Job Description
Technical Program Manager
Location: United States, Remote
Discover Your Possibilities at CARS
Here at CARS, we are constantly developing technology that innovates how customers and dealers buy and sell their vehicles. In 1998, we invented the car search with Cars.com and revolutionized the way the industry does business. Now, we bring that same boldness, energy, and drive to optimizing solutions across our brands every single day. We are constantly creating new possibilities, traversing uncharted routes and welcoming challenges along the way.
No one ever travels alone here: at its core, CARS is collaboration. Whether it is within individual teams, across departments, or the company at large, our employees support one another across every dimension of life at CARS. We operate as a collective, utilizing all of our diverse strengths to approach problems from every single angle, united by our award-winning company culture and our mission to make car shopping the best experience possible.
As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we’re obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared Best of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.
CARS includes the following brands: Cars.com, Dealer Inspire, DealerRater, FUEL, CreditIQ & Accu-Trade. Learn more here!
About the Position:
Dealer Inspire is a certified provider of multiple products and services within many automotive OEM programs. These certifications allow for franchise dealer enrollments and contribute significantly to the market penetration of products and revenue generated. The role of Technical Program Manager is a vital contributor towards the successful management of work to maintain these OEM program affiliations.
The Technical Program Manager will work in direct relationships with OEM clients to manage the work request pipeline, facilitate discovery sessions, triage new work, and troubleshoot issues. This role will be the technical point of contact and will collaborate and interact closely with an OEM Program Manager to service the program’s needs. The Technical Program Manager will also coordinate and build strong relationships with internal technical teams executing the work pipeline, ensuring the successful implementation and high-quality delivery of tasks.
OEM program pipelines include both routine maintenance efforts as well as the introduction of more complex integrations and large-scale projects requiring the Technical Program Manager to set expectations, establish priority, understand desired outcomes and manage a project plan and roadmap to ensure smooth execution.
The primary goals of the Technical Program Manager are to capture and execute OEM program tasks with consideration towards overall program health, service level agreements, and program priorities balanced against internal operating costs, business objectives, and other priorities. The ideal candidate is a self-starter with excellent communication and organizational skills, the ability to build strong relationships and influence decision makers, apply a high level of business acumen and client management, and can demonstrate the technical skills needed to understand the scope of complex projects.
Essential Job Functions:
- Manage task intake from OEM clients including triaging requests, leading scope gathering exercises, capturing desired outcomes, defining a budget, and setting clear expectations.
- Work with cross-functional teams to further refine scope, assign resources, create project plans, and timeline for larger tasks. Understand the dependencies that exist between teams.
- Maintain oversight into all routine maintenance and support tasks for assigned programs. Monitor process from backlog through delivery, focused on the prioritization, timeliness, and quality of work delivered against established SLAs. Able to utilize the appropriate SDLC process given the timeline, scale, and complexity of a project.
- Responsible for communicating updates and maintaining accurate status assessments on project progress to OEM clients and internal business stakeholders.
- Establish close working relationships with technical counterparts within the OEM program in order to streamline communication, remove obstacles, and keep a short feedback loop.
- Thorough understanding of products provided within the programs with ability to handle basic troubleshooting, ability to execute routine tasks and user activities, as well as knowledge of goals and roadmap of each product.
- Stay informed of product enhancements with attention to how they may be leveraged and brought to market for the advancement of an OEM program.
- Lead the delivery of new program enhancements and integrations, working with cross-functional teams, across all units in a program.
- Escalate prioritization conflicts or capacity issues to leadership providing analysis of risks and key considerations.
- Routinely review stakeholder and team feedback to improve processes.
- Accountable to track and understand the technical cost to serve the OEM program and have oversight of total resource hours spent against contracted allotments within the program. Prepares statements of work for and additional or out-of-scope projects outside of these allotments.
- Positively impacts OEM program health scores and satisfaction with particular emphasis on communication, execution, and quality.
Required Skills and Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer sciences, software engineering, tech management, business management, project management, or similar fields or practical field experience.
- 3-5 years of experience in program, product, or project management or similar roles.
- Experiencing managing executive level or high value accounts with excellent presentation, communication, and interpersonal skills.
- Ability to understand technical tasks in a variety of software applications, tech stacks, and systems with extensive experience collaborating with software development teams.
- Understanding of product lifecycle development, Agile, and other SDLC methodologies.
- Fast learner with a curious attitude and strong problem solving skills.
