Vice President, Strategic Operations

Public Benefit Healthcare Startup (backed by well-respected endowed foundation)

The Vice President, Strategic Operations will serve as a strategic thought partner to the Managing Director in designing and implementing this startup's operational infrastructure, processes, and procedures. The VP will lead the development, execution, and scaling of the organization’s analytics products and go-to-market strategies to advance the organization's mission and objectives. This role will be responsible for developing both medium-term (1-year) and long-term (3–5-year) strategic plans as well as measurable impact indicators, partnering with internal teams to build the capabilities required for successful implementation, and continuously incorporating feedback from organizational leadership and key external stakeholders to ensure alignment, accountability, assess progress toward organizational goals and inform strategic decision-making.

The successful candidate will also recruit, and manage a strong, talented, and diverse team and support an internal culture of learning and strategic decision-making that advances the organization’s mission, and contributes to an environment that values inquiry, continuous learning, and a thoughtful understanding of and tolerance for risk.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategic Plan Development

• Develop medium and long-term strategic plan(s) and goals that advance company’s impact.
• Collaborate with leadership to define medium and long-term goals.
• Direct and lead an efficient strategic planning process that defines key activities, capabilities, capacity requirements, and timelines.
• Collaborate with leadership to identify organizational gaps and developmental needs for a small and growing team.
• Clearly identify and refine the list of key stakeholders and partners that the company should engage with to advance its goals.
• In designing strategic plans, incorporate the company's growth objectives and strengthen engagement with critical stakeholder ecosystems, including purchasers, payers, investors, and strategic partners.
• Partner with Managing Director to build a strategy for key stakeholder verticals that are important for overall initiative impact.
• Collaborate with leadership to develop and strengthen cross-sector partnerships that bridge organizational boundaries and advance shared strategic objectives.
• Proactively identify strategic risks that the leadership team should address.
• Responsible for updating, reviewing, and monitoring company’s strategic plan.
• Maintain strategic plan and impact goal documentation.
• Develop and implement measurable impact indicators.
• Collaborate with leadership to identify strategic risks and opportunities.
• Prepare periodic updates on initiative’s progress, impact and goals for internal and external audiences.

Strategic Plan Execution

• Translate strategic plans into an executable organizational roadmap.
• Clearly communicate strategic plan, initiative goals and expected medium and long-term impact to company’s team members.
• Work with leadership and team members to translate strategic plan into an executable strategy.
• Regularly assess company’s organizational capability and capacity to execute against strategic plan.
• Proactively identify and solve for gaps in organizational capability and capacity that are required to achieve goals.
• Proactively gather input from internal teams and strategic partners to inform adjustments to plans and roadmaps.
• Translate organizational gap analysis into clear recommendations for internal hiring, vendor support and partnership development.
• Maintain documentation of team ideas, concerns, and suggestions, elevating to leadership, as appropriate.
• Drive alignment between top-down and bottom-up strategic planning and team/partner feedback.
• Develop partnerships and capabilities to deepen and advance the core competencies of company.
• Build strategic partnerships to enhance the breadth and depth of company’s approach to assessment.
• Identify innovative solutions, platforms or partnerships that advance company’s mission.

Product Engagement

• Focus on the customer journey, customer retention, and long-term usage.
• Ensure that the features being built solve employer challenges and keep customers embedded in the product space.

Administration, Culture, and Supervisory Responsibilities

• Develop, recruit, and manage a strong, talented, and diverse team.
• Stay current on emerging trends, players, and best practices in related fields.
• Support an internal culture of learning and strategic decision making in service of organizational mission.
• Contribute to a culture of inquiry, experimentation, commitment to continuous learning and understanding of and tolerance for risk.

ABOUT THE SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE

This leader must be comfortable with ambiguity helping build the plane while flying it. He/she will have a proven track record as a strategic fixer and strong project manager with expertise in removing roadblocks and driving timely delivery scalable processes and measuring results. The successful candidate will also:

Have a strategic mindset: Able to develop a big picture view; connects long-term visions and concepts to daily work; maintains a broad, strategic perspective while identifying and focusing on crucial details.

Love organizational development: Builds strong relationships within and across relevant organizations; proficient at objectively assessing organizational capacity and capabilities; finds satisfaction in the holistic development of the organization to meet its goals. Ideates innovative solutions to operational challenges.

Is a superior communicator : Ability to speak and write clearly, effectively, succinctly, and spontaneously, especially under time pressure; ability to synthesize complex information and transform complex issues into understandable and persuasive messages.

Drives results: An independent, self-starter with strong bottom-line orientation; comfortable owning tasks both large and small; persists in accomplishing objectives despite obstacles and setbacks; has a track record of exceeding goals successfully; pushes self to and helps others achieve results; a can-do attitude with a willingness to jump into projects as needed.

Brings nimble learning : Learns quickly when facing new situations; independently gathers, collects, and analyzes data to drive decisions and set direction; experiments to find solutions and thinks outside-the-box; takes on the challenge of unfamiliar tasks; extracts lessons learned from research, failures, and mistakes; enjoys the challenge of ambiguity and is highly adaptable.

Excels at project management: Organizes activities and staff clearly into an efficient workflow to deliver projects; creates and manages work plans, sets timelines and milestones, and involves stakeholders to set clear expectations on roles and responsibilities; considers the numerous factors affecting a decision in a complex environment; and ability to manage cross-functional teams.

Champion of product engagement: Ensures that product features solve user problems and keep customers embedded in the product landscape; and measures and reports on the depth, breadth and frequency of customer interactions with the product.

EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS

• At least 15 years of experience in health insurance, management consulting, corporate strategy, benefits brokerage, employer payer or related experience.
• Intellectual curiosity and interest in healthcare, funding and financing, healthcare system transformation and healthcare policy. Experience with healthcare data and analytics, a plus.
• Demonstrated experience setting, monitoring and meeting quarterly and annual goals.
• Experience building and scaling teams, processes and systems.
• Problem-solving skills.
• An entrepreneurial spirit.
• A bachelor’s degree is required; an advanced degree in health care administration, public health, public policy or related field is a plus.
• In order to build productive relationships across the organization and to ensure effective collaboration, this role requires in-person presence in accordance with the organization’s hybrid schedule of working in the office three days per week (Monday/Tuesday/Thursday).