Director Market Intelligence & Strategic Insights

The Enterprise Growth team, led by the Chief Growth Officer, exists to bring clarity, focus, and economic discipline to Staples’ growth agenda by enabling better, more informed choices about where and how to grow. The team acts as a custodian of enterprise focus, a translator of strategy into tactical execution, and an embedded thought partner to the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).

In this role, the team is tasked with ensuring the company grows profitably and sustainably, serving as an integrator across businesses and functions to connect strategy to execution, clarify trade-offs, and focus resources on the highest-return opportunities.

Director of Market Intelligence & Strategic Insights

This role will lead with data by gathering, validating, and synthesizing external market and competitive inputs into clear insights on opportunities, risks, and emerging dynamics relevant to Staples’ strategic initiatives and Growth Pyramid priorities.

This leader must be an unbiased, high‑credibility communicator who can frame complex external signals into clear decision inputs. These insights will directly inform strategic decisions by ensuring growth forums and strategic reviews are grounded in a shared external fact base, with clear implications and explicit trade‑offs. They will work directly with Senior Leadership Team (SLT) members to help define the most critical questions facing Staples’ growth agenda, delivering insights that translate into clear implications for SLT decisions.

The role will build a small team (1–2 analysts), and will operate with AI‑first principles, designing scalable architecture, automated reporting, and repeatable insight workflows that reduce manual effort and increase consistency.

• Define the external data strategy for Enterprise Growth: what sources matter (market, competitor, platform signals), how often they refresh, and what “gold standard” outputs the enterprise should trust
• Establish governance around definitions and comparability (e.g., ensuring leadership debates are anchored on shared definitions instead of conflicting lenses)

• Monitor market trends, customer behavior, and competitor moves relevant to Staples’ growth agenda
• Translate signals into enterprise growth implications, surfacing what changed, why it matters, and what risks/opportunities it creates

• Translate external market and competitor signals into quantified economic implications (e.g., pricing posture, elasticity assumptions, channel mechanics), including scenarios and clear “so what” impacts on margin, volume, and share

• Partner with SLT members and initiative owners to define hypotheses, success metrics, and post‑mortems so insights continually improve execution and decision‑making over time
• Produce unbiased risk & opportunity briefs for priority initiatives, connecting insights to value (revenue, margin, retention, cost‑to‑serve, and risk), and informing initiative design, sequencing, and success criteria

• Support Growth Pyramid reviews with fact‑based external context and pressure‑test key assumptions using outside‑in market/competitive insights
• Establish monthly/quarterly update cadence

• Align with functional analytics teams on shared inputs, definitions, and refresh cadence so internal and external views reconcile into one story
• Embed external demand and competitive insights into test‑and‑learn and pricing governance with Revenue Management, Merchandising, Digital, and Marketing, ensuring evaluation criteria reflect “go‑to‑market” realities

• Manage external data providers / research partners where needed (e.g., market share providers and competitive datasets), including ensuring the outputs are actionable and properly caveated

• Design scalable, automated reporting and synthesis workflows using AI to reduce manual effort and accelerate insight generation
• Build repeatable…