Program Manager, Cultural Events and Experiences
Apply on Dutch Bros Coffee's site
It's fun to work in a company where people truly believe in what they are doing. At Dutch Bros Coffee, we are more than just a coffee company. We are a fun-loving, mind-blowing company that makes a difference one cup at a time.
Position Overview
This role sits at the intersection of events, brand partnerships, field activations, apparel, and culture, owning the programs, systems, and cross-functional execution that turn big ideas into exceptional experiences.
You’ll be the person who can take a complex, multi-team initiative and turn it into a clear plan: aligning stakeholders, building timelines, managing budgets, identifying risks, coordinating creative and production partners, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
From A Better World (ABW) and field leadership experiences to brand partnerships, field activations, internal apparel programs, and cultural programming, you’ll help build scalable programs that strengthen how Dutch Bros shows up for our employees, our customers, and our partners.
This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a fast-moving environment, able to navigate ambiguity, communicate the team vision to SLT, loves bringing people and teams together, and is equally comfortable building a workback schedule, managing a vendor, reviewing a creative brief, analyzing a budget, or jumping onsite to make an experience happen.
Key Result Areas
A Better World (ABW) Program Management
- Serve as the program management partner to the Employee Experience lead who owns ABW, providing the structure, planning discipline, and cross-functional coordination that keeps one of Dutch Bros’ largest leadership experiences moving forward.
- Build and maintain the master workback schedule, critical path, and dependency map across creative, content, production, venue, AV, talent, travel, merchandise, and partner workstreams.
- Run the operating cadence for ABW, including planning meetings, status reviews, decision logs, action tracking, and risk registers.
- Create clarity and accountability across workstream owners by establishing milestones, owners, deadlines, and clear definitions of done.
- Surface risks, dependencies, and bottlenecks early and bring forward recommended solutions so decisions can be made quickly.
- Coordinate Creative Studio and partner-team contributions, ensuring briefs, timelines, review checkpoints, and deliverables are aligned.
- Partner with vendors and external agencies to coordinate scopes, timelines, deliverables, and onsite execution.
- Track ABW spend against forecast in partnership with the event owner, maintaining visibility into commitments, invoices, and overall budget health.
- Support executive and leadership preparation through concise status reporting, briefing materials, decision points, and meeting preparation.
- Lead post-event analysis, incorporating attendee feedback, cost performance, operational learnings, and stakeholder input into future planning.
- Codify ABW planning into a repeatable program management playbook that can scale to regional, leadership, and new-market culture experiences.
Brand Partnerships & Field Activation Programs
- Own program management and execution infrastructure for strategic brand partnerships, field activations, and consumer-facing experiences.
- Partner with Brand, Field Marketing, Creative, Operations, and external partners to translate partnership objectives into executable programs.
- Build activation plans that define scope, deliverables, timelines, owners, budgets, partner commitments, and success measures.
- Manage partner workbacks and ensure Dutch Bros deliverables are completed on time and to brand standards.
- Coordinate onsite activation logistics including staffing, product, apparel, signage, experiential elements, shipping, vendors, and field execution.
- Serve as a central point of contact between internal teams and external brand partners, creating clear communication and accountability.
- Develop repeatable activation frameworks and tiering models that allow the team to deliver more high-quality experiences with less bespoke work.
- Track partnership commitments, activation deliverables, and key milestones to ensure both internal and external stakeholders deliver against expectations.
- Conduct post-activation recaps to evaluate execution, engagement, partner experience, operational efficiency, and opportunities for improvement.
- Help identify opportunities to evolve the brand partnership experience through new activation concepts, scalable tools, and stronger operational practices.
Internal Apparel & Merchandise Programs
- Lead the program management of employee-facing apparel and merchandise experiences, helping evolve apparel from a transactional benefit into an engaging employee and brand experience.
- Manage the planning calendar for internal apparel programs, including seasonal drops, employee merchandise programs, special events, and cultural moments.
- Partner with Creative, Brand, Merchandising, vendors, and Employee Experience to bring apparel concepts from idea through sourcing, production, launch, and fulfillment.
- Build timelines and critical paths across design, approvals, sourcing, production, inventory, fulfillment, communications, and launch.
- Coordinate employee apparel experiences that prioritize choice, quality, accessibility, ease, and brand connection.
- Manage vendor relationships and ensure deliverables, quality standards, pricing, and timelines are aligned.
- Track apparel program budgets, forecasts, commitments, and actual spend.
- Develop scalable processes for employee merchandise distribution, shopping experiences, pop-ups, ecommerce, and event-based apparel.
