Director, Strategic Program & Project Management

Your Opportunity

Director, Strategic Program & Project Management

Your Opportunity:

At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us “challenge the status quo” and transform the financial services industry together. 

We are building a next-generation Product Strategy organization to strengthen how the firm designs, delivers, and monetizes products across Schwab’s brokerage, Schwab Bank and Schwab Asset Management. This effort will establish a more integrated and disciplined approach to product strategy, execution, and performance management—enhancing our ability to bring innovative offerings to market, optimize product economics, and scale efficiently across the enterprise. The organization will introduce clearer product ownership, stronger alignment across business units, and more consistent operating processes to accelerate growth, improve client outcomes, and position the firm for long-term competitiveness in an evolving financial landscape

Our strategy is grounded in our company’s “Through Clients’ Eyes” approach, placing our clients at the forefront of everything we do, ensuring alignment and prioritization of our work and delivering an unmatched service experience by leveraging Schwab’s longstanding leadership in the marketplace. 

Reporting to the Managing Director (MD), Product Strategy & Operations, this newly created position serves as a senior member of the Product Strategy operating team responsible for driving strategic initiatives, enabling cross-functional alignment, and supporting execution of the firm’s product agenda.

As the Director of Program & Project Management, you will play a pivotal role in shaping this function. This is a highly visible leadership position responsible for cross enterprise-grade project management practices, developing structured intake processes and ensuring key initiatives are delivered on time, within scope with a high standard of quality. You will partner closely with leaders across Schwab, strategy, product management and client service transformation to ensure alignment, accountability and measurable business impact.

Strategic Execution Support:

• Lead complex and strategic cross divisional initiatives in partnership with front to back business teams including product, design, engineering and operations teams
• Recognize, report, and escalate project risks to senior partners; oversee remediation of risks raised
• Provide transparency and progress of projects, issues, timelines, and budgets by running governance forums with senior leadership
• Identify and remove impediments at program level, leveraging stakeholders, sponsorship, and other relationships to do so
• Work with product owners to build the strategic vision and forward-looking roadmap and refine the backlog of demand, while balancing competing priorities.
• Define quality assurance and testing approaches, provide coaching to the team on testing best practices and develop migration strategies for post testing
• Define and implement PMO standards, tools, and methodologies to ensure consistency, transparency, and accountability across all projects
• Build a project intake and governance process to ensure that resources are aligned to strategic priorities.
• Partner with leaders across SIPPS, WAS, Retail, Technology, Product Management and Operations to ensure seamless execution and alignment of initiatives.
• Build your team! Hire, mentor and lead a high-performing team of project and program managers. Foster a culture of engagement, collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Establish KPIs and dashboards to track progress, measure success, and report to executive leadership on project portfolio performance.
• Champion change management and promote adoption of new processes, tools, and governance models throughout the organization.
• Proactively identify and mitigate project risks, ensuring delivery milestones are met and business outcomes are achieved.

What you have

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in project and program management.
• Deep understanding of project management methodologies (e.g., Agile, Waterfall, Hybrid) and industry best practices.
• Ability to make significant progress with minimal direction and to make decisions, pivot, and structure pathways forward in the face of ambiguity
• Strong leadership and interpersonal skills with the ability to influence and drive alignment across diverse stakeholder groups.
• Inspiring people leader with track record of empowering and actively fostering the growth and development of individuals.
• Ability to identify talent, recruit, hire, and build high performing teams.
• Demonstrated experience in transforming project intake, governance, and portfolio management processes.
• Excellent organizational, analytical, and communication skills.
• Ability to distill complex information for business partners and communicate effectively at an executive level
• Bachelor’s degree required. Advanced degree (MBA or related field) preferred.

We believe in the importance of in-office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s).