Project Management Team Leader

Description:

As Project Management Team Leader at Cardo Systems, you lead the end-to-end delivery of complex, multidisciplinary product development initiatives from concept through mass production. The role combines strategic leadership, governance ownership, and hands-on project execution, ensuring strong alignment across Product, R&D, Operations, and other key stakeholders.

You are accountable for delivery excellence across the project portfolio, driving consistent execution through Cardo’s PM frameworks, tools, and governance model. You lead and develop a team of experienced project managers, while directly managing a limited number of high-impact or high-risk projects.

A core part of the role is continuously improving project management practices, processes, and tooling to support increasing organizational scale, product complexity, and delivery velocity.

The Project Management Team Leader reports directly to the VP of Product.

Team Leadership & Capability Building

•     Lead, mentor, and develop a team of project managers, fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.

•     Define, standardize, and enforce project management best practices across the organization.

•     Ensure project prioritization aligns with business strategy, management direction, and resource constraints.

•     Support senior management in pre-project assessments, effort estimation, and business-case validation.

•     Build and maintain performance metrics, insights, and historical data to support decision-making and continuous improvement.

Project Management Systems & Tools Ownership

•     Own the definition, maintenance, and continuous development of project management systems, tools, and templates across the organization.

•     Ensure PM tools and workflows effectively support planning, execution, reporting, governance, and portfolio visibility.

•     Drive adoption, standardization, and ongoing optimization of tools (e.g., MS Project PWA, SharePoint, reporting frameworks).

•     Identify, evaluate, and implement AI tools and capabilities that optimize project management workflows, processes, and analytical insights

Project Planning & Governance

•     Act as the gatekeeper for project readiness, ensuring clear scope definition, objectives, deliverables, and success criteria.

•     Build and oversee detailed WBS, schedules, and dependencies using MS Project and Cardo PM templates.

•     Own and enforce stage-gate governance across NPI phases (EVT → DVT → PVT → MP).

•     Approve and control scope, timeline, and risk-impacting changes to the original project baseline.

Execution & Monitoring

•     Coordinate cross-functional teams (R&D, Product, Operations, Marketing, Supply Chain).

•     Track and report project KPIs across schedule, scope, quality, cost, and risk.

•     Conduct regular Gantt reviews and critical path analysis.

•     Serve as the first escalation layer for project conflicts and execution blockers.

•     Capture lessons learned and institutionalize best practices.

Risk & Issue Management

•     Maintain and actively manage project risk registers.

•     Identify red flags early and execute mitigation and contingency plans.

Stakeholder Alignment & Communication

•     Lead recurring cross-functional and management alignment forums.

•     Provide structured, data-driven project status updates to senior leadership.

Capacity & Portfolio Planning

•     Analyze the project portfolio to anticipate resource constraints and bottlenecks.

•     Work with functional leaders to resolve capacity conflicts.

Tools & Methodologies

•     MS Project (Desktop & PWA)

•     SharePoint

•     Hybrid Waterfall / Agile delivery model

Required Skills & Experience

•     Minimum of 5 years leading a project management team, and at least 3 additional years personally managing end-to-end multidisciplinary product development projects in a hardware-oriented environment. Full proficiency with MS Project PWA (desktop and admin).

•     Demonstrated ownership of defining, implementing, and institutionalizing project management tools and processes, with measurable impact on delivery performance.

•     Strong leadership and stakeholder management capabilities.

•     Proven experience applying AI-enabled tools to enhance project management workflows (e.g., planning, forecasting, reporting, risk identification, or capacity analysis), driving measurable efficiency or decision-quality improvements.

•     Full proficiency with Microsoft 365.

•     Solid understanding of hardware, manufacturing, and NPI processes.

•     PMP certification or equivalent.

Role Expectations & Authority

•     Accountable for project outcomes, not just process adherence.

•     Expected to challenge assumptions and push back on unrealistic commitments.

•     Mandated to enforce governance standards and reject under-defined initiatives.

•     This is not a coordination or reporting role; success is measured by predictable delivery and controlled risk.