PMO Innovation & Portfolio Manager at Flora Food Group

PMO Manager – Innovation & Portfolio (North America)

Hybrid- 2/3 days in Hackensack, NJ office

Compensation Range is 160-190K Depending on Experience

Function: Product & Portfolio / Innovation

Reports to: Global PMO Lead [dotted line - Global Head of P&P / N.America Head of Marketing]

Why this role matters

This role exists to build and embed a fit-for-purpose PMO capability for the North America (NA) business, enabling disciplined execution of innovation and portfolio priorities at pace and with quality.

As Flora Food Group continues to scale consumer-led innovation across regions, the NA business requires stronger orchestration across Marketing, R&D, Supply Chain, Finance and Operations. The PMO Manager acts as a foundational builder of this capability: setting up robust ways of working, driving executional discipline, and ensuring projects land on time, in full, and with clear accountability.

This role is critical to reducing execution risk, improving speed-to-market, and freeing up functional leaders to focus on content and decision-making rather than coordination.

Role impact

Operating at the intersection of strategy and execution, you will help:

• Establish a N. America PMO operating model aligned to global P&P / PMO standards, while tailored to local business realities.

• Bring consistency, transparency and rigor to how innovation and portfolio initiatives are planned, governed and delivered, and act as the single point of truth for execution status, risks and delivery confidence across the NA innovation and portfolio agenda.

• Act as the executional backbone for priority initiatives, ensuring cross-functional teams deliver against clear timelines, milestones and decision gates.

• Improve delivery confidence, resource visibility and decision quality across the NA portfolio.

What you’ll do

PMO set-up & governance

• Design and implement a North America PMO framework, as a critical step to helping establish global P&P Project Management Office standards.

• Embed common ways of working across innovation and portfolio initiatives, including timelines, milestones, gatekeeping and execution tracking.

• Optimize governance cadences (weekly drumbeats, monthly gate reviews, escalation forums) with clear roles, inputs and outputs.

• Ensure high-quality data, discipline and follow-through in portfolio & project management systems.

End-to-end project & activity management

• Own the planning and orchestration of priority innovation and portfolio initiatives from early-stage (G0) through to post-launch (G5). In time this will also include Value Creation / Savings initiatives.

• Build integrated project timelines based on briefs, commercial trade windows and lead times.

• Define critical paths, dependencies and resource requirements across functions and projects.

• Proactively surface risks, delays and trade-offs; drive mitigation and escalation at the right level.

• Lead structured weekly project drumbeats, ensuring clear actions, owners and accountability.

Cross-functional leadership & execution excellence

• Act as the central coordination point across Marketing, R&D, Supply Chain (including P&I and T&I teams), Quality, Finance, Procurement and Operations.

• Hold teams accountable for inputs and deliverables (e.g. technical briefs, business cases, system data, readiness milestones).

• Support preparation of governance forums and senior leadership updates with clear, decision-ready materials.

• Drive continuous improvement of execution practices, lead times and delivery performance.

Capability building

• Help build the N.AM PMO capability over time, including a small team, templates/tools, playbooks and best practices, as the NA hub scales.

• Act as a role model for execution discipline, pragmatic problem-solving and collaborative leadership.

What this role is (and is not)

• You are accountable for execution and orchestration, not for project content ownership.

• Project leadership and strategic direction remain with Marketing / Business leads; this role ensures the work lands.

• You simplify and enable — not add bureaucracy.

About you

You combine strong project management fundamentals with the confidence to operate in complex, cross-functional FMCG environments. You are comfortable building structure where it does not yet exist, and you bring calm, clarity and momentum to ambiguous situations.

Key experience

• 5–10+ years experience in project, program or PMO roles within FMCG / CPG or similarly complex environments required

• Experience acting as owner of PMO data quality, reporting cadence and execution dashboards in enterprise environments.

• Proven experience setting up or scaling PMO / project management structures.

• Hands-on experience managing end-to-end innovation, transformation or portfolio initiatives.

• Strong understanding of stage-gate models, innovation lifecycles and launch readiness.

• Experience influencing senior stakeholders without direct authority.

• Preferred, but not required: PMP, PRINCE2, Agile / SAFe certification

Critical capabilities

• Strong systems thinker with the ability to design simple, scalable ways of working.

• Excellent planning, prioritisation and execution discipline.

• Confident facilitator and communicator across senior and cross-functional stakeholders.

• High accountability mindset; comfortable holding others to commitments.

• Pragmatic, solution-oriented and resilient under pressure.

Ways of working

• Biased toward action, clarity and simplification.

• Comfortable moving between helicopter view and operational detail.

• Energised by building capability and enabling others to succeed.

• Values transparency, follow-through and continuous improvement.

Flora Food Group is committed to culinary essentials for better food. We believe fewer, better ideas — executed with excellence — are what drive sustainable growth.

What’s next

If this position sounds interesting, please hit the apply button now!