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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Program Manager

💰 $ - $

ProductTechnologyWeb

🎯 Role Definition

The Web Program Manager is a cross-functional leader responsible for planning, coordinating, and delivering complex web and digital experience initiatives across multiple teams and channels. This role drives the web strategy and roadmap, governs content and technical standards, ensures measurable business outcomes, and leads delivery using program management best practices (Agile, Scrum, and hybrid models). The ideal candidate balances technical fluency (CMS, analytics, front-end fundamentals) with stakeholder influence, vendor management, and a relentless focus on user experience, SEO, and accessibility.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Web Project Manager or Web Producer
  • Digital Product Manager or Product Owner
  • Technical Project Manager or IT Program Coordinator

Advancement To:

  • Senior Program Manager, Web & Digital
  • Director of Web & Digital Experience
  • Head of Digital Platforms / VP of Product or Digital

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Management (Digital Products)
  • UX/Design Leadership
  • Digital Marketing / Growth Management

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead end-to-end program management for enterprise web initiatives, defining scope, timelines, dependencies, milestones, and delivery criteria while ensuring alignment with broader digital strategy and business objectives.
  • Create, maintain, and communicate a multi-quarter web product roadmap that prioritizes features, technical debt, SEO improvements, and accessibility remediation based on business value and stakeholder input.
  • Act as the primary cross-functional coordinator between engineering, UX, content, SEO, marketing, legal/compliance, and third-party vendors to ensure integrated delivery of web releases.
  • Facilitate Agile ceremonies (program increment planning, sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives) and adapt delivery cadence for cross-team web projects that include multiple squads or vendors.
  • Own program-level risk and issue management for web platforms, proactively identify blockers, escalate appropriately, and drive mitigation plans to protect delivery dates and quality.
  • Manage vendor relationships for CMS implementation, DXP (Adobe AEM, Sitecore, etc.), hosting/CDN, and front-end development partners — including SOW negotiation, SLAs, and performance reviews.
  • Define and enforce web governance: content lifecycle policies, change control, release management, versioning, and post-launch support processes to reduce operational risk and ensure consistency.
  • Partner with SEO, content, and analytics teams to translate performance goals into measurable KPIs (traffic, conversion, engagement, Core Web Vitals) and track progress with dashboards and executive reporting.
  • Lead discovery and requirements workshops with stakeholders to gather functional, technical, and non-functional requirements, then translate them into user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical tasks.
  • Coordinate and prioritize backlog grooming across web teams to balance feature delivery, technical debt reduction, security patches, and accessibility obligations (WCAG compliance).
  • Oversee quality assurance, user acceptance testing (UAT), and rollout plans for web releases; define test plans, coordinate cross-team testers, and track defect remediation until closure.
  • Drive adoption of web performance and SEO best practices across engineering and editorial teams, including page speed optimization, schema markup, canonicalization, and crawl budget management.
  • Implement and monitor analytics instrumentation (GA4, Adobe Analytics) and event taxonomy for the web product to ensure accurate, business-aligned measurement and enable data-driven decisions.
  • Lead content migration and large-scale editorial initiatives during CMS migrations or redesigns, coordinating content audits, mapping, remediation, and editorial training.
  • Define and manage program budgets and resource plans for web initiatives; forecast delivery costs, track variance, and present budgetary trade-offs to stakeholders.
  • Champion accessibility and inclusive design across the web program by setting remediation priorities, integrating accessibility testing into QA, and ensuring compliance with legal requirements.
  • Establish and optimize release cadences, feature flag strategies, and rollback procedures to minimize customer impact while enabling rapid iteration and experimentation.
  • Partner with security and infrastructure teams to ensure web platform hardening, vulnerability remediation, incident response planning, and secure deployment pipelines.
  • Drive continuous improvement by defining and measuring program KPIs (predictability, cycle time, defect rate, uptime) and implementing process improvements to increase delivery velocity and quality.
  • Act as the internal advocate and single point of contact for high-visibility web programs, preparing executive-level updates, roadmaps, and decision-packages that facilitate timely approvals.
  • Coordinate large-scale experiments and A/B tests, from hypothesis design through measurement and rollout, partnering with analytics, product, and CRO teams to optimize conversions and UX.
  • Mentor and coach junior program managers, product owners, and cross-functional leads on program discipline, stakeholder communication, and delivery best practices.
  • Lead post-launch retrospectives and continuous improvement sessions to capture lessons learned, update runbooks, and refine governance for future releases.
