Strategy & Implementation Lead

Strategy & Implementation Lead

Department: Client Teams

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: US

Our Strategy & Implementation team partners with organizations to design and activate customer-centric strategies. Through core practice areas, including brand strategy, change management, and human-centered innovation, we guide clients in aligning their internal systems, behaviors, and communications to support a customer-first vision.

The Strategy & Implementation Lead plays a critical role in driving these efforts across client engagements, providing strategic direction to teams and ensuring delivery against complex business challenges.

Project Oversight & Client Engagement:

• Lead client consulting engagements across a diverse portfolio of strategic initiatives, ensuring recommendations translate into tangible business actions and sustained impact within client organizations. Work includes:
• Identify brand and innovation territories through market, cultural, and consumer insight analysis to uncover differentiated growth opportunities.
• Translate insights into clear brand strategies, including positioning, purpose, and narrative.
• Activate brand and creative strategies end-to-end, partnering cross-functionally to bring ideas to market effectively.
• Lead innovation efforts, facilitating ideation and co-creation work sessions and workshops to generate new product, service, and experience concepts.
• Advance innovation pipelines by identifying unmet needs, validating concepts, and defining value propositions.
• Deliver assets that enable change and customer-centricity, including journey maps, experience principles, and playbooks that help organizations operationalize strategy.
• Serve as a strategic advisor, challenging thinking and uncovering transformative opportunities.

Management and Leadership:

• Establish rapport with executives and build trust quickly.
• Successfully guide engagement teams in delivering consistently exceptional client service and outcomes.
• Foster collaboration with other teams and specialties at Human8 (e.g., Communication Design, Research, Analytics), weaving appropriate competencies together for a cohesive result and client experience.
• Demonstrate genuine sensitivity, support, and encouragement for colleagues, along with consistent professional maturity.

Business Development:

• Build strong, trusted relationships with the Account Strategy team and act as a subject matter expert to assist in client conversations, supporting solutions and proposal development.
• Ability to identify client needs and solutions to generate additional business opportunities through existing work.

• A degree in a related field is beneficial (Marketing, Brand, Organizational Development, MBA) but we equally value demonstrable, equivalent experience. We welcome candidates from diverse educational backgrounds.
• 8+ years of strategy or consulting experience, preferably in brand, business or marketing strategy and/or general insight led strategy work.
• High degree of comfort with ambiguity – ability to lay out an aspirational vision of what's possible and then execute on it without prompt.
• Strong presence, confidently leading meetings, facilitating discussions, and influencing stakeholders to align on clear decisions and next steps.
• Keen business acumen, critical thinking, and influential written and verbal communication skills throughout the engagement.
• Skilled with using frameworks and visual models to help convey thoughts and strategy.
• Successful track record of leading/mentoring and overseeing project teams with agility as well as strong communication, collaboration, and organizational skills.
• Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and brings a proactive, entrepreneurial mindset.