Senior Program & Digital Production Manager

Tom
Schoenberg

20+ years building the processes, teams, and systems behind enterprise-scale digital programs — from Chevrolet.com's 10 million monthly users to designing the digital production methodology for Rocket Mortgage.

20+
Years of program leadership
10M
Monthly users on Chevrolet.com
150K
Silverado EV preorders at launch
5 → 2
Rounds of changes required
"Turnaround times for simple maintenance requests dropped from 8 days to 8 hours, and schedules for large-scale builds were cut by weeks."

Areas of expertise

A cross-functional skill set built across agencies, publishers, and enterprise clients spanning two decades.

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Program & project management

End-to-end lifecycle ownership for complex, multi-workstream programs — from discovery through delivery. Proven at enterprise scale with global brand clients.

Agile / ScrumRisk mitigationSchedule dev.Portfolio mgmt
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Digital production operations

Designed and managed production processes for high-traffic websites and platforms. Led teams of producers through content deployment, QA, and platform migrations.

CMS managementWeb deploymentsQA oversightPlatform migration
Signature
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Process creation & documentation

Champion of building scalable, repeatable processes from scratch. Created manuals, templates, onboarding programs, and workflows adopted across large teams.

Process designSOPsTrainingOnboarding
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Client & stakeholder relations

Primary point of contact for major automotive clients across a decade. Maintained weekly reporting cadences and constant cross-functional communication.

Client relationsCross-agencyExecutive comms
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Resource & budget management

Managed seven-figure vendor budgets and resource allocation across teams of 8–15 producers. Delivered consistently on time and under budget.

Budget oversightVendor mgmtResource planning
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Tools & platforms

Deep hands-on fluency with the full project management and production toolchain used across agency and enterprise environments.

WorkfrontJIRASmartsheetFigmaMonday.comSharePoint

Let's talk about your next program.

Whether you're standing up a new digital production operation, navigating a complex platform migration, or just need a steady hand on something in motion — I'd like to hear about it.

Blog

Writing on process, program management, and the work of building durable digital operations.

See, there's this triangle…

If you've worked with me long enough, you've heard me say the above at least once. Possibly dozens of times. It's the basis of my approach to managing a project.

As project managers we have a million tools to visualize our work. But as useful as a burn chart or a workflow diagram is, neither is foundational enough to start work with. The spreadsheets and calendar a project manager lives and breathes in can make a massive difference in if you hit your goals, and how you get to them. But they're late steps, granular and specific. You can't start new work without something more essential, more foundational.

See, there's this triangle…

TIME RESOURCES SCOPE QUALITY
The project management triangle.

There's nothing more critical to a project manager than what's in this triangle. What are we making? How much time do we have? What resources can we tap? If we can answer these questions in detail early on in a project, we set ourselves up for success. Once the triangle is roughed out, everyone on the team will be in tune with the project's goals and broad needs. Nothing makes the team's work smoother than everyone on the same page.

The triangle isn't just a diagram. It's a lead to start asking the three most important questions we ask when we decide to do a thing. Step zero of any endeavor, business or otherwise, is what to do when and how.

Figuring out the answers to the basic questions above leads to more—is the scope locked? Are resource requests in? Being a project manager who (seemingly) knows all the answers requires being one who asks the right questions throughout the process. And the best way to ask the good questions is to ask a lot of them.

The best way to ensure a project's successful completion in my mind is to start with questions and keep asking them until you have a triangle the whole team can understand and get into sync. Then you can go deeper, asking more thoughtful and more specific questions. That's how you mitigate risk. That's how you reduce stress and improve quality. Teams that know the goal and the expectations are happier and more productive.

So how foundational is the triangle to me? I've been wanting a tattoo of it for decades. Just so when I inevitably bring it up I have a ready visual aid.

That is not a joke I made up for this blog, in case you were curious.

Selected work

Two case studies from a decade managing Chevrolet.com — one about rebuilding how a global team operates, one about launching under impossible conditions.

Digital Production Program Manager, Chevrolet.com

When Chevrolet.com needed a full rebuild, I used the effort to redesign cross-organizational operations.

I reduced turnaround times and rounds of revisions while leading a team to maintain and simultaneously redesign one of the world's largest automotive brand sites.

400
Distinct URLs migrated
8 mo.
Project duration
75
Stakeholders coordinated
5 → 2
Correction rounds reduced

During a high-pressure platform migration for a major brand website, I seized the opportunity to change how the cross-organizational Chevrolet website team operated by rebuilding a conflict-prone and inefficient production system.

Digital Production Program Manager, Chevrolet.com

The Silverado EV launch was a new beginning for the brand, so Chevrolet asked us to match Apple to sell it.