  • Ensure regulatory and legal compliance for web properties (privacy, cookie consent, data residency) by collaborating with Legal and Privacy teams and incorporating requirements into the delivery lifecycle.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc analytics requests and exploratory data analysis to validate feature impact and inform prioritization decisions for the web roadmap.
  • Contribute to the organization's digital strategy and web roadmap by surfacing gaps, opportunities, and technical recommendations from program execution insights.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate marketing and product objectives into engineering requirements and clear acceptance criteria for web features.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within distributed development teams to maintain alignment and unblock dependencies across web initiatives.
  • Provide internal training and enablement for editorial and marketing stakeholders on CMS workflows, release processes, SEO best practices, and analytics interpretation.
  • Coordinate archival and content retention activities, ensuring compliance with records policies and minimizing unnecessary content sprawl.
  • Assist with procurement and onboarding of third-party SaaS tools (tag managers, personalization platforms, testing tools) and govern their integration into the web stack.
  • Maintain and update program documentation, runbooks, and operational handoffs for on-call and post-release support teams.
  • Support incident response and postmortem investigations for web outages or degradation, driving corrective actions and tracking remediation to completion.
  • Evaluate and pilot new web technologies, frameworks, and platforms, delivering recommendations and migration plans that balance innovation with operational stability.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Program and project management methodologies: Agile (Scrum, Kanban), SAFe, and Waterfall program governance.
  • Roadmap planning and backlog management using Jira, Aha!, or similar portfolio tools.
  • Hands-on experience with leading CMS platforms: Adobe AEM, Drupal, WordPress, Sitecore or equivalent DXP systems.
  • Web analytics and measurement: Google Analytics (GA4), Adobe Analytics, tag management (Google Tag Manager), and event taxonomy design.
  • SEO and technical SEO skills: crawlability, schema markup, canonicalization, redirects, and Core Web Vitals optimization.
  • Web performance optimization: front-end performance tuning, caching, CDN configuration, and Lighthouse/Core Web Vitals remediation.
  • Accessibility standards and testing: WCAG 2.1 compliance, accessible component design, and assistive technology considerations.
  • Basic web technology literacy: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript fundamentals, REST APIs, and familiarity with headless/web APIs and modern front-end frameworks.
  • A/B testing and experimentation platforms: Optimizely, VWO, Google Optimize, or similar; designing experiments and interpreting lift.
  • Data fluency: SQL basics, spreadsheets (advanced Excel/Google Sheets), and data visualization tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI) to analyze web KPIs.
  • Security and compliance awareness for web platforms: secure deployment, vulnerability patching, and privacy-by-design principles.
  • Vendor and contract management: RFP/RFI coordination, SOW development, and SLA negotiation for web technology suppliers.
  • Release management and CI/CD familiarity for web deployments, including feature flags and rollback strategies.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills — able to synthesize complex technical updates into business-impact narratives.
  • Cross-functional leadership and influence without authority; excels at aligning engineering, product, design, and marketing teams.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication, with experience creating roadmaps, program briefs, and executive dashboards.
  • Strategic thinking with strong attention to detail — able to balance long-term platform vision with day-to-day delivery realities.
  • Problem-solving and analytical mindset; comfortable making decisions under ambiguity and rapidly changing priorities.
  • Negotiation and vendor management skills to secure resources, timelines, and contractual terms that meet program goals.
  • Facilitation and workshop skills for discovery, prioritization, and alignment sessions with diverse stakeholders.
  • Time management and prioritization to juggle multiple concurrent web initiatives and release tracks.
  • Coaching and mentoring capability to grow junior program managers and improve team delivery practices.
  • Conflict resolution and change management skills to successfully navigate organizational transitions and adoption of new processes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, Marketing, Communications, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MBA, MS in Information Systems) or relevant advanced certificate in program/project management (PMP, PgMP, CSM, SAFe).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Information Systems / Technology Management
  • Business Administration / Management
  • Marketing / Digital Media
  • Human-Computer Interaction / UX Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5–10 years of progressively responsible experience in program or project management with at least 3–5 years focused on web, digital experience, or CMS programs.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years leading multi-team web initiatives or enterprise digital transformations, experience with DXP migrations, proven success delivering complex web products, and demonstrated experience with SEO, analytics instrumentation, and accessibility compliance.
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