Director, Product and Portfolio Management – Platform Engineering

Caterpillar Inc.•Mossville, IL

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc. When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it. Position Summary The Director, Product and Portfolio Management – Platform Engineering is a senior leader accountable for shaping, governing, and delivering a complex portfolio of platform and digital engineering initiatives. This role plays a critical role in early scoping and solutioning, while also owning program and portfolio management to ensure disciplined execution, alignment, and value realization across the Platform Engineering ecosystem. This leader operates at the intersection of Product Management, Engineering, and Delivery, ensuring that customer problems are clearly understood, solutions are architected with a Platform First mindset (reusable, scalable, and integrated), and delivery is sequenced to maximize enterprise value. The Director builds and leads a high-performing organization of product, program, and project leaders and partners closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Finance, and Business stakeholders to deliver integrated platform capabilities at scale.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Business, Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
10+ years of experience leading product, program, portfolio, or delivery functions in large, complex technology organizations.
Demonstrated experience in early-stage scoping, solutioning, and technical product leadership.
Proven ability to operate at the portfolio level, including intake, prioritization, sequencing, and governance.
Strong people leadership experience leading managers and senior individual contributors.
Experience delivering complex, multi-team initiatives using Agile or hybrid delivery models.
Exceptional stakeholder management and executive communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree (MBA, MS, or equivalent).
Experience with platform engineering, reusable services, and enterprise-scale architectures.
Familiarity with scaled Agile or enterprise delivery coordination models.
Experience integrating security, privacy, and compliance into solutioning and delivery governance.
Relevant certifications (PgMP, PMP, SAFe, Scrum, Agile Coaching).

Responsibilities

Portfolio Governance & Value Realization: Own portfolio intake, prioritization, sequencing, and governance across platform and engineering initiatives. Establish and lead portfolio operating rhythms (quarterly planning, monthly portfolio reviews, dependency and risk reviews, roadmap alignment). Drive transparency across scope, progress, milestones, risks, dependencies, capacity, and financials. Ensure alignment between portfolio priorities and Platform Engineering strategy, balancing innovation, reuse, capacity, and time-to-value. Partner with Product, Engineering, and Finance on investment decisions, trade-offs, and funding alignment. Establish and oversee benefits realization practices to ensure delivery outcomes translate into measurable business value and sustained adoption.
Technical Product Management Leadership: Drive scope-related decisions across all phases of initiatives, from intake through delivery. Champion Platform First solutions, prioritizing reuse, extensibility, and cross-platform integration. Align and manage cross-program dependencies and synergies to reduce duplication and accelerate value. Ensure workstreams are led by accountable leaders who clearly articulate project needs, outcomes, and constraints. Serve as a senior partner to Product Management to ensure platform and product roadmaps are aligned and mutually reinforcing.
Scoping Phase Leadership: Ensure deep understanding of the customer problem being solved and the intended business outcomes. Assess, clarify, refine, and augment product requirements to enable integrated, end-to-end experiences. Evaluate cross-product and cross-platform impacts; pivot solutions to maximize functional reuse. Conduct complexity assessments to determine the level of solutioning, architectural rigor, and delivery approach required. Drive scope alignment with Product Management and Engineering leadership. Define the engineering delivery approach appropriate to the scope and complexity. Establish and govern project tracking artifacts in Azure DevOps (ADO). Ensure solutioning requests are properly captured and managed in ADO. Lead early decomposition of Product Management epics into feature-level requirements, wireframes, and initial delivery artifacts.
Solutioning Phase Leadership: Provide Platform First solution options, clearly articulating trade-offs, implications, and reuse opportunities. Drive alignment and decisions on the preferred solution approach. Ensure delivery of POCs, POTs, and High-Level Architectures (HLAs) as required. Partner with Product and Engineering to align on go-to-market sequencing and software release strategies. Drive solution alignment with the designated Engineering Champion and Architecture partners. Define and validate the engineering delivery approach for execution. Develop Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) cost estimates and unconstrained delivery schedules. Secure Product Management and stakeholder consensus to proceed into execution.
Program & Delivery Operating Model: Lead the design and continuous improvement of program and project management methodologies for complex, multi-team platform initiatives. Define and maintain a clear delivery operating model, including decision rights, governance forums, escalation paths, and RACI. Establish enterprise-ready planning, reporting, and tracking frameworks spanning portfolio, program, and project levels. Define delivery health metrics for high-risk and high-impact initiatives (schedule confidence, dependency health, scope stability, risk burndown). Provide hands-on consultation for execution strategy, including release planning, critical path management, and dependency resolution.
Engineering Ways of Working, Standards & Tooling: Coordinate alignment across Product and Engineering teams to enable predictable, scalable delivery. Partner with Engineering leadership to ensure consistent SDLC practices, quality gates, and release management. Govern standards for backlog readiness, solution design, integration milestones, and acceptance criteria. Lead adoption and governance of delivery and engineering tools (including ADO) to support traceability, capacity management, and dependency visibility.