Director, Corporate Strategy

About Us

tms unites technology, marketing, and sourcing to drive transformational change for the world’s leading brands. With more than 1,400 employees across 28 countries, we offer an impressive range of solutions – from inspiration and innovation to category management and delivery.

Operating as a creative agency, a strategic consultancy, a sourcing business and a technology provider, we engage with over 110 million customers every single day for clients such as McDonald’s, T‑Mobile, O2, Starbucks and adidas. Most importantly we’re a place where you can achieve great things and be recognised as the best.

Breakthrough, business‑driving ideas come from extraordinary people with the freedom to be their most authentic selves henticity and diversity are critical elements of our business. We foster a culture of inclusion and belonging and aspire to be ever‑evolving.

The Director, Corporate Strategy helps tms achieve sustainable growth and long‑term value creation by leading core elements of enterprise strategy, enabling disciplined trade‑offs and strengthening alignment between strategy, execution and performance. The role also ensures leadership decisions are informed by a continuously refreshed view of external trends, competitors, relevant M&A activity and benchmarks.

• Lead major work streams within the multi‑year enterprise strategy and strategic planning process; translate strategy into objectives, value levers and KPIs inclusive of evaluating strategic initiatives that require financial investment through a detailed return on invested capital analysis.
• Own development of executive‑ready strategy materials for Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and Board engagement, including strategy narrative and decision framing.

• Lead process to prioritise initiatives across the enterprise, enabling explicit trade‑off discussions across leadership.
• Work with initiative teams to develop options and recommendations to enable leadership prioritisation.

• Partner with Finance to embed a strategy lens in monthly performance tracking, QBRs and Board updates.
• Partner with business leads to identify and develop KPIs, and lead development of internal dashboards and reporting to senior leadership on achievement of KPIs.
• Identify execution risks, misalignment and areas requiring strategic intervention or deprioritisation; drive follow‑through on course corrections.

• Lead trend tracking, benchmarks, competitive reviews and translate insights into strategic implications for tms.
• Track relevant industry M&A, partnerships and investment activity and connect insights to corporate development hypotheses and planning.

• Support and, where appropriate, lead corporate development and special projects; act as a sounding board and escalation partner on complex strategic issues.

At the Director level, success requires building strategy capacity and leading through others, not just producing analysis. This role is expected to define the future path for the Corporate Strategy function (scope, ways of working and resourcing required) and scale capability over time.

• Define and evolve the operating model for the strategy function, including planning cadence, prioritisation standards and clear “definition of done” for executive‑facing outputs (e.g., Board/SLT materials, external scans, benchmarking).
• Develop a resourcing plan for the function; when appropriate hire, onboard and lead a small team (e.g., Manager(s), Senior Analyst(s), Analyst(s)).
• Coach and develop team members through role clarity, feedback, quality standards and development plans; ensure increasing leverage through others over time.
• Build cross‑functional influence across Finance and business leaders; model effective stakeholder management and help team members navigate complex stakeholder environments.