.
• Nurture a Healthy Development Environment: Utilize work systems that support effective, balanced, sustainable work while improving project predictability, individual and team agency, and product innovation. Champion efforts, activities and projects that build trust and collaboration within the organization. In partnership with leadership and HR, continually re-assess the team’s maturity and health.
• Shape Product Strategy: Understand and facilitate the use of financial metrics, ROI, revenue potential and opportunities across the B&OP products and services to determine priorities and impact. Utilize industry expertise to generate ideas for new products or services. Remain up to date on research, market environment, industry trends, and technologies relating to the product. Look for ways to increase the profitability of efficiency of existing products. Review and utilize metrics reporting for fact-based decision making.
• Ambassador for the platform: Develop and maintain a strong understanding of Battle.net features, capabilities, current integration pain points, and best practices in order to provide strong proactive guidance to technical personnel responsible for integration. This person is going to need to be able to empathize with teams implementing our tech across the entire gaming hardware landscape (PC, Mac, Playstation, Xbox, Switch, iOS, Android space).
• Manage Complexity: Provide regular communication (cross- and intradepartmental, internal/external, and cross-hierarchy) to ensure transparency and progress of projects. Cut through the ambiguity to identify the core issues (both procedurally and technically).
• Accelerate the Process: Communicate dates, capacity, metrics/results, and prioritization to make sure we are executing on high profile deliverables. Negotiate agreements that meet critical development and launch deadlines while maintaining positive relationships. Focuses on delivery while keeping a vision to create a repeatable process.
• Drive Large Cross-Department Programs: Partner with colleagues on cross-discipline teams to bring together a unified deliverable. Develop and control deadlines, budgets, and activities associated with the program. Apply change, risk and resource management. Assess program performance and aims to maximize ROI. Resolve projects’ higher scope issues. Keep leadership and stakeholders appraised of the initiative status.
• Develop Work Systems & Drives Change: Work with a mindset of continuous improvement that uses data and retrospectives to guide our future processes. Identify gaps, inconsistencies and inefficiencies in our existing processes and tooling. Leverage creativity and problem solving to define new processes and tools that address identified opportunities. Build consensus and drive consistent adoption of new processes and tooling across the organization. Root out problems and risks, raises concerns, challenges convention, and inspires people to move in new directions.

Requirements

• Strong interpersonal skills, a love for collaboration, and a commitment to cultivating a healthy development environment
• Proven experience managing end-to-end releases of a well-known software product
• Previous experience leading project planning for large (300+) development teams; managing and coaching agile-at-scale; and developing department-level roadmaps
• Detailed knowledge of software lifecycle; software development best practices; project management methodologies (Agile, Lean, & Waterfall) and release management methodologies
• Previous experience managing teams of project managers
• Strong communication and executive-level presentation skills
• Self-driven, with the ability to deliver on ambiguous projects with incomplete data
• Seeks out opportunities for improvement on a continuous basis
• High attention to detail and project management rigor with an emphasis towards measurement

Blizzard Entertainment is a global company committed to growing our employees along with the business. We offer generous benefits and perks with an eye on providing true work / life balance. We’ve worked hard to foster an intensely collaborative and creative environment, a diverse and inclusive employee culture, and training and opportunity for professional growth. Our people are everything. Our core values are real, and our mission has never changed. We are dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences…ever. Join us!