Associate Director Project & Portfolio Management

Associate Director, Project & Portfolio Management

College Board – Advanced Placement & Instruction

Location: This is a remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). All CB employees are required to occasionally travel to meet in person for business purposes.

Role Type : This is a full-time position

About the Team

The AP Prototype Development and Evaluation team exists to help AP learn fast and decide well on major innovations that could materially affect outcomes, operations, trust, or costs-to-serve. The team evaluates high-impact program and product changes before the organization commits to build and scale, producing decision-ready recommendations grounded in market requirements, implementation feasibility, directional economics, and evidence from staged pilots.

The team functions as an internal viability studio, drawing on cross-functional contributors assembled around each initiative to ensure AP pursues innovations that are desirable, workable, sustainable, and aligned to strategy. It also creates the confidence to stop early when the facts don't support moving forward.

About the Opportunity

The Associate Director, Project & Portfolio Management is the team's most collaborative and flexible role, bringing structure and continuity to a fast-moving portfolio of prototype and pilot initiatives so work stays organized, on track, and well documented. This role thrives on shifting priorities and ambiguity, moving fluidly between leading cross-functional execution across the portfolio and producing and managing the team's decision-ready documents. The Associate Director owns the operating cadence and knowledge systems that let the team move quickly without losing rigor, ensuring work flows smoothly across contributors and workstreams and that the team's knowledge and artifacts stay easy to find and reuse, and that proposed initiatives carry clear delivery and financial framing before AP commits to build.

In this role, you will:

Program & Project Management (60%)

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Own project management across the full lifecycle for the team's portfolio of prototype and pilot initiatives, including timelines, milestones, dependencies, and decision gates

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Coordinate the team's cross-functional work: convene contributors, track commitments, and keep workstreams aligned to charters and deadlines

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Operate the team's project intake and kickoff process, from intake through retrospective, so each initiative starts and closes with consistency

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Track risks, blockers, dependencies, open questions and decisions across active initiatives, and escalate items that threaten timelines or go/no-go gates

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Build and maintain trackers and status reporting that give the team and leadership a clear, current view of portfolio health

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Support pilot execution by coordinating logistics, stakeholder communications, timelines, and launch readiness activities

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Maintain visibility across the team's portfolio of active initiatives, pilots, and evaluation efforts, ensuring work remains aligned with strategic priorities

Knowledge Management and Team Operations (40%)

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Own the team's document and knowledge management system, including the artifact library, templates, version control, naming conventions, and access

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Maintain the library of reusable artifacts (pilot charters, decision memos, evaluation plans, project briefs) so they are easy to find, reuse, and hand off

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Manage document workflows: drafting support, routing for review, and final production of decision-ready materials

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Capture and organize team decisions, learnings, and process improvements so knowledge persists across initiatives

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Facilitate agile-style planning including sprint or cycle planning, standups, backlog grooming, and retrospectives

About You

To qualify for this role, you must have:

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4+ years of experience in project or program m