Design Program Manager

Location: Quebec City, Canada (Hybrid)

Position Summary:

An integral part of the Design organization is the Design Strategy & Operations team, responsible for the planning, processes, and operational foundations that enable it to work effectively. From strategic planning to project management, resource management, and tooling, the team ensures designers can focus on delivering great user experiences.

The Design Program Manager orchestrates programs of work across the Design organization. Rather than managing a single project end-to-end, this role manages the portfolio: the intake pipeline, resource allocation across competing demands, governance rhythms, and the cross-team coordination that keeps the whole function moving.

This means connecting requests for design resource to broader objectives, balancing capacity against demand, surfacing trade-offs to leadership, and establishing the cadences and standards that make delivery predictable at scale. This role brings structure, visibility, and strategic alignment to how the Design organization plans and delivers its work, so the team can consistently do its best work on what matters most.

Responsibilities:

Portfolio & pipeline management

• Own the intake and prioritization pipeline, ensuring incoming work is triaged, scoped, and sequenced against strategic priorities and capacity.

• Maintain a clear, current view of all active and upcoming programs and projects across the Design function.

• Connect individual projects to broader organizational objectives, ensuring effort is concentrated on the highest-value work.

• Establish and run the governance rhythms (planning cycles, reviews, prioritization forums) that keep the portfolio aligned and on track.

Resource & capacity management

• Manage allocation of design resources across competing demands, balancing capacity against the pipeline of work.

• Provide visibility into who is working on what, where capacity is constrained, and where trade-offs are needed.

• Partner with design leads to forecast demand and plan resourcing ahead of need.

Cross-team coordination & delivery

• Coordinate dependencies and hand-offs across designers, cross-functional partners, and parallel workstreams.

• Operate across delivery models, running some work through a centralized intake model and embedding in agile teams and squads for others, managing sprints and backlogs and adapting ways of working to fit each context.

• Establish consistent delivery standards, ceremonies, and ways of working across programs.

• Monitor health across the portfolio, proactively addressing slippage, bottlenecks, and risk before they impact delivery.

• Track program-level KPIs related to throughput, capacity utilization, quality, and stakeholder engagement.

Risk & issue management

• Identify, log, and actively manage risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies across the portfolio.

• Develop mitigation and contingency plans, escalating to sponsors and leadership where appropriate.

• Anticipate systemic blockers and resolve them before they cascade across programs.

Stakeholder & communication management

• Act as a central point of contact and source of truth for portfolio status across designers, stakeholders, and senior leadership.

• Provide regular, clear, and accurate progress updates at both project and program level.

• Constructively challenge scope, priorities, and trade-offs, holding the line on what serves the strategy rather than the loudest request.

• Bring an independent point of view to decisions, advising leadership rather than just relaying information.

• Facilitate decision-making by surfacing the right information to the right people at the right time.

Governance & continuous improvement

• Manage changes to scope, priority, or resourcing through clear, structured governance and change control.

• Assess the impact of changes across the portfolio and ensure decisions are made with full visibility of trade-offs.

• Run program reviews and retrospectives to capture lessons learned and apply them across future work.

• Drive the ongoing improvement of program and operational management practice within the Design Team.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 6+ years of program or project management experience, preferably within a digital design, creative agency, or modern software product environment.
• Portfolio Management: Demonstrated track record of successfully managing a portfolio of work or multiple concurrent programs, rather than just single isolated projects.
• Industry Domain: Solid understanding of modern design processes, terminologies, and deliverables (UX, UI, Brand, and Visual design).
• Tooling: Proficiency with modern collaboration and program management tools (e.g., ClickUp, Aha!, Azure DevOps).
• Leadership Style: Strong critical thinking and confidence to challenge assumptions, negotiate priorities, and build trust with senior leadership.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience.

Desirable Skills:

• Professional project/program management certification (e.g., PMP, PgMP, Agile/Scrum, PRINCE2).
• Experience with data visualization and operational metrics reporting.

What We Offer:

• A great Team and culture - please see our colleague video.
• An exciting career as an integral part of a world-leading software company providing solutions for architecture, engineering, and construction - watch this short documentary about how we got our start.
• An attractive salary and benefits package.
• A commitment to inclusion, belonging, and colleague well-being through global initiatives and resource groups.
• A company committed to making a real difference by advancing the world's infrastructure for a better quality of life, where your contributions help build a more sustainable, connected, and resilient world. Discover our latest user success stories for an insight into our global impact.

Around the world, infrastructure professionals rely on software from Bentley Systems to help them design, build, and operate better and more resilient infrastructure for transportation, water, energy, cities, and more. Founded in 1984 by engineers for engineers, Bentley is the partner of choice for engineering firms and owner-operators worldwide, with software that spans engineering disciplines, industry sectors, and all phases of the infrastructure lifecycle. Through our digital twin solutions, we help infrastructure professionals unlock the value of their data to transform project delivery and asset performance. www.bentley.com

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