Director - Enterprise Agility, Product Management & Strategic Portfolio Management

Overview:

This role is responsible for building, scaling, and sustaining three core enterprise capabilities: Enterprise Agility, Product Management, and Strategic Portfolio Management.

The Director is accountable for setting enterprise standards for how work is prioritized, funded, and delivered—and for ensuring those standards are consistently adopted across the Bank. Adoption is achieved through a balanced combination of change management, enablement support, governance, transparent measurement, and executive influence.

The current state is characterized by fragmentation and inconsistent maturity and buy-in, particularly outside of the technology context. This role is designed to drive a step change in enterprise maturity, helping the organization move from pockets of progress to consistent, repeatable ways of working that improve speed, transparency, quality and ultimately business outcomes.

Capability Ownership

The Director defines standards, builds supporting systems, and ensures adoption of the following enterprise capabilities.  In addition the Director builds support and buy-in from critical leaders and teams across the organization.

Enterprise Agility

• Define, govern, and ensure adoption of enterprise-wide standards for organizational agility, including how agility is measured and reinforced across business and support functions.
• Improve end-to-end flow of work across the enterprise by identifying systemic barriers, dependencies, and decision bottlenecks that span teams, functions, and business lines.
• Design and scale enterprise ways of working that clearly define ownership, decision rights, and accountability across complex, federated organizations.
• Partner with senior leaders to modernize governance, funding, and performance practices so they actively support agility, speed, and responsible risk management at scale.

Product Management

• Establish and maintain enterprise standards for product management, including expectations for roles, decision-making, and outcomes across business-aligned organizations.
• Enable strong product strategy, vision, prioritization, and roadmaps that connect customer needs, business objectives, and investment decisions.
• Ensure a customer-centric, product mindset is embedded across organizations, with leaders and teams accountable for outcomes rather than activity or output alone.
• Govern and support the enterprise adoption of modern product management practices, balancing consistency with flexibility across federated business contexts.

Strategic Portfolio Management

• Establish and maintain enterprise standards for product management, including expectations for roles, decision-making, and outcomes across business-aligned organizations.
• Enable strong product strategy, vision, prioritization, and roadmaps that connect customer needs, business objectives, and investment decisions.
• Ensure product-centric thinking is embedded across organizations, with leaders and teams accountable for outcomes rather than activity or output alone.
• Govern and support the enterprise adoption of modern product management practices, balancing consistency with flexibility across federated business contexts.

Key Responsibilities

• Set and maintain enterprise standards for agility, product management, and portfolio management.
• Ensure adoption of standards across the Bank using enablement, governance, measurement transparency, and executive influence.
• Build and lead a team over time, establishing enterprise capability leadership largely from the ground up.
• Lead through a combination of direct management and dotted-line relationships, working across centralized and federated organizations.
• Define simple, practical frameworks, tools, and measures that leaders can use consistently and confidently.
• Establish governance models that reinforce standards while allowing for business-level flexibility.
• Coach and influence executives, senior leaders, and organizations through significant change while building durable enterprise capabilities.
• Act as a trusted advisor to the Executive Leadership Team, translating complex topics into clear, actionable decisions.

Education and Experience Required:

Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 11 years’ relevant work experience, or in lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 15 years’ higher education and/or work experience, including a minimum of 11 years’ relevant work experience

Minimum of 5 years’ managerial experience

• Demonstrated experience building and scaling enterprise capabilities, not just optimizing existing ones.
• Experience setting standards and driving adoption across multiple business areas with limited direct authority.
• Proven ability to influence executives and senior leaders through credibility, clarity, outcomes, and relationship building.
• Strong people leadership capability, including building teams and working through dotted-line relationships.
• Clear, plain-language communicator with a strong results orientation.
• Belief in the mindsets of our cultural transformation:  listen to learn, adapt and grow, win together, and focus on what matters
• Belief in the importance and power of all other disciplines that are led by the Office of the Customer and The Way We Work Enablement: Customer Research, Experience & Process Design, and Organizational Change Management

Education and Experience Preferred:

• Background in leading a large and complex product management or a senior operations role.
• Experience leading transformational change in non-technology or mixed business environments.
• Experience working in regulated or complex organizations

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M&T Bank is committed to fair, competitive, and market-informed pay for our employees. The pay range for this position is $206,400.00 - $344,000.00 Annual (USD). The successful candidate’s particular combination of knowledge, skills, and experience will inform their specific compensation.

Location

Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America