About us:

At Cisco Meraki, we know that technology can connect us, empower us, and drive us. By simplifying powerful technology we can free passionate people to focus on their mission. As the fastest growing cloud-managed networking team in the world, our products and technology architecture are changing the face of enterprise networking and making cloud-managed IT a reality.

Cisco Meraki’s Support group is a growing, global, and diverse team of highly knowledgeable and empathetic customer advisors. We strive to guide our customers to successful outcomes with a mix of strategic thinking and the grit to execute the next best action.

About the role:

• Cisco Meraki is looking for a purposeful, well-organized, and influential teammate to supercharge the strategy and execution of our world-class support organization.
• You will be the first Program Manager to join Support and you’ll have the opportunity to both design and build out our program and project management lifecycle. Additionally, we want you to exemplify the mold for our future project management hires.
• Along the way, we want your help to prioritize and execute the projects that will shape the future of our Support organization with a direct line to the senior leadership team.
• A typical work week might consist of providing overall program and specific project health reports to senior management, meeting with project partners to drive deliverables and solicit feedback, investigating program-level process/tooling improvements, and working closely with our software development team to uncover challenges.

Primary responsibilities40% Program Development Work

• Design an overall, beginning-to-end project lifecycle for high-severity Support initiatives (e.g. initiation, planning, execution, etc.)
• Define the charter template and intake processes for new projects
• Set metrics for both our overall program and individual projects to assess performance and improve our return on investment
• Lead the annual and quarterly strategic project planning efforts (we use OKRs)
• Establish an economics-based approach to project prioritization and strategically know when/how to say “no”
• Craft a source of truth for project status and deliver executive briefings to update senior leaders on Support’s overall program and specific projects
• Work cross-functionally with our Support, Product Management, Operations, Sales, Business Systems, and Engineering teams and their associated roadmaps
• Help to define our future Project Manager hiring plans as we expand our use of project management methodologies in more of Support’s initiatives

40% Strategic Project Work

• Join forces alongside our software development team’s sprint ceremonies
• Divide complex projects into manageable parts and devise delivery plans
• Unleash creativity and resolve in the face of ambiguity and/or constraints
• Employ superb written and meeting skills to quickly resolve discovered issues or perceived bottlenecks
• Be the source of truth for project status and work to make overall progress (or lack thereof) transparent
• Drive project stakeholder engagement and accountability by facilitating user story generation, collecting feedback, and sprint-aligned demos/reviews
• Plan for “Day 2” support and the related bugs/feature requests

20% Professional development

• Stay well-versed in the latest theory and best practices in the project/program/product management
• Find the intersection between your personal development interests and our business needs to identify side projects

Preferred qualifications:

• Proven examples of project management work spanning teams (Product, UX, Support, Engineering, etc.) to deliver features and/or products
• Presentation, meeting planning, and communication experience across various audiences (in-team, cross-team, executive, etc.)
• Experience with current software development lifecycles and practices
• Agile methodologies (Scaled Agile, etc.), continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD)
• Expertise in project management tooling and workflows (Jira, Wrike, etc.)
• Project delivery experience with Support or Service organizations
• Required: customer relationship management (CRM) software (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, etc.)
• Nice-to-have: documentation, help pages/portals, UX design, workforce management
• Strategic planning experience using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and related tools (e.g. Workboard)
• Relevant project management certifications (e.g. Project Management Professional, Certified ScrumMaster, etc.)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related technical field.

Cisco is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, genetic information, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis. Cisco will consider for employment, on a case by case basis, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

At Cisco Meraki, we don't just accept difference - it's one of our key values. Everybody In means we listen to each other's opinions. Everybody is accepted and valued here, and we are a team that works as one towards our goals. We recognize that diverse teams make the strongest teams, and we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.