Associate Strategic Program Manager

Associate

Strategic Program Manager leads one of the Strategy team’s three portfolios, a group of related departments and the mission-critical annual priorities that connect their work to Clickstop’s long-term vision. Rather than directly executing the work, the Strategic Program Manager holds the full picture, partnering with department leaders to ensure the highest-priority initiatives are clearly scoped, sequenced, resourced, aligned, and progressing toward measurable outcomes.

About Clickstop

Serving as the bridge between Clickstop’s strategic vision and team-level execution, this role brings the structure, cadence, and cross-functional alignment needed to turn priorities into results. By embedding within teams and maintaining clarity around what matters, what it will take, and how progress is measured, the Strategic Program Manager enables leaders to make confident decisions, stay focused on leading their teams, and successfully deliver the initiatives that move Clickstop’s long-term strategy forward.

"The Strategy team is a brand new team, built to help us keep the momentum of our first 20 years while being intentional about where we’re headed. The best person for this role loves a blank page and wants to build the process, not inherit one. You’ll be surrounded by people who hold a high bar, say ‘tell me more’ when you bring a new idea, and trust you to run with it."

Lauren Gilbertson, VP of Strategy

What does Clickstop provide?

• A purpose-driven career experience; discovering the opportunity to pursue your best self (as an employee, parent, partner, community member, etc.)
• An entrepreneurial environment where opportunities are endless for those who seek them.
• Effective and impactful cross-department collaboration opportunities with our highly dynamic
• Recognition for personal, team, and company accomplishments - Clickstop’s success is a reflection of your engagement and excellence!

Responsibilities

• The
• Strategic Program Manager Core Responsibilities

Embedded & Cross-Functional Facilitation

• Facilitate and coordinate execution inside teams without owning the subject matter or the tasks, building deep context on team constraints to remove and resolve friction.
• Drive alignment across multi-departmental initiatives, managing dependencies, bottlenecks, and resource constraints early and convening stakeholders to resolve them.

Systems Thinking

• Assess the system a project operates within and distinguish issues that need an underlying process fix from those solvable within the project.
• Trace recurring friction to its root cause and collaborate with leaders on the structural change rather than a project-level workaround.

Change Adoption & Communication

• Own change management for strategic initiatives, preparing employees for new ways of working and sustaining adoption after launch.
• Own portfolio-level updates that keep stakeholders, adjacent teams, and the company informed.
• Serve as the intake point for the assigned portfolio, evaluating, theming, and qualifying emerging requests from its departments.
• Partner with leadership and subject-matter experts to translate strategic priorities into actionable roadmaps with clear boundaries, milestones, success metrics, and ownership.
• Lead quarterly planning and reprioritization cycles alongside leadership, ensuring resource allocation matches shifting business needs without losing sight of active commitments.
• Establish transparent tracking, status cadences, and visibility across all initiatives in the portfolio.
• Lead retrospectives and post-implementation reviews to capture learnings and refine workflows.
• Coach leaders and teams on planning frameworks and deploy scalable templates and standards that raise project management capability organization-wide.

Requirements

• Translating ambiguity into action: Exceptional ability to synthesize high-level ideas into clear, structured execution plans.
• Influence without authority: Builds trust quickly with leaders and teams and holds initiatives
• accountable without owning the work or the reporting line.
• collaborating to prioritize decisions with leaders and teams.
• Framework fluency: Picks up planning methodologies and project management frameworks
• quickly and applies them pragmatically rather than rigidly.
• You already lead without the title. You take ownership, bring people together, and help others do their best work. This role is where you build those skills further: leading a portfolio, influencing leaders, and shaping how the Strategy team works as it grows.
• Clickstop teams
• Must be authorized to work in the United States.

Preferred

• Experience in project and/or stakeholder management, with examples of leading work and people without formal authority.

Benefits

• great full-time benefits, including a competitive compensation package and a generous amount of time off. But what truly sets us apart is how we work and the environment we work in! Benefits include
• Health Insurance ($0 Premium option), Dental & Vision Insurance
• PTO, Paid Holidays, Wellness, Birthday, and Volunteer Time Off
• 401K Match
• ESOP – After one full year of service and minimum hour requirement is met

Hybrid

This role combines remote flexibility with essential onsite collaboration at our headquarters in Urbana, IA 1-2 days per week.

Judgment under competing priorities: Comfortable sequencing trade-offs and

• Note: For hybrid work, internet speeds of 20 mbps are required.
• Employment is contingent upon the completion of a satisfactory background check.
• Clickstop is an Equal Opportunity Employer.