Technical Program Manager – Digital Products

 The Technical Program Manager serves as the coordinating force across commercial and consumer-facing technology programs spanning the Restaurant Technology and Digital product teams. Embedded within the Restaurant Technology team and reporting to the VP of Restaurant Technology, this role ensures initiatives—including point-of-sale, digital ordering, customer relationship management, loyalty management, kiosks, promotions, delivery channel integrations, and consumer-facing applications—are delivered in a coordinated, sequenced, and business-aligned manner. This role facilitates cross-team planning, manages program interdependencies and risks, maintains enterprise-wide visibility into commercial technology delivery, and supports technical decision-making across internal engineering and vendor technical teams by surfacing trade-offs and driving alignment on integration approaches and dependencies. This high-visibility role sits at the intersection of technology execution and guest-facing business impact and requires organizational rigor and sufficient technical fluency to keep cross-team technical conversations productive.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Cross-Team Planning & Coordination

• Maintain a unified program calendar across all Restaurant Technology and Digital product workstreams, surfacing timeline conflicts, resource overlaps, and sequencing risks.
• Facilitate recurring cross-team planning sessions with product managers and program managers to align on priorities and dependencies.
• Facilitate technical alignment discussions between internal engineering and vendor technical leads when integration approaches, architecture choices, or system dependencies require resolution; surface trade-offs and drive the group toward a decision or clear escalation path.
• Translate executive priorities from the VP of Restaurant Technology into coordinated action plans distributed across the appropriate product and program owners.

Vendor & Partner Program Coordination

• Coordinate scheduling and preparation for vendor roadmap sessions, sprint reviews, and performance reviews, ensuring the right internal stakeholders are engaged.
• Track vendor delivery commitments across all active programs and flag deviations or risks to the appropriate product manager or program manager.
• Maintain a consolidated vendor activity log across Restaurant Technology and Digital, giving the VP of Restaurant Technology a single view of third-party status.
• Support RFP/RFI processes by coordinating internal inputs, managing review timelines, and ensuring cross-team participation in vendor evaluations.
• Monitor and communicate upcoming vendor release windows, ensuring all impacted teams—including Digital, Operations, and Field Enablement—are informed and prepared.

Stakeholder & Digital Team Alignment

• Serve as the primary coordination point between the Restaurant Technology team and the broader organization, including Digital Product, the CDO organization, PMO, Business Analysts, and other stakeholders, by facilitating joint planning sessions and managing cross-team dependencies.
• Act as the liaison between technology teams and Field Enablement, ensuring training plans, rollout communications, and readiness checklists are developed and tracked for all releases.
• Engage cybersecurity, compliance, and legal stakeholders proactively to ensure all programs maintain appropriate review timelines and approval gates.

Program & Release Coordination

• Own the enterprise technology release calendar, coordinating go/no-go readiness across all active programs and ensuring releases are properly sequenced to minimize operational disruption at the restaurant level.
• Facilitate UAT planning and pilot coordination across workstreams, tracking readiness milestones and communicating status to all stakeholders.
• Produce and distribute release communications to field operations, franchise partners, and internal teams for all technology deployments.
• Track post-release issues across programs and coordinate resolution efforts between the relevant product manager, vendor, and support teams.

Visibility, Reporting & Escalation

• Produce weekly and monthly program status reports for the VP of Restaurant Technology, summarizing progress, risks, blockers, and upcoming milestones across all active workstreams.
• Maintain a consolidated risk and issues log across all Restaurant Technology and Digital programs, tracking escalation status and resolution timelines.
• Contribute program coordination and delivery data to operations intelligence products to support leadership visibility into technology execution.

Qualifications Guidelines:

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, Operations Management, or a related field required; advanced degree preferred.
• 5–7 years of experience in technology program management, preferably supporting commercial, consumer-facing, restaurant, retail, hospitality, or enterprise SaaS technology programs.
• Experience coordinating cross-functional technology initiatives involving product, engineering, business stakeholders, and third-party vendors.
• Familiarity with agile and waterfall delivery methodologies and experience coordinating teams using different development approaches.
• Working knowledge of system integrations, including APIs, webhooks, middleware, and data feeds, sufficient to identify risks and support cross-vendor coordination.
• Experience with restaurant, QSR, fast casual, multi-unit, CRM, digital ordering, loyalty, kiosk, or third-party delivery platforms preferred.

This is a hybrid role. Candidates must be able to commute to the office.

Language Ability: Excellent verbal and written communication skills are required. The successful candidate must be able to produce clear program documentation, status reports, and executive presentations, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences, including software engineers, vendor teams, field operators, and C-suite leaders.

Math Ability: This position requires proficient business math and analytical skills, including the ability to interpret program data, track delivery metrics, and identify trends or risks from consolidated reporting across multiple workstreams.

Reasoning Ability: The position requires strong organizational thinking, the ability to manage complexity across multiple simultaneous programs, and sound judgment in identifying and escalating risks before they become problems. The candidate must be comfortable operating in ambiguity while keeping multiple teams coordinated and moving forward.

Computer Skills: Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite is required. Experience with program and project management tools, such as Jira, Asana, Monday.com, Smartsheet, or similar platforms, road mapping software, and cross-team collaboration platforms is preferred.

Supervisory Responsibilities: This position has no supervisory responsibilities.

Physical Demands: This position is primarily office-based and requires the ability to remain in a stationary position for prolonged periods while using a computer, telephone, and standard office equipment. The position may occasionally require standing, walking, reaching, grasping, handling objects, and lifting or moving up to 20 pounds. Travel to restaurant locations for discovery sessions, pilot testing, and field enablement may be required, with business needs potentially requiring travel up to 25% of the time. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Special Requirements/Certification: PMP, PMI-ACP, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), or equivalent program/project management certification preferred but not required.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow any other instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor, policy, or company management. Work location and onsite attendance requirements will be determined by the company in accordance with company practice and business needs.

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