Principal Program Manager

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally. 

• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

The Business Operations team helps guide and articulate technology strategy and research, and is responsible for driving the day-to-day operation of the Product & Technology organization, including: project and portfolio management and tracking; organization-level capital, space, and resource management and allocation; process management; technical incident management; and our administrative and workplace experience support team.

Job Summary:

The person in this role will own and operationalize the program structure for Big Rock planning across the organization. While Technical Program Managers (TPMs) within each Alliance are already leading the execution of these efforts, this role will focus on enabling and supporting those TPMs by establishing a standardized operational framework, including processes, tooling, and documentation to ensure Big Rocks can be scoped, sized, and handed off efficiently and consistently across teams.

This individual will drive the full lifecycle of Big Rock planning, from strategic intake through execution readiness, ensuring that initiatives are clearly defined, aligned to strategic goals, and traceable to business outcomes. By creating repeatable planning and intake frameworks, they will enhance organizational clarity, improve cross-functional coordination, and connect long-term strategy to near-term delivery in a scalable way.

A key focus of this role is partnering with Product Managers and TPMs across Alliances (e.g., Streaming, CDI, MPA, Ads) to support the upfront planning, intake, and scoping of Big Rocks, while laying the groundwork for smooth and consistent handoff into delivery phases. This includes operationalizing standards for documentation, tooling (e.g., Airtable, JIRA, Google Suite), and governance across the Cross-Alliance Program portfolio.

This position is critical to scaling how Big Rocks are structured and managed across the organization, especially as top-priority work increasingly spans multiple Alliances and Fleets. It will serve as the connective tissue between strategy and execution, enabling TPMs to focus on delivery while ensuring a strong, repeatable foundation is in place to support successful execution over time.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Establish and operationalize a standardized framework for planning, documenting, and scoping Big Rocks across DEEPT, including intake processes, milestone definitions, estimation practices, and handoff readiness criteria.

• Partner closely with TPMs across Alliances (Streaming, CDI, MPA, Ads, etc.) to support upfront planning and definition of Big Rocks, ensuring strategic intent is translated into clearly scoped and structured bodies of work (e.g., L2s, L3s, L4s).

• Develop and maintain tooling and documentation standards in Airtable, JIRA, and Google to support structured planning, estimation, and roadmap visibility.

• Coordinate and facilitate alignment across Product, Engineering, Design, TPM, and Ops to ensure a shared understanding of scope, assumptions, and deliverable expectations during the preparation and idea phases for overall product discovery.

• Track and communicate changes in scope or planning assumptions that impact delivery timelines, while maintaining executive visibility into alignment between OKRs and delivery plans.

• Ensure that all involved parties understand and accept their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable to their deliverables. 

• Strong understanding of all program domain technical components, including architecture, tools and deployment practices that development team is employing, including cross-system interactions and dependencies. 

• Independently manage activities and resolve conflict within associated teams, with minimal influence from management.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, communications or a related field.

• 10+ years of experience in program or product management and operations, strategic planning, or cross-functional program delivery in a technology or media environment.

• Proven experience building and scaling operational frameworks and planning processes.

• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities across complex, matrixed teams.

• Proficiency with tools such as Airtable, JIRA, Confluence, Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides), Excel.

• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across diverse stakeholder groups.

• Excellent communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to distill complexity and synthesize plans for executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in a product-led organization, particularly with scaled agile or OKR-driven planning environments.

• Familiarity with technical project management and delivery life cycles.

• Experience in strategic initiative planning and financial tracking (e.g., CAR/CER funding processes).

• High attention to detail with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving clarity in fast-paced, evolving environments.

The hiring range for this position in New York or Seattle is $175,800 to $235,700 per year and in Los Angeles is $167,700 to $224,900 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.