Technical Project Manager

We are seeking a highly organized and proactive Project Manager to drive the successful planning, execution, and delivery of Unify America’s Civic Gym Program.

Program Context

The Civic Gym is an established national program that gives students structured practice in civil discourse at scale. It engages thousands of college students each year across hundreds of partner campuses.

The Project Manager will coordinate the planning and execution cycles that support six national virtual dialogue events each spring, summer, and fall. This includes managing timelines and dependencies across teams.

There is another team at Unify America called Democracy League, which is building local civic assembly forums like the one in Akron. The Civic Gym Project Manager must work closely with the Democracy League Project Manager to ensure our shared tech and creative teams can serve both programs simultaneously.

Orchestration and Clarity

The Civic Gym Project Manager ensures that all aspects of the program are delivered on time, in scope, and in sync across teams.

• This role focuses on the how and when of execution, coordinating product, tech, user engagement, communications, and data updates so each Civic Gym program cycle runs smoothly.
• Working closely with cross-functional leads, this person will translate program goals into clear plans, timelines, and deliverables, anticipate risks, and keep everyone aligned on priorities and progress.
• The core responsibility is orchestration, ensuring that engineering, UX, communications, and program operations stay coordinated and that delivery remains predictable and reliable as the Civic Gym scales.
• The ideal candidate is a self-starter who excels in both strategic thinking and tactical execution, and thrives in a small, start-up environment.

Key Responsibilities

Project Planning & Process Improvement

• Develop detailed project roadmaps, timelines, Gantt charts, and milestone plans that reflect dependencies and resource availability.
• Continuously assess risk and develop mitigation plans to avoid scope creep and delays.
• Identify gaps that require more formal processes, and current processes that could be improved, and improve both, seeking feedback to optimize as we go.
• Work closely with your Democracy League PM counterpart to ensure project scope and timelines align with current resource availability, and flag anticipated future conflicts and resource needs.

Feature Discovery & Requirements Ownership

• Facilitate and document collaborative discovery sessions with stakeholders, users, and technical teams to elicit, define, and document requirements.
• Identify gaps and ask the right questions to uncover implicit needs and constraints.
• Work closely with the QA Lead to ensure requirements are clear, testable, and align with quality standards.
• Translate complex concepts into clear deliverables with well-defined scope and rationale.
• Work closely with executive stakeholders, designers, and engineers to capture and coordinate execution of features that align with organizational goals and user needs.

Stakeholder Alignment & Delivery Management

• Lead regular stakeholder meetings and asynchronous conversations to align on goals, scope, timelines, and evolving requirements.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for project communication, actively managing expectations and ensuring clarity within the team.
• Provide consistent and transparent updates through status reports, dashboards, and visual project artifacts (e.g., Gantt charts, progress trackers, demonstrations).
• Drive accountability and momentum by following up with owners, escalating blockers, and adapting plans as needed.
• Ensure all team members understand the definition of success and how it will be measured.

Qualifications

• Preferably a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Business, or a related field; PMP or Agile certification a plus.
• Three to six years of experience in managing software or digital product projects in an Agile, Scrum, or hybrid environment.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and interpersonal skills with a proactive, solutions-oriented mindset.
• Experience using project management tools such as Jira, Asana, Trello, Microsoft Project, or similar platforms.
• Excellent organizational and time-management skills; able to thrive in smaller organizations.

What You Bring

• You’re not just a task manager—you’re a strategic partner who takes ownership of outcomes.
• You initiate communication, rather than waiting to be asked.
• You’re skilled at distilling ambiguity into clarity and making progress in uncertain conditions.
• You thrive on collaboration, but you're also comfortable pushing forward independently when needed.

Want to learn more about Unify America?

You could read this.