What Does the Strategy & Operations Role Do?
Anyone job searching has seen listings for strategy & operations [S&O] positions. Typically, these positions call for senior experienced people with a strong grasp of business, business operations and strategy development. Organizations rely on strategy to provide structured direction and operations to ensure that we are delivering on that plan. The S&O team ensures an effective collaborative marriage between those activities to deliver long-term and short-term goals, requiring aligned efforts between finances, production operations, sales/marketing, supply chain, offering development, and other supporting services.
The role title is expansive, seemingly covering the entirety of everything that drives a business. Having served as Head of S&O for one of Google Search engineering organizations, I can affirm that the role is fast paced, challenging and demanding. However, it is not all things strategy and operations. Rather, the S&O effort provides a framework for facilitating leadership decision-making by providing curated, rapidly digestible intelligence at the moment of its greatest need.
The effort requires a chaotic dance between driving a structured cadence and flexing toward emerging, disruptive discoveries, challenges and opportunities, packaging it in an elegant way that separates the signal from the noise. That sounds messy, and it is. But if managed deftly, most days, we can orchestrate delivering the right information to the right people at the right time.