Director of Portfolio Management

Job Description

Director, Portfolio Management | Manulife Financial

The Tone:
This is a full-time hybrid role at Manulife Financial. Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, dedicated to helping people make their financial decisions easier and lives better. This pivotal role drives the enterprise-wide portfolio strategy, ensuring that all investments deliver measurable business value and align precisely with overarching corporate objectives. This position is critical for leading portfolio governance, influencing senior leadership decisions, and owning outcomes related to strategic prioritization, resource optimization, and benefits realization across the organization.

The TL;DR
• Role: Full Time
• Type: Hybrid
• Location: Hybrid
• Mission: Driving enterprise-wide portfolio strategy, ensuring investments deliver measurable business value and align with corporate objectives.
• Tech Stack: Clarity, Planview, Jira Align, MS Project Online, Smartsheet

What You’ll Actually Do
• Strategic Roadmapping: Develop and maintain a strategic portfolio roadmap aligned with corporate objectives and adaptable to change, ensuring visibility and traceability of initiatives.
• Demand Prioritization: Streamline intake and prioritize initiatives based on business value and strategic impact, applying prioritization models and influencing decision-making forums.
• Performance Optimization: Drive continuous improvement in throughput, resource utilization, and delivery efficiency, monitoring performance and removing bottlenecks to improve value realization.
• Benefits Realization: Oversee the definition of KPIs, OKRs, and value metrics for initiatives, tracking and reporting on benefits realization to ensure strategic outcomes are achieved.
• Resource Capacity Planning: Forecast, allocate, and adjust resources to meet portfolio demand and delivery timelines, collaborating with delivery teams as needed.
• Program Leadership: Oversee complex, cross-functional programs using traditional and adaptive delivery models, ensuring alignment with portfolio priorities and strategic outcomes.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Information Technology, Finance, or a related field, serving as a Director-level leader.
• Experience: 10-15 years in portfolio and program management within large, complex enterprises, with proven ability to influence executive decision-making, establish intake and prioritization frameworks, drive strategic alignment and value realization, lead cross-functional programs, and perform resource capacity planning and optimization.
• Skills: Exceptional communication, executive presence, and stakeholder engagement skills, coupled with strategic thinking, financial acumen, strong analytical and decision-making capabilities, leadership in organizational change and transformation, and knowledge of risk management, dependency mapping, and scenario planning.
• Bonus: Master’s degree or professional certification in Portfolio Management, Program Management, or Strategic Planning (e.g., PfMP, PMP, SAFe POPM, MoP), and certifications in Agile or Lean practices (e.g., SAFe, Scrum, Kanban).