Associate Strategy and Performance Manager (UAE National)

Life at Dubai Future Foundation

Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) aims to realize the wise vision of Dubai’s leadership to keep Dubai 10 years ahead, institutionalizing future-oriented thinking and forward-looking methodologies that position Dubai as the leading city of the future.

In collaboration with government entities, global institutions, startups, and innovators, DFF drives collective efforts to imagine, design, and execute the best possible future for humanity.

Under the supervision of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of DFF, the Foundation oversees a portfolio of initiatives that include the Museum of the Future, Area 2071, Dubai Future Accelerators, Dubai Future Labs, Dubai Future Academy, Dubai Future Forum, Dubai Centre for AI, and the Dubai RDI Program.

Through these platforms, DFF institutionalizes foresight, enables innovation, builds talent, and designs the systems and industries that will keep Dubai 10 years ahead in every dimension of its future.

For more information on the initiatives, projects, and programs of Dubai Future Foundation, please visit the website: www.dubaifuture.ae

Where does this role fit into the bigger picture?

The Associate Strategy and Performance Manager reports directly to the Senior Strategy Manager, Strategy and Performance, within the Strategy and Strategic Capital Department at DFF.

This vertical focuses on delivering with intention — owning strategic planning-cycle management, portfolio governance, the institutional PMO, capital allocation, operating-model and process design, enterprise digital transformation, and the performance frameworks that keep DFF’s initiatives aligned, funded, resourced, and on track.

Why this role is important?

This role is the bridge between DFF’s strategy and its delivery. By translating moonshots into mandates, holding the portfolio accountable against measurable goals, keeping a disciplined eye on capital and human-capital alignment, and modernising how DFF operates, you ensure leadership can steer every initiative toward measurable, well-funded, well-resourced impact — and that the organisation itself stays fit to keep Dubai 10 years ahead.

Associate Manager

As the Associate Strategy and Performance Manager, you will act as the connective tissue between leadership intent and execution — translating DFF’s vision, moonshots, and annual priorities into clear mandates, and surfacing project realities, risks, and trade-offs back to leadership in decision-ready form.
Your remit runs beyond individual projects: you will help shape DFF’s operating model, support its digital transformation and adoption of new tools, and partner with Finance and HR to keep capital and human-capital growth aligned to budget. The role demands a rare dual capability — the strategic mindset to connect every initiative to DFF’s moonshots, and the delivery and financial discipline to make sure it actually ships, on budget and on impact.

Strategic Needs Translation (Corporate ↔ Project)

• You will build a deep, current understanding of DFF’s needs at both the corporate level (vision, moonshots, annual priorities) and the project level (objectives, constraints, dependencies, delivery status).
• You will engage continuously with project teams to understand their needs first-hand and anticipate problems before they escalate
• You will translate high-level strategic direction into clear, actionable mandates for project teams, and surface project-level realities, risks, and trade-offs back to leadership in a structured, decision-ready form.
• You will maintain a living, enterprise-wide view of the portfolio so leadership always has an accurate picture of what is in flight, what it is delivering, and where it stands against strategy.

Portfolio Alignment, Orchestration & Cross-Functional Delivery

• You will align efforts across the portfolio — identifying overlaps, gaps, dependencies, and synergies — and ensure every initiative is explicitly mapped to DFF’s moonshots, challenging or escalating efforts that drift.
• You will establish and run portfolio governance — prioritisation frameworks, stage gates, and decision forums — that keep resources flowing to the highest-impact work.
• You will conduct analysis on the innovation funnel and initiative readiness, advising which initiatives are ready to advance, pause, or stop.
• You will manage cross-project dependencies and resolve conflicts in scope, timing, or resourcing before they compromise delivery.
• You will coordinate directly with project owners and verticals to monitor progress, remove blockers, and unblock initiatives where they are stuck, and drive a consistent cadence of portfolio reviews, status reporting, and milestone tracking.

