Forward Deployed Strategist

You sit where a customer's business goals, their operating model, and Rocketlane's platform actually meet. The customer can feel something's wrong but doesn't have the language for it. That's where you start. You bring structure to the ambiguity without flattening it, turning incomplete signals into a direction someone with real stakes will commit to. This is a strategist role that carries through to delivery. It owns the why, the what, the diagnosis, the strategy, the engagement design, and the measurable outcome. Own the outcome end to end.

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Immerse and diagnose:

• Build a deep read of each customer's delivery model, commercial priorities, and success metrics well beyond product adoption.
• Identify the highest-impact problem worth solving, often before the customer has framed it themselves.

Design the engagement:

• Scope transformation initiatives end-to-end from intake and discovery through delivery, each mapped to a defined business outcome and a complexity tier.
• Set success criteria up front. Every engagement is measurable before it starts, so value realized is provable at the end.
• Run the discovery sprint that qualifies a request: confirm the problem is real, scope the work, and recommend whether it proceeds. You protect the function from under-scoped or misrouted requests.

Drive outcomes and expansion:

• Run executive engagements that move the conversation from features to outcomes.
• Surface expansion and churn signals early and build the strategic case behind them. You influence the commercial result, not just the technical one.
• Carry accountability for the value FDS delivers and prevent escalations.

Shape the function:

• Feed cross-account patterns back into the product as the voice of the customer.
• Build reusable engagement models, intake criteria, and frameworks that scale across accounts. You help define what FDS looks like at scale, not just execute it.

Requirements:

• Strategic, customer-facing background in PS consulting, solutions strategy, solution architecture, or management consulting.
• Commercial instinct: you read an account's trajectory, frame risk, and find the expansion without being told where to look.
• Comfort with ambiguity: you take something genuinely messy, understand it, and make it actionable for someone who has to decide.
• Exceptional communication: equally fluent in an exec setting and in a working session.
• You compress complex ideas without dumbing them down.
• PS/delivery literacy: you understand utilization, margin, and project economics, not just CX metrics.
• Technical fluency: you know when integrations, APIs, and AI tooling matter to a design decision.