Jordan Hayes
Principal Program Manager, Product Operations
Summary
Program leader with 9+ years shipping cross-functional initiatives in SaaS and fintech. I connect product strategy to execution—clarifying scope, de-risking launches, and building operating cadences that keep design, engineering, and GTM aligned from discovery through cutover and post-launch stabilization.
Known for turning ambiguous mandates into sequenced roadmaps, dependency maps, RACI matrices, and exec-ready readouts. I run steering forums that surface tradeoffs early, document decisions, and keep partner teams moving when timelines slip or priorities compete.
Recent focus: identity and billing platform migrations, pricing & packaging releases, SOC 2 control work, and incident-driven process hardening across US and EMEA teams. Comfortable partnering with Legal, Security, Finance, and Sales Ops under fixed-date constraints.
Experience
Senior Program Manager
Brightline Software | Austin, TX (hybrid) | Mar 2022 — Present
- Lead multi-quarter platform programs spanning identity, billing, and admin APIs; coordinated 6 product teams and 40+ contributors with shared release trains, dependency maps, and weekly cutover rehearsals tied to customer contracts.
- Cut launch slip rate by 27% by introducing a single readiness checklist, dry-run calendar, rollback owners, and comms templates for every customer-visible release; institutionalized postmortems for sev-2+ incidents.
- Partnered with Legal and Security on SOC 2–related control updates; delivered evidence packs on schedule for two consecutive audits and reduced last-minute evidence scrambles by routing requests through a single intake queue.
- Facilitated quarterly planning with Finance and Sales Ops; reconciled capacity forecasts with hiring plans, flagged dependency conflicts early, and reduced mid-quarter scope thrash by publishing a single source-of-truth roadmap.
- Stood up cross-functional war rooms during peak migration windows; maintained decision logs and stakeholder updates so leadership could redirect funding or staffing within 48 hours when risks materialized.
Program Manager
Harbor Payments | Remote — US | Aug 2018 — Feb 2022
- Owned card-present and ACH roadmap threads for a mid-market payments stack; translated regulatory deadlines into engineering milestones, customer comms, and support enablement assets.
- Stood up a weekly risk review with Support and SRE; reduced sev-1 repeat incidents tied to config drift by prioritizing guardrails in the deploy pipeline and adding synthetic checks for critical routes.
- Ran vendor evaluations for fraud scoring tools; led RFP scoring, POCs, security review packets, and contract handoff to Procurement with documented success criteria and rollout plans.
- Partnered with Marketing and Compliance on customer-facing notices; ensured copy, timing, and support macros aligned before each mandated disclosure window.
Senior Business Analyst
Cedar & Co. Consulting | Dallas, TX | Jun 2015 — Jul 2018
- Supported digital transformation workstreams for retail and logistics clients: current-state process maps, gap analyses, workshop facilitation, and benefits tracking against baseline KPIs.
- Built executive dashboards in Excel and Tableau; trained client teams on refresh cadences, data definitions, and exception handling so leadership could trust week-over-week trends.
- Contributed to proposals and SOWs; maintained traceability from statement of work to delivered milestones and change orders when scope shifted.
- Facilitated working sessions between IT and business owners to prioritize backlog items and document acceptance criteria for high-risk integrations.
Operations Coordinator
Northbridge Retail Group | Plano, TX | Aug 2013 — May 2015
- Coordinated store rollout schedules, training windows, and vendor installs for a 30-location refresh; tracked RAID logs and escalated slips before they hit customer-facing dates.
- Maintained inventory reconciliation templates and weekly variance reviews with finance; helped close recurring discrepancies tied to shipment timing.
- Supported leadership off-sites: agendas, materials, action-item tracking, and follow-through across facilities and HR stakeholders.
Skills
- • Program & portfolio governance
- • Roadmapping & dependency management
- • Launch readiness & cutover planning
- • Stakeholder comms & exec reporting
- • Risk & issue tracking
- • Vendor & contract coordination
Tools
- • Jira Advanced Roadmaps
- • Confluence
- • Linear
- • Notion
- • Looker
- • Figma (review)
- • Slack
- • Workday
- • ServiceNow
- • Google Sheets
Education & certifications
The University of Texas at Austin (2011 — 2015) — B.B.A., Management Information Systems — Concentration: Operations; Honors thesis on rollout metrics and adoption curves
UT McCombs School of Business (2019) — Graduate Certificate, Technology Commercialization — Capstone: GTM plan for B2B workflow tool
Coursera / university partners (2021) — Machine Learning for Business (audit) — feature definition, ethics, and model risk overview for PMs
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) · Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) · AWS Cloud Practitioner · SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) · ITIL 4 Foundation
Structured
Precision ATS
Skills band + structured jobs.
Template id precision_ats matches the in-app renderer and export pipeline. Editing, tailoring, and PDF download run in the AIApply iOS app.