Principal Project Manager

Summit K12 is seeking a highly strategic, analytical, and systems-oriented Principal Project Manager to oversee the health, visibility, forecasting, governance, and operational management of the Product Development portfolio. This role serves as the central point of visibility across all active and planned initiatives within Product Development, ensuring leadership has a clear understanding of project health, resource utilization, delivery confidence, costs, dependencies, risks, and organizational capacity.

Responsibilities:

• Maintain comprehensive visibility across all active and planned initiatives within the Product Development portfolio
• Establish and manage portfolio governance frameworks from ideation through launch and post-release review
• Develop and maintain standardized project intake, prioritization, planning, reporting, and review processes
• Ensure project data is accurate, current, and consistently maintained across all portfolio management systems
• Create transparency across the organization regarding priorities, timelines, dependencies, and resource commitments
• Monitor portfolio health and proactively identify initiatives requiring intervention, escalation, or executive decision-making
• Develop and maintain resource planning and forecasting models across Product, Engineering, QA, Content, Design, and Compliance teams
• Analyze current and future capacity against planned work to identify potential bottlenecks and resource constraints
• Provide recommendations regarding staffing needs, resource allocation, prioritization, and organizational trade-offs
• Monitor utilization trends and ensure leadership has visibility into team capacity and workload distribution
• Partner with department leaders to support strategic planning and portfolio balancing decisions
• Establish frameworks for estimating, tracking, and reporting project and portfolio-level costs
• Monitor investment levels across initiatives and provide visibility into resource expenditures
• Analyze portfolio performance and identify opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and optimize resource utilization
• Support annual planning and budgeting efforts with portfolio forecasting and capacity analysis
• Provide data-driven recommendations regarding project investments and organizational priorities
• Develop executive dashboards and reporting systems that provide meaningful portfolio insights
• Deliver monthly portfolio health reports to executive leadership and key stakeholders
• Communicate portfolio status, risks, dependencies, capacity constraints, delivery confidence, and investment impacts
• Present strategic recommendations and trade-off analyses to support executive decision-making
• Ensure leadership has accurate and timely information regarding organizational commitments and delivery expectations
• Establish and maintain portfolio-level risk management processes
• Identify cross-functional dependencies and potential delivery impacts across initiatives
• Monitor project health indicators and proactively surface concerns before they impact delivery
• Facilitate discussions and decision-making when risks, constraints, or competing priorities emerge
• Partner with Product Managers and functional leaders to develop mitigation plans and maintain delivery continuity
• Serve as a trusted advisor and escalation partner when projects require additional support or intervention
• Design, implement, and continuously improve portfolio management systems, tools, and workflows
• Drive automation and process improvements to reduce manual reporting and increase organizational visibility
• Establish meaningful portfolio metrics and key performance indicators
• Improve forecasting accuracy, reporting quality, and operational efficiency across the organization
• Champion best practices in portfolio management, governance, resource planning, and organizational effectiveness
• Evaluate and optimize portfolio management tools to ensure they support organizational goals and scalability

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Project Management, Operations, Engineering, Technology, Education, or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in Project Management, Program Management, Portfolio Management, PMO Leadership, Strategic Operations, or related disciplines
• Experience managing complex portfolios involving multiple cross-functional teams and concurrent initiatives
• Demonstrated success building governance frameworks, operational processes, reporting systems, and forecasting models
• Strong experience with resource planning, capacity forecasting, risk management, and executive reporting
• Experience working in highly collaborative environments involving Product, Engineering, QA, Design, Content, and Operations teams
• Exceptional analytical, organizational, and problem-solving skills
• Advanced proficiency with portfolio management, reporting, and analytics tools
• Experience in EdTech, SaaS, software development, curriculum development, educational publishing, or related industries
• Experience supporting executive leadership through portfolio analytics and strategic planning
• PMP, PgMP, PMI-PMOCP, Lean Portfolio Management, Agile, Scrum, or related certifications
• Experience implementing and optimizing project and portfolio management platforms