- Use employee feedback, participation data, and program performance to continuously improve the apparel experience.
- Partner with Brand and Creative to ensure internal apparel programs reinforce Dutch Bros’ brand identity and serve as an authentic employee influence and advocacy channel.
- Build repeatable playbooks and operating standards that make apparel programs easier to execute across the organization.
Cultural Programming & Employee Experiences
- Help design and operationalize cultural programming that brings Dutch Bros’ values, leadership philosophy, and employee experience to life.
- Partner with Employee Experience leadership to translate cultural priorities into meaningful programs, experiences, and activations.
- Build and manage program plans for cultural moments, leadership experiences, employee activations, recognition programs, and other high-impact internal experiences.
- Coordinate cross-functional teams across Creative, Internal Brand, Operations, People, Communications, and Field teams.
- Create repeatable programming frameworks that can scale across HQ, field, and new markets.
- Ensure experiences are thoughtfully planned from concept through execution, including communications, logistics, staffing, content, production, and onsite experience.
- Incorporate employee feedback and engagement data into program design and continuous improvement.
- Identify opportunities to make cultural programming more experiential, relevant, and connected to the everyday employee experience.
- Help create consistent tools, resources, and playbooks that enable leaders and teams to activate culture in their own environments.
Cross-Department Program Management
- Serve as the central program management function across Employee Experience and Field Marketing, creating a single view of active programs, owners, timelines, capacity, and risks.
- Build and manage a unified intake and prioritization process so incoming requests are appropriately scoped, sequenced, and staffed against team capacity.
- Establish a tiering structure for events and activations that enables more turnkey execution while reserving custom solutions for the highest-impact opportunities.
- Apply the appropriate level of project management rigor to each initiative—from detailed critical-path planning for high-stakes programs to lighter, iterative processes for creative development.
- Maintain a portfolio dashboard that provides leadership with visibility into project status, capacity, risk, budget, and blockers.
- Identify dependencies and conflicts across teams and drive resolution before they impact delivery.
- Establish and continuously improve standards, templates, tools, and operating rhythms that allow teams to execute consistently as the organization scales.
- Create clarity across ambiguous projects by defining scope, ownership, milestones, decisions, and next steps.
- Build systems that allow the team to spend less time managing process and more time creating exceptional experiences.
Executive Partnership & Event Preparation
- Act as a strategic thought partner to the team leader and a trusted representative of the department across cross-functional initiatives.
- Help prioritize workstreams and align execution with department and company goals.
- Prepare executive-ready updates, dashboards, decks, timelines, and briefing materials that clearly communicate progress, risks, decisions, and recommendations.
- Represent the department in cross-functional meetings and partner forums, speaking confidently to status, dependencies, and tradeoffs.
- Anticipate roadblocks and bring recommended solutions rather than open problems.
- Shape high-impact leadership meetings by coordinating agendas, pre-work, decisions, and post-meeting follow-through.
- Create clarity and momentum in environments where priorities, stakeholders, and requirements may change quickly.
- Build strong relationships across the organization and become a trusted partner to teams relying on Employee Experience and Field Marketing to deliver.
Planning, Budget & Continuous Improvement
- Build the operational infrastructure that allows Employee Experience and Field Marketing programs to scale while maintaining a high bar for quality and experience.
- Manage the annual operating calendar, including budget planning cycles, major events, apparel launches, partnership activations, cultural programming, and key deliverables.
- Monitor department budgets and ensure spend aligns with strategic priorities.
- Track forecasts, commitments, actual spend, and variances across major programs.
- Conduct research, benchmarking, and analysis to inform decisions around process, tooling, staffing models, vendors, and program design.
- Evaluate and refine systems and workflows to reduce friction, improve visibility, and increase the team's capacity for high-value work.
- Develop post-program reporting and insights that turn executional learnings into better future programs.
- Establish metrics and feedback loops that help the team understand participation, engagement, efficiency, and program impact.
- Serve as a point of connection between Employee Experience, Field Marketing, Brand, Creative, Operations, and other partner teams.
- Continuously look for ways to make programs more scalable, more efficient, more engaging, and more distinctly Dutch Bros.
Skills
- Executive Presence — Commands credibility with senior leaders. Communicates status, risk, and tradeoffs with clarity and confidence, and can represent the department in rooms where decisions get made.
- Adaptive Project Management — Fluent in multiple methodologies and knows when to apply which. Brings hard structure to live event execution and lighter, iterative rhythms to creative development.
