Associate Program Director

Full Time
Toronto
10 months ago

As an Associate Program Director, you are a creative and strategic thinker who loves learning everything there is to know about a client’s brand, business, and customer. You have experience leading multidisciplinary teams, and integrating with agency partners to develop, implement and manage integrated processes, and project trackers.  Experience with media and data sciences is an asset. You know what it takes to deliver a digital experience that can improve the lives of customers while surpassing the goals of clients. Being a reliable partner to teams helps you consistently elevate the work.

Both the client services and project delivery worlds are successfully navigated by your proactive communication of project statuses, challenges, and opportunities to clients. You adeptly manage the project team tracking scope, schedule, staffing, and budget on medium to large sized projects to support a team of Project Managers. You have a passion for digital project delivery and the globally admired brands we partner with.

You will:

  • Manage Client Relations by...
    • Acting as a primary contact of communicating needs between the client, team, and agency partners.
    • Understanding your client’s short and long-term goals, as well as their competition.
    • Proactively communicating with clients on project status, issues, and opportunities.
    • Informing clients how to drive project success.
    • Delivering solutions to drive consensus for problems in a professional and timely manner.
    • Identifying additional opportunities within the ask or account.
    • Integrating with the various agency partners to deliver integrated advertising campaigns on time and on budget.
  • Ensure Program Excellence by...
    • Supporting developing solutions to drive client business.
    • Maintaining a unique perspective of a common goal to increase knowledge, communication, and awareness between team members and the client.
    • Approaching problems in a calm and logical manner, finding creative solutions to problems.
    • Communicating and understanding large amounts of information in a highly organized manner.
    • Effectively communicating stories across a variety of internal and external stakeholders.
    • Encouraging high standards of professionalism throughout the life of a project.
    • Ensuring the team is properly briefed and understands the requirements of the project/work.
    • Creating solid project plans with top-down and bottom-up budgets to support clients’ the agency teams’ interests.
    • Developing, implementing, and monitoring consolidated and integrated processes and project tracking with agency media partner.
    • Executing project plans according to established procedures, channels, and expectations.
    • Managing and maintaining project scopes and communicating status of scope to team.
    • Facilitating and being a participant in both client and internal meetings.
    • Coordinating project deliverables and guiding the team on potential risks.
    • Creating an articulate storyline of all client materials.
    • Defining, negotiating, communicating, implementing, and monitoring quality standards on all project deliverables
    • Managing project communication and document issues and changes that affect the project.
    • Developing integrated agency status reports and work with project leaders to ensure all resources.
    • Creating a positive, team-oriented environment that demonstrates award-winning work.
    • Forecasting, tracking, and managing project budgets and revenue, POs and invoices.
    • Identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, mitigating, and communicating project and program risks.
    • Working with discipline leads to define appropriate resources for client needs and deliverables.
  • Drive Account Planning and Operations by...
    • Contributing to account road map development that will allow for solid resources and revenue management, looking at all projects being tied into the larger account picture.
    • Acting as a career manager and provide project delivery guidance, mentoring, and training
    • Contributing to process and people evolution to effectively deliver solutions

You have:

  • 7-10 years-experience managing a variety of digital project types; integrated digital advertising campaigns, performance marketing, media or marketing science programs.
  • Experience with office productivity tools such as Excel, Word, Google Sheets, Box, Smartsheets, and Sharepoint
  • Experience with collaboration and issue tracking tools such as Box, Jira and Confluence.
  • Experience guiding teams and conversations with clients around scope, schedule, and budget as well as roadmaps, goals, and strategies.
  • Strong ability to manage and control project scope, schedule, budget and resource management / reporting and change management, project roadmap development and revenue forecasting.
  • Advanced knowledge of Program Management principles, methods, and techniques.
  • Ability to tactically organize and structure activities, paying particular attention to detail.
  • Demonstrated problem-solving, communication, presentation, facilitation and negotiation skills, which translate issues into viable work solutions.
  • Solutions-oriented mindset with refined decision-making skills.
  • The ability to stay focused on the driving goals, even in high-pressure situations.
  • Ownership and accountability of clients’ business needs and ability to drive to solutions.

What We Offer:

  • Global maternity and parental leave
  • Competitive benefits packages
  • Vacation, compassionate leave, sick days, and flex days
  • Access to online services for families and new parents
  • Winter holiday office closures
  • Summer Fridays (off at 3:00 PM local time every Friday)
  • Diversity and Inclusion Board with 12 affinity groups
  • Internal learning and development programs
  • Enterprise-wide employee discounts

At Critical Mass, we value our employees and offer competitive compensation and benefits packages.  If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding opportunity to make a significant impact on the lives of our employees, we encourage you to apply for this exciting position today!

The Talent Team at Critical Mass is focused on ensuring we provide the best training, onboarding, and employee experience possible! Our new hires & employees are the future of our organization, and we want to set you up for long-term success. In an effort to do so, we expect our team to work from an office a minimum of 4 days a week. The ask stems from our want to:

  • Strengthen opportunity for continuous learning
  • Improve collaboration and team relationships
  • Increase employee engagement

This work model balances the need for individual flexibility while maintaining the relentless customer focus we provide at CM. We understand that not everyone may feel comfortable with this expectation, so we ask that you please let us know immediately if there are any concerns so we can help navigate accordingly.

Critical Mass is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We do not tolerate discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. If you are an individual with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please reach out to accommodations@criticalmass.com.

We are committed to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within our pool of candidates, with a target of achieving at least 50% representation from underrepresented communities.

The Critical Mass Talent Acquisition team will only communicate from email addresses that use the URLs criticalmass.com and us.greenhouse-mail.io. We will not use apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Google Hangouts for communicating with you. We will never ask you to send us money, technology, or anything else to work for our company. If you believe you are the victim of a scam, please review your local government consumer protections guidance and reach out to them directly.

If U.S. based: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams#avoidIf Canada based: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/finance/consumer-affairs.htmlIf U.K. based: https://www.gov.uk/consumer-protection-rightsIf Costa Rica based: https://www.consumo.go.cr/educacion_consumidor/consejos_practicos.aspx