The Corporate Strategy team assists the CEO with developing the company’s long term objectives and setting its course. By assessing a broad range of trends and issues that span across markets, customer, competitor, regulatory and technology insights, the team develops winning strategies that will have a significant impact on the company’s growth.
Get to know the Role:
I. Scanning the business environment for insights and trends to identify key growth opportunities for the company that will build sustainable competitive advantages.
II. Translating company-level strategies into actionable functional deliverables and re-allocating business portfolio to align with market opportunities.
III. Driving decision-making and ensure major initiatives are coherent with company strategic direction.
IV. Sustaining the momentum of strategy execution and instilling organisation discipline to realise commitments to strategic plans.
The day-to-day activities:
Functioning as the incubator for experimental business opportunities to ensure rigorous assessment of market feasibility and ensure that adequate baseline capabilities are developed before transitioning to operations (where appropriate).
Develop and/ or update the company’s strategies on a periodic cadence, including identifying and prioritising major cross-functional initiatives by synthesizing:
I. Internal business performance and competencies
II. External trends (market, customer, competitor, regulatory, technological etc)
Provide inputs and advise the CEO and management team on key issues (e.g. strategic initiatives, BU-level plans and major investments) based on clear issue framing, systems-level thinking and rigorous analyses
Bridge business opportunities with product development via a keen grasp of the business imperatives and clear understanding of the possibilities and / or limitations of technology
Lead the development of experimental business opportunities including development of baseline capabilities, definition of the parameters of success and ensuring smooth transition to operations
Support Operations Heads on BU-level strategy and facilitate cross-pollination of best practice and approaches
Align company organisational structure to achieve strategic objectives including identification of internal capabilities to be developed or strengthened
Execute the corporate planning rhythm to ensure follow-through of the functional deliverables via discussions, updates and action-tracking (i.e. Secretariat for the Bi-weekly and Monthly Management Meetings)
Communicate company vision to stakeholders and support translation into operational reality via various channels (e.g. CEO communications, engagements with senior stakeholders etc.)
Set the agenda for Grab Forward off-sites in line with company objectives and to enable tighter networking within the management team
Assess proposals for all major initiatives to ensure judicious investment of company resources in line with strategic direction
Advocate focus on achieving sustainable growth by working with BU leads to design and refine pricing and incentives schemes
Actively and independently engage with company senior executives to identify new opportunities and to seek alignment on strategic priorities
Influence a high-performance company culture by challenging critical business assumptions and encouraging cross-functional collaboration
Drive coherence across functions and business units in order to achieve strategic objectives, including with product, engineering, operations, partnerships functions
Provide a sounding board to company senior executives by helping to frame initiatives against wider company objectives and external business environment
The must haves:
A degree with good honours from a top tier university in any discipline
MBA will be an advantage
Experience with quantitative analysis e.g. financial modelling and data manipulation
Ability to construct and deliver clear presentations to senior company executives
Working knowledge of RDBMS such as PostgreSQL or MySQL
Ability to look beyond individual issues to identify broader themes with wider-reaching impact
Experience in analysing and quantifying complex strategic issues tied to long term business growth
Superb presentation and communication skills
Experience in project managing complex, cross-functional projects
Creativity and comfortable with ‘blank sheet of paper’ assignments
A natural leader who displays integrity, humility and responsibility, with excellent interpersonal skills
Ability to empathise and collaborate with stakeholders across functions and at all levels of experience
A self-starter and independent learner who takes the initiative to challenge the status quo.
A big-picture thinker who is detail-oriented
Ability to perform under pressure in a dynamic, fast-paced environment
