Director, Platform Programs
Mercer Advisors · United States
Why Work at Mercer Advisors?
For more than 40 years, Mercer Advisors has been helping families amplify and simplify their financial lives by integrating financial planning, investment management, business management, tax, estate, insurance, and more, all managed by a single team. We deliver the kind of comprehensive care once reserved for only the wealthiest households.
Today, we serve over 42,800+ families across 110+ cities across the U.S. Ranked the #1 RIA Firm in the nation by Barron’s for two consecutive years, Mercer Advisors is an independent fiduciary legally bound to act in our clients’ best interests — always.*
Mercer Advisors offers a workplace that stands apart in the financial industry. More than half of our employees and client-facing professionals are women, reflecting the clients we serve. With a flexible, national footprint, we build our teams around exceptional talent — wherever they are.
Join us and help families amplify and simplify their financial lives with confidence.
* Mercer Advisors was ranked #1 for RIA firms with up to $70 billion in assets. The Barron’s top RIA ranking is based on a combination of metrics – including size, growth, service quality, technology, succession planning and others. No fee was paid for participation in the ranking, however, Mercer Advisors has paid a fee to Barron’s to use the ranking in marketing. Please see important information about the ranking criteria methodology here.
Job Summary
We're rebuilding how the Platform organization operates at Mercer Advisors — and we need someone who makes sure that transformation actually lands. This is not a coordinator role. This is not a status-tracker. This is the operating nerve center of a modern Platform org, and you'll own the systems, cadences, and discipline that determine whether we ship the right things, in the right order, at the right speed.
This role owns four things at a high level: roadmap planning and management; the end-to-end development process from intake through delivery; project management and execution across the Platform org; and a set of shared platform utilities — including budget and resource tracking, platform metrics, vendor coordination, and serving as the primary conduit between the Platform org and central functions like compliance, legal, finance, and BI.
You'll work directly with and on behalf of the Chief Platform Officer. You give leadership clear visibility into what's on track, what's at risk, and what needs a decision. You raise unblockers before they become blockers. You carry real authority across engineering, product, and data to define how work gets done and hold the org to it. When people ask what the Platform org committed to this quarter and how we're doing against it — your answer will be the answer.
Essential Job Functions
1) Roadmap Planning and Management
- Own and facilitate the quarterly and annual roadmap planning process — connecting business goals to squad capacity to committed delivery. Keep the rhythm consistent and the process honest: no sandbagging, no last-minute pivots that weren't surfaced early.
- Prepare and deliver Advisors Leadership Forum (ALF) updates on behalf of the Platform org. These should be clear, well-framed, and ready — no deck that takes three hours to produce, no spin. Platform leadership should be able to walk in with confidence in what's being presented.
- Organize and run sprint demos that are worth attending: tight, outcomes-focused, and useful to leadership. Run retrospectives that actually change behavior — not sessions that produce a parking lot and no follow-through. Own the connection between what we planned, what we shipped, and what we learned.
2) Development Process
- Design and own the end-to-end development process — from intake and requirements through build and delivery. This is the agile operating model for the Platform org: how requests are evaluated, how work is sized and scoped, how it moves through the system, and how changes to scope get approved. These aren't suggestions — they're the standard.
- Build and run the intake framework that scores every feature request, initiative, and technical investment against business impact, strategic alignment, squad capacity, and level of effort. Make intake legible and trusted: business stakeholders know how to submit and what happens next; squads know what's coming and why it was prioritized; nothing slides sideways into the roadmap.
- Define roles and responsibilities across product management, engineering, design, and data — so there's no ambiguity about who decides what at each stage. Introduce estimation discipline without bureaucracy. Partner with product managers to pressure-test scoping, surface hidden dependencies, and catch scope creep before it derails a commitment.
3) Project Management and Execution
- Own delivery execution across the Platform org. Track commitments, surface risks early, and drive accountability across teams. When something is off track, you're the one who knows first — and you bring a recommendation, not just a flag.
- Raise unblockers proactively on behalf of Platform leadership. When a team is stuck, a dependency isn't moving, or a decision is sitting idle, surface it with context and a path forward. Own the follow-through until it's resolved — and escalate when it needs to go higher.
- Serve as a trusted proxy in cross-functional conversations. Represent the Platform org's priorities clearly and consistently — especially in forums where Platform leadership isn't in the room. Build strong working relationships across the organization to keep alignment moving without requiring executive escalation every time. Support the standing up of the full squad model: help the org understand what it means, track the transition, and make sure the new structure has the process clarity it needs to work.
4) Platform Utilities
- Budget and resource allocation. Own the tracking and reporting of development hours and team capacity across the Platform org. Partner with finance to maintain budget visibility, flag variances, and support resource planning decisions. The squads do the work — this function makes sure leadership has an accurate, real-time picture of where time and money are going.
- Platform metrics. Own the internal health metrics for the Platform org: delivery velocity, planning accuracy, intake cycle times, and system-level indicators like uptime and SLAs where they fall within scope. Partner with the appropriate teams — including customer experience and advisor experience functions — to define where platform metrics end and client-facing metrics begin, and make sure there's no gap between the two.
- Central functions conduit. Act as the primary interface between the Platform org and central functions — compliance, legal, finance, BI, and people — that receive requests from across the organization and struggle to independently prioritize them. This role doesn't change where accountability lives (squads own their work), but it adds a prioritization lens so central teams can sequence Platform requests coherently and Platform teams aren't competing against themselves for shared capacity.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
- 8+ years in program management, PMO leadership, or a senior operational role inside a product and/or technology organization — ideally at a company going through transformation, not just steady-state execution
- Proven track record of building operating models from the ground up — not inheriting and maintaining someone else's system
- Deep fluency in agile product delivery: how software gets built, how roadmaps get set, and what breaks when process is absent
- Experience designing and running intake and prioritization frameworks that stakeholders actually trust and use — you've built the scoring model, defended it, and evolved it
- Skilled at running planning cadences that work: quarterly roadmaps, sprint demos, retrospectives, and executive-facin