Goal-Setting, OKRs & Scorecard Supervision

• You will set, review, and approve project and portfolio goals — ensuring they are ambitious, measurable, and explicitly tied to DFF’s moonshots — and hold initiatives accountable against them.
• You will develop and supervise OKR-based scorecards across the portfolio, cascading objectives from corporate strategy down to initiative level and keeping them current.
• You will track and maintain portfolio-level KPIs and scorecards, giving leadership a clear, current view of where the portfolio stands against target.
• You will translate delivery and performance data into early-warning indicators, flagging at-risk initiatives and recommending course corrections with supporting analysis.

FP&A, Financial Oversight & Capital Allocation

• You will build and maintain a clear FP&A view of each project — budgets, spend, forecasts, and variance — and consolidate these into a portfolio-level financial picture.
• You will partner closely with Finance to support DFF’s annual budget cycles, building the bottom-up and top-down inputs that connect portfolio plans to budget.
• You will work with HR to ensure DFF’s human-capital growth and headcount plans stay aligned with budgets and portfolio priorities.
• You will support capital-allocation decisions — helping leadership direct funding to the highest-return initiatives and challenging spend that is not earning its place.
• You will apply business-case discipline, linking project spend to expected impact and strategic return, and translate financial data into clear delivery decisions.

Operating Model & Process Design

• You will help design and evolve DFF’s operating model — structures, roles, decision rights, and ways of working — so the organisation is set up to deliver against strategy.
• You will document and critically assess DFF’s existing strategic and operational processes, mapping how work actually flows across the organisation.
• You will design, optimise, and institutionalise processes that improve clarity, consistency, and speed of execution, and lead process re-engineering initiatives end-to-end — diagnosis, redesign, and change adoption.
• You will apply lean, agile, and design-thinking methodologies to continuously improve how DFF plans, governs, and delivers.

Digital Transformation, Tooling & AI Enablement

• You will support DFF’s digital transformation agenda at the enterprise level — extending the PMO’s mandate beyond individual projects to how the organisation operates as a whole.
• You will support the adoption of new tools and platforms across DFF, helping drive and measure uptake so investments translate into real change in ways of working.
• You will map processes to DFF’s available tools, identify where tooling is underused, duplicated, or missing, and optimise the process–tool fit.
• You will work natively with AI tools and emerging technologies, and develop or meaningfully contribute to new AI-enabled solutions that enhance how DFF operates.

Governance, Reporting & Stakeholder Management

• You will establish and maintain PMO standards, templates, and reporting frameworks that bring consistency to how projects are planned, tracked, and communicated.
• You will develop and own a central project-management dashboard as the single source of truth on portfolio status, milestones, financials, and risks, keeping it continuously and accurately updated.
• You will produce executive-ready briefings, portfolio reviews, and board-level presentations that turn dashboard data into clear, persuasive decisions and recommendations.
• You will identify, track, and mitigate portfolio-level risks and issues, maintaining clear escalation paths and decision logs.
• You will manage relationships with internal stakeholders across seniority levels, building trust and driving alignment.

What Dubai Future Foundation offers

DFF offers a dynamic and mission-driven environment that values collaboration, excellence, and measurable impact. You will work alongside multidisciplinary teams passionate about execution, innovation, and the future of Dubai. Expect diverse challenges, high-level exposure, and the opportunity to contribute directly to shaping Dubai’s readiness for the future.

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Finance, Economics, or a related discipline; an advanced degree (MBA, MSc) is a plus.
• 3–5 years of experience spanning both strategy and delivery — for example, a top-tier consulting firm (McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, Accenture Strategy, or equivalent) combined with PMO, programme/project-management, or strategy-execution roles.
• Project/portfolio-management certification (PMP, PRINCE2, PgMP, or Agile/Scrum) is an advantage.
• Strong dual capability: the strategic mindset to connect work to vision and moonshots, and the delivery discipline to make sure it ships.
• Solid FP&A and financial acumen — comfortable with budgets, forecasts, and variance, supporting annual budget cycles and capital-allocation decisions, and keeping human-capital growth aligned to budget.
• Experience in operating-model design and/or enterprise digital transformation — including driving the adoption of new tools and platforms across an organisation — is highly valued.
• Exceptional structured problem-solving — able to break ambiguous