I led a team of 20 to design and build a groundbreaking multi-page microsite while simultaneously onboarding a new Agile team building the new platform the site would live on. This all occurred on a tight schedule in the midst of the COVID crisis.

150K
Vehicle preorders at launch
20+
Team members led
10 mo.
From brief to CES reveal
Record
Traffic for any Chevrolet reveal

In 2020, Chevrolet solidified its "All-electric" pledge by unveiling the Silverado EV.

Career experience

Over two decades of progressive leadership across agency, enterprise, and publishing environments.

Download resume (PDF) ↓
#1
Chevrolet.com — JD Power automotive ranking
7-figure
Vendor budgets overseen at Commonwealth//McCann
11 yrs
Tenure as lead producer for a global automotive brand
Oct 2024 – July 2025
Rocket Mortgage · Detroit, MI
Digital Production & Project Management Consultant
Independent Contractor
  • Partnered with the marketing division and a team of 10 producers to design and implement digital production processes for web deployments.
  • Conducted cross-functional interviews and gathered documentation to shape production process creation from the ground up.
  • Established a new methodology for initiating, estimating, and executing projects — including schedule development, delivery management, and project cadence.
  • Presented roadmap and methodology to senior and executive Creative leadership.
  • Led process integration discussions for 9 distinct open-web proposals using the newly created methodology.
Oct 2013 – Oct 2024
Commonwealth//McCann · Detroit, MI
Senior Digital Producer & Program Manager
Chevrolet.com · 11 Years
  • Oversaw end-to-end production for Chevrolet.com — the #1 automotive manufacturer website per JD Power — supporting 10M monthly users.
  • Reduced content update turnaround from 3–5 days to 8 hours or less through process redesign.
  • Launched dozens of high-visibility sites including the Silverado EV microsite, first mid-engine Corvette site, and full Chevrolet EV information environment.
  • Managed a portfolio of 250–500 individual site projects annually; personally completed 50–100 per year.
  • Led 4 full platform, design system, and CMS migrations involving large-scale content management, functionality development, and cross-functional coordination.
  • Oversaw work for 8–10 producers; developed and delivered onboarding training for all producers joining 2014–2024.
  • Managed seven-figure vendor budgets, consistently delivering on time and under budget.
Mar 2012 – Oct 2013
Cengage Learning · Farmington Hills, MI
Product Manager
Promoted from Senior Editor
  • Served as Product Owner for an Agile team of 15, managing a library reference database used across thousands of libraries.
  • Managed day-to-day development for digital reference platforms providing 7M user sessions yearly.
  • Partnered cross-functionally to support $35M in annual revenue.
Jan 1998 – Mar 2012
Cengage Learning · Farmington Hills, MI
Senior Editor & Project Manager
14-Year Tenure
  • Scaled a reference book series from 8 volumes per year to 26 volumes per year while streamlining documentation and processes.
  • Generated $3M in annual sales across high-volume e-book and print projects.
  • Launched two library manuscript web application projects involving the digitization of hundreds of thousands of images.

How I work

Good process serves people. Strong teams serve clients. Honest accountability keeps the cycle alive.

Process first

The root cause of most project failures isn't the resources, the scope, or the talent involved. It's churn—all those things that drain efficiency and breed confusion, increase stress and foster miscommunication. Preventing churn is the whole point of building process.

To build solid processes and reduce churn, I begin every project by learning how work actually flows. I conduct interviews, review existing documentation, and watch as the team does the work. I find the pain points, see where the risks will be, and smooth the bumps. I build processes that are clear, repeatable, extensible, and owned by the team. They're flexible enough to change as business needs do, but robust enough that following the process will make the work faster and easier to complete.

At Rocket Mortgage I started with cross-functional interviews before writing a single process document. At Commonwealth//McCann I built and refined the Chevrolet.com production methodology over 11 years and across 4 platform migrations, continuously improving speed to market and reducing errors. I worked with our partner agency to document cross-organizational processes and establish a formalized system for process improvement and rollout. And at Cengage Learning, I entered a situation without process documentation and created it. That documentation was implemented department-wide and used for future onboarding.

The processes I created built upon themselves—changes to responsibility matrices led to changes to file storage, which led to gains in accuracy. And that led to better work and less stress for team members and clients alike.

No process can thrive without changing as its scope and needs expand. A good process is not only living, it's evolving.

Three properties every process I build must have. Each one enables the next.

CLARITY REPEATABILITY EXTENSIBILITY

Get in touch

Open to senior program management, digital production leadership, and consulting engagements.

Let's talk about your next program.

Whether you're standing up a new digital production operation, managing a complex platform migration, or need a seasoned PM to bring structure to a fast-moving environment — I'd like to hear about it.

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Location
Detroit, MI
✉️
Email
tom.j.schoenberg@gmail.com

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