Program Manager, Continuous Improvement at FortuneBrands

Fortune Brands' Connected Products Engineering is seeking a Program Manager, Continuous Improvement to serve as the operational backbone of CPE's incident governance, program integrity, and organizational learning functions. This role sits within the Planning, Delivery, and Continuous Improvement organization and reports to the Sr. Director of Planning, Delivery & Continuous Improvement. It works in close partnership with the CTO and CPE leadership team. This is not a program management role in the traditional sense. The person in this role ensures that when things go wrong — and they will — CPE learns from them, closes the loop, and builds systems that make the next incident faster and better handled. That means owning the AAR program from incident declaration to corrective action closure, facilitating hotwash reviews with engineering leadership, producing executive-grade communications and business justifications, and tracking the portfolio of internal improvement projects across a globally distributed organization. The right candidate has operated in high-pressure environments, writes with the precision of a staff officer, can hold senior engineers accountable without making it adversarial, and uses AI tools as amplifiers rather than shortcuts. Strong fluency with Claude Enterprise and GitHub Copilot is expected. This role has historically been an early adopter of AI for AAR analysis, document generation, and structured reasoning. POSITION LOCATION: This is a hybrid position based in our world-class Deerfield, IL campus OR San Francisco, CA, with flexibility to work from home on Mondays and Fridays. The campus offers vibrant, collaborative workspaces, along with amenities for dining, onsite daycare, fitness, and recreation. Given the globally distributed nature of CPE, occasional off-hours coordination and limited travel should be expected. Key Responsibilities  Incident Governance & AAR Program • Own the CPE After Action Review (AAR) program end-to-end: from incident declaration through hotwash facilitation, AAR authorship, corrective action assignment, and closure tracking • Facilitate hotwash and post-mortem sessions with engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders; produce written findings with root cause analysis and corrective action plans • Maintain the AAR tracker in Confluence; ensure all open corrective actions are visible, assigned, time-bounded, and progressing • Monitor for systemic patterns across incidents (infrastructure, mobile, IoT platform, security) and surface risk to CPE and brand leadership proactively • Coordinate distribution of AAR findings to appropriate leadership audiences — including brand leadership (Yale, August, Moen, Master Lock) and IT leadership — based on incident scope • Drive cross-team accountability for corrective action execution — not just tracking, but closure • Monitor active incidents in CPE's incident management channels and serve as the coordination point between engineering, product, and leadership during escalations • Develop and maintain incident response playbooks and standard operating procedures across water, security, access control, and platform product lines • Maintain the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for Connected Products Engineering; ensure on-call rotation clarity and escalation path documentation are current and understoodContinuous Improvement Portfolio • Own and drive CPE's portfolio of continuous improvement and internal projects — including corrective action workstreams, process reform initiatives, and organizational capability investments • Partner with engineering and program leadership to identify process gaps and build the improvement roadmap • Facilitate agile training and process adoption initiatives as assigned by senior leadership • Champion AI productivity tooling adoption (Claude Enterprise, GitHub Copilot) within incident documentation and internal project workflowsExecutive Communications & Business Justification • Draft executive communications, point papers, and business justifications on behalf of CPE leadership — including CEO-level briefs, budget justifications, and program status updates • Translate complex operational and engineering findings into clear, business-readable language for FBIN leadership and cross-brand stakeholders • Produce structured proposals for organizational capability investments (tooling, headcount, process programs) with ROI framing and risk analysisOrganizational Process & Knowledge Management • Coordinate with Jira and Confluence to ensure project tracking is structured, visible, and auditable • Work with system owners to maintain program structure in Confluence, including Frontdoor, space organization, and program-to-page linking • Maintain documentation infrastructure in Confluence that makes CPE's operational history navigable and actionable