Senior Program Manager

Role Description

The Chief Business Officer (CBO) Office is responsible for leading business planning and operations, program management and change management for Booking.com. The CBO Office reports to Booking’s Chief Business Officer and works directly with the most senior leadership across the organization, including Department LTs and corporate functions (HR/People, Finance, Legal, and Global Strategy & Development), to enable Booking.com to achieve its strategic and operational goals.

The Role

The Senior Program Manager, CBO Office will report to the Director, CBO Program Management and is one of the few Program Managers accountable to lead one of Booking’s Priority Programs. The objective of these programs is to deliver against company priorities, ensuring strategy is translated into effective and efficient execution across the organization. Priority Programs deliver the highest level of impact for customers and the business, are cross-departmental and multi-year in scope, and require close and frequent collaboration with a broad set of stakeholders, including senior leaders (VPs and SVPs). Current Priority Programs include accelerating the adoption of AI, modernizing the technical platform, developing new revenue models, and growing market share in specific markets.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

Lead the delivery of Priority Programs (80%)

• Program Planning & Delivery: You are responsible for the successful planning and delivery of all phases of the program, following the Booking.com Program Standards. This includes the design, setup and flawless execution of the program governance.
• Stakeholder Management: Together with the program’s executive sponsor and business owner(s), you are accountable for the program delivering on its objectives. You successfully manage relationships with all stakeholders at all levels and act as a trusted advisor and guide for the program steering committee.
• Ways of Working: Implement and proactively display behaviors in the program that make the cross-departmental program team more effective, alongside company values and mindsets (Protagonist, Learner, One Team).

Thought leadership on Program Management (20%)

• Program Excellence: You set the gold standard for how programs are run at Booking and are committed to raising the bar.
• Continuous Improvement: You ensure insights and learnings from each program are used to improve program fundamentals, including the Booking.com Program Standards.
• Community: You actively contribute to the development and elevation of the Project & Program Management (PPM) community at Booking by sharing insights and best practices and providing mentorship.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

The ideal candidate is a consistent high performer with very strong, in-depth experience leading multiple strategic and transformational programs in global commercial organizations. Experience doing this at multiple companies in an international environment is highly valued.

Program Management

• Programs: You have successfully led multiple company-wide programs in global commercial organizations of 10K+ employees. The scope of the programs is more important than the number of programs or years, but the role seeks someone who has done this more than once and likely brings at least 5–10 years of experience at this level.
• Expertise: You have led programs focused on one or more of the following areas:

• Transformation (large-scale business transformation)
• Innovation (technology, integration and adoption of AI)
• Regulatory & Compliance
• Business Development (building new businesses, leading growth initiatives)
• Product Development (building connected products and services)

• Methodologies: You have experience leveraging project and program management methodologies and are able and willing to lead the way, including driving adoption of methodologies by peers.
• Systems: You have experience using project and program management systems, ideally the Atlassian Suite (Jira, Confluence, Oboard).

Stakeholder Management

• Collaboration: You have experience with and are committed to achieving results by collaborating closely with stakeholders and peers across the organization.
• Relationships: You bring extensive experience building strong, productive relationships with leadership at Director level and above, and are able to successfully guide, advise and challenge these stakeholders.
• C-level: You have the seniority and experience to comfortably work closely with senior leadership (VPs/SVPs), including company leadership (C-level).

Personality

• Customer Centric: You think customer first, always, and encourage and enable others to do the same.
• Attitude: You have a positive attitude and a desire and commitment to make things happen.
• Accountable: You take ownership of what’s needed and accountability for delivering impact.
• Proactive: You are comfortable handling significant ambiguity and able to proactively craft a path forward aligned with business needs.
• Pragmatic: You are forward-looking, focused on achieving progress and moving things forward with a pragmatic approach.
• Feedback: You proactively provide constructive feedback to drive improvements.
• Collaborative: You enjoy collaborating closely with others across all departments, roles and levels of the organization, bringing people together to achieve a common goal.
• Communication: You are a very effective communicator, written and spoken, ensuring clear, timely and impactful communication tailored to varying audiences. You are comfortable presenting to senior leadership.
• Problem solving: You are able to recognize challenges and opportunities in a timely way and define an end-to-end plan to address them, from analysis to solution to implementation to adoption, including acquiring stakeholder buy-in and support.

Benefits & Perks

Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy includes compensation and benefits. We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, as well as unique-to-Booking.com benefits which include:

• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave
• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country)
• Industry-leading product discounts of up to 1400 per year for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit