Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Director of Program Management role stands out in the SaaS ecosystem because it sits at the operating layer between product strategy and engineering execution. Gong is describing a need for centralized program leadership across product pillars, which typically emerges as a SaaS product footprint expands and cross-team dependencies become harder to manage through informal coordination alone.
For a SaaS career, the value is in building repeatable systems that make delivery predictable across multiple teams and long-running initiatives. The remit touches portfolio visibility, release readiness, and decision support for senior leaders, all of which are core muscles in mature SaaS product organizations. Experience shaping planning cadences, risk escalation paths, and shared standards tends to transfer well across SaaS companies where product complexity and stakeholder surfaces increase over time.
This role fits a leader who prefers clarity, measurement, and operational rigor over ad hoc problem solving. It will suit someone who enjoys coaching other program managers while also acting as a peer to Product and Engineering leadership, influencing outcomes without relying on direct authority. Comfort navigating ambiguity, surfacing tradeoffs early, and maintaining a reliable “source of truth” is central to the mandate.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
We’re looking for a Director of Program Management to build and lead a centralized Program Management team aligned to Gong’s product and engineering divisions and pillars.
This team is the execution layer of Gong’s Product & Engineering Operating Engine. Its mission is to drive complex, cross-team and long-running initiatives to completion, create predictable delivery across product pillars, and ensure initiative health, dependencies, risks, decisions, and release readiness are managed with operational rigor.
In this role, you will lead the Program Management team as both a people leader and a functional leader: coaching and developing PMs, setting the bar for execution excellence, building scalable methodologies, and partnering closely with Product and Engineering leadership to move strategic initiatives from intent to measurable outcomes.
You’ll Own:
- jkldTeam Leadership: Lead, coach, and develop a centralized Program Management team, setting clear expectations, building functional standards, and raising the bar for execution excellence across Product and Engineering.
- Program Management Methodology: Build and continuously improve Gong’s program management methodologies, tools, templates, and operating standards, including planning frameworks, milestone tracking, dependency management, risk escalation, status reporting, and execution cadences.
- Strategic Program Delivery: Drive cross-team and long-running initiatives to completion, ensuring clear ownership, disciplined execution, timely decisions, and strong follow-through across teams.
- Portfolio Visibility & Release Readiness: Maintain a clear source of truth for program health, blockers, risks, owners, timelines, and delivery confidence, while owning sequencing and readiness coordination for multi-team releases.
You’ll Solve:
- Execution Complexity: Ensure cross-team initiatives move with clarity, accountability, and pace as Gong’s product surface area grows.
- Late-Surfacing Dependencies: Identify dependencies, risks, and ownership gaps early enough to prevent avoidable delivery delays.
- Time-to-Market Variability: Make delivery timelines more predictable across initiatives with varying levels of complexity, urgency, and cross-functional involvement.
- Leadership Signal Flow: Ensure execution risks, blockers, and tradeoffs are visible early and translated into timely leadership decisions.
You’ll Impact:
- Predictable Delivery: Improve Gong’s ability to deliver complex, cross-team initiatives with greater consistency, confidence, and speed.
- Execution Quality: Raise the bar for planning, dependency management, release readiness, and follow-through across Product and Engineering.
- Leadership Confidence: Give Product and Engineering leaders a clear, reliable view of program health, risks, decisions, and delivery commitments.
- Team Leverage: Build a high-performing Program Management function that enables teams to move faster without sacrificing quality, accountability, or alignment.
How You’ll Succeed Here
- An Experienced Program Management Leader: A senior leader with 10+ years in technical program / project management in SaaS, product, R&D, or complex technology environments.
- A Strong People Manager: Someone with 5+ years of experience managing Program or Project Managers, with a proven ability to coach, develop, and elevate team performance..
- A Functional Builder: Someone who has built or scaled program management methodologies, tools, templates, cadences, and standards in a fast-moving Product and Engineering organization.
- A Cross-Functional Driver: Someone with proven success delivering large-scale, cross-functional initiatives across Product, Engineering, Design, Infrastructure, Security, Support, and GTM stakeholders.
- An Executive Communicator: Someone who can translate complex program details into clear, decision-ready updates, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations for senior leadership.
- A Collaborative Peer: Most importantly, a person who enjoys working closely with exceptionally strong peers and can influence senior stakeholders without direct authority.
We operate in a flexible hybrid work model.
What makes the Product & Engineering Operations function at Gong unique?
Here at Gong, we trust and empower our employees with ownership to solve complex problems, make the right decisions, and build the best products that create a radical impact. We call this “Own. Solve. Impact.”
This is an opportunity to build the operating system for how Product and Engineering work at scale — creating the structure, standards, tools, and rhythms that help teams move faster, make better decisions, and deliver measurable outcomes. If you’re excited to build clarity without bureaucracy and use AI and technology to improve how modern teams work, we’d love to meet you!
We encourage our employees to express their personality and identity (whether gender, ethnic, religious, or sexual), and we ensure fairness and equal opportunities. We follow a hybrid working model that combines working from home, on the go, or at the office. This allows us: flexibility, autonomy, positive work relationships, and effective work habits. If these considerations are important to you when c#LI-TD1hoosing a workplace, we'd love to see you with us. To review Gong's privacy policy, visit www.gong.io/privacy-policy/ for more details.
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