“Strategy” has become one of the more common additions to a growing company’s org chart, and one of the least consistently defined. BizOps, Corporate Strategy, Strategy & Operations, Value Creation: the titles vary, and so does the work behind them.
I have worked with several versions. Some strategy teams set the three-to-five-year growth plan and double as a talent feeder for future P&L leaders. Others run more like a PMO, building the systems and cadence that get cross-functional work done. Some exist to triage urgent problems as they surface. And some exist largely to advance the CEO’s agenda, with a heavy dose of upward influence that never appears in the job description.
When one title can mean four different jobs, the hiring plan goes sideways more often than it should. The cause is usually a scoping problem, not a talent problem. These roles attract strong candidates, often ex-consultants and ex-bankers looking to move in-house, which makes correct scoping paramount. Hire a genuinely capable person into a job that was never clearly defined, and everyone spends the next year confused about why it is not working.
Why the title travels but the job does not
Most functional titles carry a stable meaning. A VP of Sales runs revenue. A Controller owns the books. You can hire against those titles with reasonable confidence about what the person will do on day one. Strategy resists that kind of definition, because it often becomes the place for work that does not fit cleanly inside a more typical function.
That is exactly why it varies so much. At a company with a strong operational core and a C-Suite carrying more strategic questions than they can work through, the role skews strategy: market analysis, planning, the bets the leadership team has no bandwidth to think through. At a company with a clear strategy but chaotic execution, the same title can skew operations: cadence, cross-functional delivery, the operating system of the business. At a company with a list of thorny, high-stakes problems and no one to own them, it becomes an internal consulting role. And at a company that mostly wants leverage for the CEO, it becomes a chief-of-staff function by another name. Four different jobs, one label.
The four jobs
Before scoping the search, it helps to name which version you are actually hiring, because each one calls for a different person.
The strategist. This version exists to work the questions the leadership team cannot get to: where to play, what to prioritize, how to think about a new market or a pricing move, where to place the three-to-five-year bets. It rewards structured thinking within ambiguity, working from the abstract and the unknown toward a defensible point of view. It is the version most at risk of drifting away from real decisions, and must be plugged in with appropriate stakeholders across the business.
The operator. This version exists to help the business run more smoothly: the planning cycle, the operating cadence, cross-functional projects with no obvious ownership, the mechanics of execution. It rewards someone who can build and run systems and drive delivery across teams. A brilliant strategist who cannot run an operating rhythm will struggle here, and the reverse is just as true.
The internal consultant. This version exists to attack the company’s hardest problems directly, often with little existing structure or framework to solve them. One quarter it is a broken supply chain, the next it is a failing product line or an integration that has stalled. It rewards the ability to parachute into an unfamiliar problem, build the approach from scratch, and drive it to a result, then do it again somewhere else. It is the most consulting-like of the four in the day-to-day, and the one that most rewards range over depth.
The chief of staff. This version exists to extend the CEO: managing the operating rhythm around the leadership team’s priorities, prepping the board materials, owning the things the CEO needs handled but cannot personally hold. It rewards judgment, discretion, and comfort operating through influence rather than authority. Its value is defined almost entirely by the relationship with one person, which makes it the hardest of the four to assess from the outside.
Most real roles blend more than one of these. But one version usually has to be the center of gravity, especially in the first twelve months, and naming which one is where scoping begins.
How to scope it before you search
The fix is straightforward in concept and often skipped in practice. What, specifically, is this role for? That question needs to be answered before the job description gets written, not after the wrong hire is a year in.
Start with the first-year problem. What is the single thing this person is being hired to solve in their first year? If the honest answer is a strategy question, you are hiring the strategist, and functional operations experience is secondary. If it is an execution problem, you are hiring the operator. If it is a rotating set of one-off fires, you are hiring the internal consultant, and you should screen for range rather than domain depth.
Then look at where the role sits. Who does it report to, and how close is it to the CEO day to day? A role that lives in the CEO’s orbit is a chief-of-staff role whether or not it is titled that way, and it should be scoped and assessed as one.
Finally, ask what the role should become. What does it look like in eighteen months? Some of these jobs are designed to evolve into a functional leadership seat or a COO track, and some are designed to stay in the CEO’s orbit indefinitely. Those are different value propositions, and the candidates who fit each are different people.
The answers also change how you screen. For the strategist, you probe for recommendations that turned into decisions and outcomes, not analysis for its own sake. For the operator, you probe for operating systems they built and ran, and cross-functional delivery under real constraints. For the internal consultant, you probe for a track record of walking into unstructured problems and producing results across very different domains. For the chief of staff, you probe for judgment, trust, and the ability to be effective without formal authority. Screen all four the same way, with a generic “strategic and analytical” rubric, and you run the risk of passing on strong candidates while advancing ones who interview well but cannot do the actual job.
Why this matters more than it looks
A mis-scoped strategy hire rarely fails loudly. The person is capable, so they find things to do, and it takes a year for it to become clear that the things they are good at are not the things the company actually needed. By then the role has calcified around the wrong center of gravity, the organization has formed opinions, and fixing it means either a painful re-scoping or a second search on a tighter timeline.
The role is also a common entry point for exactly the kind of high-potential talent (ex-consultants, ex-bankers, sharp generalists) that companies most want to attract and keep. Getting the scope wrong does not just cost a search. It burns a person who could have become a future functional leader, in a seat that never gave them a real chance.
The strategy role is not hard to hire for because the talent is scarce. It is hard because the title defines several jobs, with nuanced but key differences, and most searches never decide which one they are hiring for. Decide that first, and the rest of the search gets much easier.