Proposal Development Manager

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

Job Description

Proposal Development Manager

Position Summary

The Proposal Development Manager is responsible for leading the day-to-day activities and performance of the proposal development team, ensuring resources are effectively aligned to business needs and proposal assignments are delivered with consistent quality, accuracy, and timeliness.

This role directly manages and develops proposal professionals, oversees workload and assignment distribution, monitors proposal schedules and deadlines, and provides hands-on guidance to resolve delivery challenges and maintain quality standards. The manager serves as the primary point of coordination for the proposal development team, balancing capacity, priorities, complexity, and development needs across assignments.

In addition to people leadership, this role provides strategic, writing, and editorial leadership for complex or high-priority opportunities and helps ensure proposals are developed through a disciplined, collaborative process. Deliverables must be client-focused, persuasive, compliant, and aligned with established proposal strategy, processes, and standards.

Key Responsibilities

Proposal Development Team Leadership

Directly manage, coach, and develop proposal writers.

Establish clear expectations for writing quality, project execution, collaboration, responsiveness, and deadline management.

Provide ongoing coaching, feedback, mentoring, and writing guidance.

Identify individual and team development needs and help build proposal writing capabilities.

Support onboarding and training of new proposal writers.

Build greater consistency across the team in writing quality, client-centric messaging, executive communication, and proposal execution.

Day-to-Day Workload & Assignment Management

Manage daily proposal writer assignments and workload across the team.

Assess capacity, proposal complexity, deadlines, and writer capabilities when assigning work.

Monitor workloads and rebalance assignments when priorities or capacity change.

Maintain visibility into upcoming deadlines, resource constraints, competing priorities, and delivery risks.

Serve as the first point of escalation for writer capacity or delivery challenges.

Coordinate coverage for planned and unplanned absences.

Escalate significant capacity, prioritization, or delivery risks to the Head of

Proposal Strategy & Management.

End-to-End Proposal Development Oversight

Provide oversight across the portfolio of active proposal development assignments, from kickoff and strategy alignment through content development, review, and submission.

Monitor progress against key milestones, content deadlines, review cycles, pens-down dates, and submission requirements.

Help writers resolve obstacles that could affect quality or delivery.

Reinforce accountability for established proposal processes and deadlines.

Ensure appropriate escalation when contributors or stakeholders miss critical deadlines.

Provide hands-on support for complex, high-value, or time-sensitive assignments when needed.

Writing & Quality Leadership

Serve as the proposal development, writing, and editorial leader for the team.

Review and strengthen executive summaries, strategic narratives, key proposal sections, and other high-visibility content.

Coach writers on translating complex product, technical, and business information into clear, compelling client value.

Reinforce consistent standards for grammar, tone, structure, readability, brand alignment, and client focus.

Help ensure responses clearly address client requirements, business objectives, differentiators, and opportunity-specific win themes.

Partner with the broader proposal team to support quality-control and continuous-improvement practices.

Team Operations

Lead regular writer workload and assignment discussions.

Maintain visibility into active assignments, upcoming demand, capacity, and resource needs.

Identify recurring delivery challenges and recommend operational improvements.

Reinforce consistent use of approved proposal processes, templates, content, and tools.

Partner with proposal leadership on staffing, capacity planning, training, and team capability development.

Support adoption of proposal technology, approved AI capabilities, and content-management practices.

Cross-Functional Partnership

Serve as the primary day-to-day leadership contact for issues involving proposal development resources, assignments, and delivery coordination.

Help writers navigate competing stakeholder requests and priorities.

Partner with Sales, Product, Pricing, Legal, Risk, Marketing, SMEs, and other contributors as needed to support successful proposal delivery.

Escalate broader strategic, governance, organizational, or business-priority decisions to the Head of Proposal Strategy & Management.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Communications, English, Journalism, Marketing, Business, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

7+ years of experience in proposal writing, proposal management, business writing, marketing communications, or a related discipline.

Demonstrated experience leading, coaching, or developing proposal writers or similar professional teams.

Strong experience managing multiple concurrent RFPs, RFIs, questionnaires, or complex client deliverables.

Exceptional writing, editing, proofreading, and executive communication skills.

Strong workload, resource, and deadline management capabilities.

Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, highly matrixed environment.

Strong collaboration and stakeholder-management skills.

Ability to translate complex financial, technical, and product information into concise, client-focused messaging.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in financial services, payments, treasury management, commercial banking, fintech, or another complex B2B environment.

Experience with proposal management platforms such as Responsive.

Experience developing executive summaries, strategic positioning, win themes, and value-based messaging.

Familiarity with proposal content-management and knowledge-management practices.

APMP certification or related proposal-management training.

Experience using AI-enabled tools to support proposal writing, editing, content development, or workflow efficiency.

Measures of Success

Effective allocation and balancing of proposal writer workloads.

Consistent on-time completion of proposal assignments.

High-quality, accurate, compliant, and client-focused proposal deliverables.

Reduced delivery escalations and avoidable rework.

Increased consistency across writers and proposal deliverables.

Continued development of writer capabilities and bench strength.

Effective adoption of proposal processes, tools, templates, and approved content.

Strong collaboration between proposal writers and internal partners.Develops and leads the marketing strategy for a specified area to deliver customer-centric, multi-channel marketing programs to maximize customer growth, retention and engagement. Identifies and communicates key performance indicators to ensure marketing strategies are yielding positive return on investment as well as to modify and optimize strategies as necessary. Manages professional employees and/or supervisors of com