- Large-Scale Event Program Management — Builds and manages critical path, dependencies, and timelines for complex multi-day events with many contributing teams and owners.
- Creative Workflow Fluency — Understands how creative work actually gets made. Builds process that protects the work instead of slowing it down.
- Cross-Functional Orchestration — Connects two departments and multiple external partners, aligning intake, handoffs, and delivery without friction.
- Prioritization & Capacity Management — Sees where resources are strained before it becomes a problem and helps leadership make clear-eyed calls on what gets done, deferred, or dropped.
- Risk Anticipation & Problem Solving — Anticipates roadblocks, escalates early with options attached, and solves problems in real time under pressure.
- Clear Communication & Documentation — Produces clean, executive-ready documentation—workback schedules, dashboards, briefs, and updates that leaders can act on immediately.
- Budget & Resource Tracking — Maintains visibility into program spend and vendor commitments, and ensures resources stay aligned to strategic priorities.
- Emotional Intelligence & Adaptability — Builds trust across creative and operational partners, handles sensitive information with care, and stays steady through change and ambiguity.
Job Qualifications
REQUIRED
- Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience
- 6+ years of experience in program or project management, preferably spanning creative production, brand marketing, event production, or agency environments
- Demonstrated experience program-managing a large-scale, multi-day live event or comparable high-visibility initiative—building workback schedules, tracking cross-functional workstreams, and managing risk through execution
- Experience managing creative workflows and production pipelines (design, video, campaign development) with competing intake and shifting priorities
- Fluency in more than one project management methodology and the judgment to flex between them; able to right-size process to the work rather than impose a single system
- Strong executive presence, including experience presenting to and building materials for senior leaders, and comfort representing a department in cross-functional settings
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives across multiple stakeholders, departments, and competing priorities
- High level of maturity, discretion, and professional judgment
- Advanced proficiency in project and portfolio management tools (Asana, Monday, Smartsheet, Wrike, or equivalent) and MS Office, especially Excel and PowerPoint as well as AI automation.
PREFERRED
- Dutch Bros field experience, preferably leadership experience of Shop Manager or above
- Experience working closely with senior executives or leadership teams
- Project management certification (PMP, CAPM, PMI-ACP, CSM, or equivalent)
- Background in event production, program management, field marketing events or a live production environment
- Working familiarity with event production operations—AV, venue coordination, vendor contracts, and speaker logistics—sufficient to plan, sequence, and pressure-test timelines accurately
- Experience tracking program-level budgets and coordinating vendor deliverables
- Experience supporting a team through rapid growth or scaling
- Familiarity with resource and capacity planning models for creative teams
Location Requirement:
This role is located in Tempe, AZ. This position is required to be in office 4 days per week (Mon-Thurs); Fridays are optional remote work days.
Ability to travel for ABW and other field-facing culture events, including extended on-site hours during event windows.
Physical Requirements
- In-Office Environment: Must be able to work in a busy, crowded, and loud office with frequent distractions and interruptions
- Must be able to collaborate in-person with occasional impromptu in-person meetings
- Office Conditions: Adaptability to typical office conditions, which may include exposure to air conditioning, heating, artificial lighting, and varying noise levels
- Mobility: Ability to sit, stand, reach, twist, stretch, and work at a desk for long stretches. Must be able to occasionally move or lift office items up to 25 pounds
- Event Environment: This role includes on-site event execution, which may require extended periods of standing and walking, long or irregular hours, and travel during event windows
- Hearing Requirements: Hearing must be sufficient or correctable to ensure clear understanding of spoken information, including participating in virtual meetings and phone calls. Use of hearing aids or other assistive devices is acceptable if needed.
- Reading and Writing Proficiency: Ability to read and write in English is essential for processing documents, drafting reports, and following up on necessary actions. Proficiency in written communication is required to handle job-related tasks effectively.
- Vision Requirements: Vision must be adequate or correctable to perform essential job duties, such as reading documents on a computer screen and using other visual tools. Use of corrective lenses or other measures to meet visual requirements is expected if needed.
- Technology Proficiency: Must be proficient in operating a computer and other office productivity tools such as printers, scanners, and collaboration software.
- Effective Communication: Must possess strong verbal and written communication skills to interact effectively with team members, clients, and other stakeholders via email, video conferencing, and other in office communication tools.
Compensation:
DOE
If you like wild growth and working in a unique and fun environment, surrounded by positive community, you'll enjoy your career with us!
About Dutch Bros Coffee
Dutch Bros is a high-growth operator and franchisor of drive-thru shops that focus on serving hand-crafted beverages.