Commercial Production Manager

About TEGNA

TEGNA Inc. helps people thrive in their local communities by providing the trusted local news and services that matter most. With 64 television stations in 51 U.S. markets, TEGNA reaches more than 100 million people monthly across the web, mobile apps, streaming, and linear television. Together, we are building a sustainable future for local news.

We are looking for an experienced

Commercial Production Manager to lead a distributed team of commercial producers and oversee the delivery of high-quality commercial video content across multiple TEGNA markets. This role will directly manage approximately 8–10 commercial producers located in different markets, providing leadership, coaching, prioritization, and operational support to ensure the team consistently delivers strong work for our clients and sales partners.

The Commercial Production Manager will be a key partner to local sales leadership and sales teams, helping create effective workflows between sales and production, balance client needs with production resources, and continuously improve how commercial creative is developed and delivered. The ideal candidate combines strong production expertise with people leadership, practical problem-solving, collaboration, and change management skills.

This person should be comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment, introducing new processes and technologies, and finding pragmatic solutions that improve both quality and efficiency.

Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership & Development: Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of approximately 8–10 commercial producers across multiple TEGNA markets. Establish clear expectations, provide regular feedback, support professional development, and foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, creativity, and high performance.
• Production Leadership: Provide oversight and direction for commercial production from concept through final delivery, ensuring work is completed efficiently, on time, within budget, and to established quality standards.
• Sales Partnership: Build strong, collaborative relationships with local sales leaders and sales teams. Serve as a trusted production partner who understands business priorities, client needs, and market realities and helps teams develop practical solutions that support revenue and client retention.
• Sales & Production Workflow: Develop, implement, and continuously improve systems and processes that create seamless collaboration between sales and production. Establish clear expectations, roles, timelines, and communication practices across teams.
• Resource & Workload Management: Manage production capacity and priorities across multiple markets, balancing workloads and deploying resources effectively to meet client and business needs.
• Change Management: Lead teams through evolving production processes, organizational changes, and new technologies and tools, including AI-enabled capabilities. Help producers and sales partners understand the rationale for change, adopt new ways of working, and translate new processes into practical day-to-day execution.
• Operational Improvement: Identify opportunities to simplify workflows, improve turnaround times, increase consistency, and scale best practices across markets. Take a pragmatic approach to solving problems, balancing ideal creative solutions with business needs, available resources, timelines, and budgets.
• Client Experience: Ensure production teams understand client objectives and deliver a professional, responsive experience throughout the production process. Step in as needed to help resolve complex client or production issues.
• Quality Control: Establish and maintain strong creative and technical standards across the team, providing guidance and feedback to ensure commercial content meets both client expectations and TEGNA standards.
• Production Planning: Ensure effective production planning across markets, including scheduling, budgeting, location needs, talent coordination, equipment, and other production resources.
• Budget & Vendor Management: Oversee production budgets and the effective use of external vendors, freelancers, and contractors. Ensure resources are used responsibly and projects remain within financial parameters.
• Problem Solving & Escalation: Anticipate and resolve production, staffing, workflow, and client challenges. Exercise sound judgment and provide practical solutions that keep work moving while maintaining strong relationships with internal and external partners.
• Compliance: Ensure production activities comply with applicable legal, safety, contractual, rights, and clearance requirements.
• Performance & Reporting: Monitor team workload, production performance, timelines, quality, and other key measures. Provide visibility to leadership on performance, opportunities, and areas requiring attention.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Film Production, Media Studies, Communications, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ years of experience in commercial video production, production management, creative operations, or a related field.
• Extensive experience with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, specifically Premiere and After Effects.
• Demonstrated experience leading and developing teams, preferably including employees working across multiple locations or markets.
• Strong understanding of video production workflows, including pre-production, shooting, post-production, and delivery.
• Proven ability to build strong partnerships with sales teams, business leaders, creative teams, and other cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience leading teams through process, technology, or organizational change, with the ability to build adoption and maintain momentum during periods of transition.
• Strong organizational and operational skills, with the ability to manage competing priorities, allocate resources, and make sound decisions in a fast-paced environment.
• A pragmatic, solutions-oriented mindset with the judgment to balance creative quality, client expectations, business priorities, timelines, and available resources.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to navigate challenging conversations, resolve conflicts, and build credibility across different functions and levels of the organization.
• Experience managing production budgets and external vendors or contractors.
• Comfort working with evolving production technologies and tools, including AI-enabled creative and production capabilities.
• Location: Any TEGNA station within the Northwest region, preferably Portland, OR or Seattle, WA

Pay Range

$90,000 — $120,000 USD