Principal Program Manager

Location:

Condé Nast is a global media company, home to iconic brands including Vogue, GQ, Glamour, AD, Vanity Fair and Wired, among many others. Our award-winning content reaches 84 million consumers in print, 367 million in digital and 379 million across social platforms, and generates more than 1 billion video views each month.

As we move to smaller, more autonomous Product and Engineering teams aligned to brands and core platforms, delivery ownership sits directly within those teams. In this model, Program no longer acts as a coordination layer. Instead, it becomes a strategic function focused on ensuring that our most complex, high-impact initiatives are structured, aligned, and deliver real outcomes.

This is the most senior individual contributor role in Program Management, equivalent to Director level, focused on leading the organisation’s most complex and strategically important transformation work.

You will act as a strategic partner to Product, Engineering, and Business leadership, leading the initiatives where complexity, scale, and cross-domain dependencies require deliberate orchestration.

These are not incremental efforts. They are the programs that shape how we evolve as a company, including platform modernisation, data and AI transformation, and product or technical strategy shifts that cut across multiple domains.

Your accountability is not simply to ensure delivery. It is to ensure that what we build works in practice, that business and technical change land together, that teams are aligned in how they execute, and that the outcomes we are aiming for are realised.

In the absence of a formal Product Operations function, you will also play a critical role in shaping how complex work operates across the organisation, stepping in where standard team-level ways of working are insufficient and helping evolve the operating model over time.

You will not manage a team. Your influence comes from clarity of thinking, strength of partnership, and your ability to bring structure to complexity.

• You will personally lead a small number of the organisation’s most critical programs, such as

• A cross-domain program to realise reduced investment in non-differentiating capabilities, shifting away from building commodity technologies and toward leveraging best-in-class solutions while focusing internal effort on areas that create distinct value

• A business transformation program, in partnership with the Transformation organisation, to realise technology objectives that will unlock  business transformation goals across Product, Engineering, and the wider enterprise, including the adoption of AI-enabled ways of working

• These programs are central to our strategy. Your role is to ensure they are not only ambitious, but executable, adopted, and impactful.

• At this level, your role is to make complex work possible, not by managing from a distance, but by being actively engaged where it matters most. You will operate both strategically and hands-on. You will shape direction, structure, and decisions at a senior level, while also working directly within programs to resolve ambiguity, unblock progress, and bring clarity to execution.

You will:

• Work directly within your programs to structure work, resolve dependencies, and address issues as they arise

• Bring clarity where there is ambiguity, aligning teams on sequencing, priorities, and approach

• Step into critical moments to unblock teams and drive progress across domains

• Balance long-term transformation goals with the realities of day-to-day execution

• Stay close enough to the work to understand where plans break down, and adjust accordingly

At the same time, you will operate as a strategic partner:

• Shaping how large initiatives are structured and governed

• Influencing direction across Product, Engineering, and Business leadership

• Ensuring that programs are aligned to real business outcomes

• Challenging decisions where sequencing, architecture, or assumptions are not viable

You will also play a key role in evolving how the organisation works:

• Identifying where coordination overhead, unclear ownership, or misaligned processes are slowing teams down

• Establishing lightweight structures to enable execution where the standard model breaks down

• Applying AI as a core part of how programs are structured, monitored, and improved

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  You are a senior leader comfortable working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and execution.

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  Proven experience leading large-scale, cross-domain transformation programs in complex organisations

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  The ability to structure ambiguous problems and turn them into executable plans

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  Deep understanding of how systems, platforms, and data fit together

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  Experience driving business transformation alongside technology delivery

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  Strong judgment in assessing what will work in practice, not just in theory

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  Confidence to challenge direction when assumptions, sequencing, or plans are not viable

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  You are comfortable operating at executive level, influencing without authority, and working in environments where the path is not always defined.

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  You use AI as part of how you think and work, not as an add-on, but as a core tool for improving clarity, speed, and insight.

As we move to smaller, more autonomous teams, the primary risk shifts from slow delivery to fragmented execution. Without strong program leadership at this level, our most important initiatives will either stall under their own complexity or deliver in ways that do not work in practice. This role ensures that does not happen. It connects business ambition, product direction, and technical execution, ensuring that transformation efforts are structured, aligned, adopted, and deliver real outcomes.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below, and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile.

Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.