Program Manager, PDLC

About the Role

Vasion is adopting a Product Development Life Cycle, a cross-company operating model designed to bring just enough structure to how we build and ship software. As a Program Manager on the PDLC team, you will be one of the people who makes it real. This is not a coordination role. You will not be tracking status and scheduling syncs. You will be embedded across engineering and product management teams as a practitioner, coach, and change agent helping teams not just follow the PDLC, but understand it, trust it, and work inside it naturally. You will split your time between two things: operating the PDLC across active programs day-to-day, and helping build and improve the framework itself. Your perspective from inside the teams will actively shape how the system evolves. Vasion's engineering organization is also moving toward agent-native development, which means genuine curiosity about AI is part of the job.

Responsibilities

• Operate as an embedded PDLC practitioner, modeling the framework and helping cross-functional partners understand why it exists and how to use it
• Coach engineering and product management team members on PDLC practices by meeting them where they are, not where the playbook says they should be
• Build trust through consistency, follow-through, and genuine partnership, not process authority
• Communicate the value of the PDLC to engineering clearly and often: reduced context-switching, clearer scope handoffs, fewer rebuilds, better predictability
• Partner with the VP of PgM to build, document, and refine processes, templates, stage gate criteria, and governance standards
• Develop and maintain playbooks and documentation that make the PDLC accessible across Product Management and Engineering
• Translate on-the-ground experience into framework improvements
• Own the full lifecycle of assigned programs from Discovery through Grow: scope, timelines, milestones, dependencies, and deliverables at every stage
• Build program plans that give Product Management, Engineering, Design, QA, and Go-to-Market a shared view of what is happening, what is next, and who owns what
• Stay ahead of risks and blockers; bring well-reasoned options to the VP before problems compound
• Facilitate kick-offs, stage gate reviews, cross-functional syncs, and retrospectives to drive clear outcomes and documented next steps every time
• Serve as the day-to-day coordination point between Product Management, Engineering, Design, QA, and Go-to-Market for programs in your portfolio
• Surface and resolve cross-team misalignments and dependency conflicts before they impact delivery
• Maintain accurate, up-to-date program documentation throughout the full lifecycle
• Treat documentation as a core part of program quality in order to make programs reproducible, learnable, and increasingly agent-ready

Requirements

• 5-8 years of program management experience in software, at the program level across multiple teams
• Cross-functional programs through multiple phases of a product or software development lifecycle
• Embedded directly within engineering and/or product management teams, not a centralized PMO
• Participated in or drove a process or operating model change
• Fluency with Atlassian (Jira/Confluence), Notion, and/or Adobe Workfront
• B2B SaaS or enterprise experience