Program manager Jobs in Houston, TX

Technical Program Manager

Location: Houston, TX (Hybrid 4 days/week in office & 1 day/ week from home)

The Technical Program Manager will lead cross-functional planning and execution for digital strategy projects, a digital enrollment experience designed to support eligible small and midsized business customers. This role connects business outcomes, customer experience, architecture, engineering, data, compliance, operations, and go-to-market teams to deliver an integrated, reliable, and measurable solution on strict timelines.

Role mandate: Create delivery clarity, maintain a trusted ADO system of record, resolve cross-team ambiguity, and drive committed scope to production-ready outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Program leadership and delivery: Own the integrated program plan across discovery, requirements, design, architecture, development, integration, testing, launch readiness, and post-launch stabilization. Translate strategic goals into milestones, release plans, sprint objectives, decision points, and measurable outcomes.

Azure DevOps (ADO) governance: Administer and continuously improve ADO Boards, including epics, features, PBIs/user stories, tasks, dependencies, risks, technical debt, defects, and release scope. Establish standards for hierarchy, descriptions, acceptance criteria, ownership, estimates, priority, status, and Definition of Done.

Business and technical requirements alignment: Facilitate requirements workshops and convert business needs, customer journeys, regulatory obligations, UX designs, and operational processes into clear technical requirements and sprint-ready backlog items. Maintain traceability from business objective to feature, PBI, test evidence, and release outcome.

Cross-functional orchestration: Coordinate product, UX, front-end, back-end, architecture, platform, data, security, privacy, legal/regulatory, marketing, sales, operations, QA, DevOps, and vendor teams. Clarify roles, decisions, handoffs, integration contracts, and delivery commitments.

Dependency, risk, and issue management: Maintain RAID and dependency logs; identify critical-path constraints early; assign owners and due dates; drive mitigation; and escalate decisions with clear impact, options, and recommendations. Particular attention should be given to environments, APIs, downstream systems, data readiness, compliance, and external team dependencies.

Sprint and release execution: Lead or support backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily coordination, demos, retrospectives, release readiness reviews, and go-live checkpoints. Monitor flow, velocity, rollover, blocked work, defects, and scope changes while protecting committed timelines and quality.

Status, governance, and stakeholder communication: Provide concise, fact-based reporting on scope, schedule, program health, accomplishments, upcoming commitments, risks, decisions, and support needed. Tailor communication for delivery teams, business leaders, and executive stakeholders.

Quality, controls, and operational readiness: Ensure non-functional requirements, testing strategy, security/privacy controls, regulatory traceability, analytics instrumentation, exception handling, support procedures, monitoring, and operational handoffs are included in program planning and acceptance.

Success measurement and continuous improvement: Define baseline and target measures for delivery and product outcomes. Partner with analytics teams to track funnel conversion, abandonment, completion time, submission success/failure, customer support contacts, adoption, margin, deal count, volume, and other approved KPIs. Use insights to prioritize improvements.

Core Deliverables

Integrated roadmap and milestone plan with critical path, releases, and launch-readiness gates.

Well-governed ADO backlog with complete traceability, ownership, prioritization, acceptance criteria, and status hygiene.

Approved business-to-technical requirements mapping and documented scope boundaries.

RAID log, decision log, dependency map, change-control record, and escalation plan.

Sprint, release, and executive status reporting with objective health indicators and recovery actions.

End-to-end test and readiness plan covering functional, integration, performance, security, compliance, analytics, and operational scenarios.

Go-live checklist, stakeholder sign-offs, support model, hypercare plan, and lessons-learned summary.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

7+ years of experience in technical program management, technology delivery, product delivery, or a comparable cross-functional role.

Demonstrated experience delivering customer-facing web applications or digital commerce/enrollment journeys with front-end, back-end, APIs, data, and enterprise-system integrations.

Hands-on proficiency with Azure DevOps Boards and Agile delivery practices, including backlog design, refinement, sprint/release planning, estimation, acceptance criteria, and Definition of Done.

Ability to translate ambiguous business needs into structured technical outcomes and to communicate system dependencies and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Strong record of managing multiple teams, vendors, risks, and dependencies while meeting fixed milestones.

Excellent facilitation, executive communication, documentation, negotiation, problem solving, and decision-driving skills.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in energy, utilities, retail energy, SMB/commercial sales, regulated customer journeys, or digital enrollment.

Experience with CRM, billing, pricing, identity, marketing automation, customer data, analytics, or cloud platforms.

Working knowledge of system architecture, API integration, environment management, observability, data privacy, PII controls, and release governance.

Experience coordinating UX research/wireframes, analytics instrumentation, conversion funnels, A/B testing, and post-launch optimization.

PMP, PgMP, PMI-ACP, Certified Scrum Professional, SAFe, or comparable certification.

Measures of Success

Delivery milestones and strict timeline commitments are met, or recovery plans are initiated before committed dates are at risk.

Backlog items are sprint-ready, traceable, correctly prioritized, and supported by clear acceptance criteria and ownership.

Critical dependencies, decisions, and risks have owners, due dates, and transparent escalation paths.

Business, product, architecture, engineering, compliance, and operations remain aligned on scope and release readiness.

Releases meet agreed quality gates and enable reliable enrollment, clear exception handling, auditable outcomes, and actionable analytics.

Post-launch metrics demonstrate adoption, funnel performance, operational stability, and progress toward approved business outcomes.