Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Business Solution Strategist

🎯 Role Definition

The Business Solution Strategist is a cross-functional leader who defines solution roadmaps, crafts high-impact business cases, and translates complex business challenges into practical, scalable technical solutions. This role partners with stakeholders from product, engineering, operations, finance and sales to drive end-to-end solution design, vendor selection, go-to-market planning and post-implementation optimization. Ideal candidates combine strategic thinking, hands-on requirements translation, strong analytic skills and experience with enterprise platforms (CRM/ERP/cloud) to accelerate measurable business value and digital transformation.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Business Analyst (senior) with domain exposure to CRM/ERP implementations
Management Consultant with experience in digital transformation and solution design
Product Manager or Solution Engineer transitioning to strategic, cross-functional delivery

Advancement To:

Director of Business Solutions / Director of Strategy
Head of Solution Strategy or Head of Digital Transformation
VP of Product Strategy or VP of Enterprise Solutions

Lateral Moves:

Enterprise Solution Architect
Product Owner / Product Strategy Lead
Customer Success or Sales Engineering leadership

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the development of end-to-end solution strategies and roadmaps by analyzing market trends, customer needs, competitive landscapes, and internal capability gaps to prioritize initiatives that maximize ROI and strategic impact.
Own and deliver detailed business cases and financial models (TCO, ROI, NPV) for solution investments, including sensitivity analysis and scenario planning to support executive decision-making and budget approvals.
Translate complex business requirements into clear, actionable solution specifications and user stories for product, engineering and implementation teams while ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and security standards.
Facilitate cross-functional workshops and discovery sessions with stakeholders (sales, marketing, finance, legal, IT) to elicit requirements, validate assumptions, and drive consensus on solution scope and success metrics.
Define target-state process maps, information flows and business rules to guide implementation of CRM, ERP, analytics and automation solutions, minimizing operational disruption and optimizing user adoption.
Partner with technology architects and engineering leads to validate technical feasibility, define integration patterns (APIs, ETL, middleware) and ensure solutions align with cloud infrastructure and data governance policies.
Manage vendor evaluation, RFP/RFI processes and vendor selection, including scoring criteria, proof-of-concept oversight and commercial negotiation input to secure best-fit partners and pricing.
Design and oversee pilot programs and phased rollouts, establishing KPIs, measurement frameworks and dashboards to demonstrate early value and inform scale decisions.
Serve as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and delivery teams to prioritize backlog items, manage scope changes, and ensure on-time, high-quality delivery of solution increments.
Lead go-to-market coordination for strategic solutions: define packaging, pricing, enablement materials, sales playbooks and competitive positioning in collaboration with sales and marketing.
Conduct quantitative and qualitative market research, customer segmentation and use-case validation to inform product-market fit and identify new growth opportunities enabled by solution capabilities.
Drive change management and adoption strategies including stakeholder communication plans, training curricula, executive sponsorship models and incentive alignment to maximize user adoption and behavior change.
Create and maintain comprehensive solution documentation, including functional specs, process SOPs, runbooks and architecture diagrams to enable operational handoff and long-term maintainability.
Monitor solution performance post-implementation, run retrospectives and adopt continuous improvement practices to refine features, reduce technical debt and improve business outcomes.
Champion data-driven decision making by defining required data sets, metrics and reporting standards, and by collaborating with analytics teams to ensure actionable insights are integrated into solutions.
Provide strategic guidance and subject-matter expertise during complex incident or escalation scenarios, coordinating cross-functional response and remediation while communicating impact and resolution to executives.
Drive standardization and reuse of solution components (templates, reference architectures, integration patterns) across programs to accelerate delivery and reduce cost.
Mentor and coach junior strategists, business analysts and product owners on best practices in requirements definition, stakeholder management and business case development.
Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, privacy policies and internal controls when designing solutions that handle sensitive data or operate in regulated industries.
Build and maintain strong executive relationships by regularly presenting solution roadmaps, status updates, risk assessments and economic outcomes to senior leadership and steering committees.
Actively scan for and evaluate emerging technologies (AI/ML, automation, low-code platforms) for applicability and value capture, and pilot strategic innovations where appropriate.
Collaborate with procurement and legal to structure contracts, SLAs and delivery expectations for third-party implementations, ensuring service levels and exit strategies are clearly defined.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain up-to-date documentation of solution decisions, trade-offs and architectural rationale to support knowledge transfer.
Provide training sessions and enablement resources to internal teams during rollout phases.
Assist sales engineering on complex opportunity scoping and solution demos for strategic prospects.
Participate in post-implementation benefit realization reviews and updates to executive stakeholders.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Strategic business case development and financial modeling (TCO, ROI, NPV) for enterprise investments.
Requirements elicitation, user story creation, acceptance criteria and backlog prioritization.
Solution architecture fundamentals including API integration patterns, middleware, and cloud-native considerations (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Enterprise systems exposure: CRM (Salesforce), ERP (SAP, Oracle), Workday or comparable platforms.
Data literacy: SQL query proficiency, familiarity with BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, Looker) and data modeling concepts.
Experience with enterprise integration technologies (ETL tools, iPaaS, message queues) and data governance implications.
Vendor evaluation and RFP/RFI process management including vendor scoring and POC oversight.
Agile delivery experience (Scrum/Kanban), sprint planning, and use of tools like Jira and Confluence.
Process mapping and business process re-engineering (BPMN, value stream analysis).
Product/solution rollout and change management methodologies, including adoption KPIs and training plans.
Technical writing: functional specifications, runbooks and architecture documentation.
Familiarity with security, privacy and regulatory frameworks relevant to solution design (GDPR, SOC2, HIPAA where applicable).
Experience with automation and low-code/no-code platforms (e.g., UiPath, Power Automate, Mendix) for rapid solution delivery.
Basic familiarity with AI/ML use cases and integration points for strategic product enhancements.
Presentation and demo tooling (PowerPoint, Figma or wireframing tools for solution UX sketches).

Soft Skills

Exceptional stakeholder management and executive communication skills; able to synthesize complex information for C-suite audiences.
Influencing and negotiation skills to align cross-functional teams and secure resources.
Strong analytical thinking and structured problem-solving with the ability to translate analysis into strategic recommendations.
Leadership and team coaching to mentor junior colleagues and lead cross-functional initiatives.
Facilitation and workshop leadership to drive consensus across diverse stakeholder groups.
High degree of adaptability and comfort with ambiguity in fast-changing environments.
Customer-centric mindset and empathy to advocate for user needs and drive adoption.
Collaboration and interpersonal skills for effective cross-team partnership.
Strong prioritization and time management under competing deadlines.
Resilience and accountability in delivering business-critical initiatives.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Finance, or a related field.

Preferred Education:
MBA, Master’s in Information Systems, or equivalent advanced degree with emphasis on strategy, analytics or technology management.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration / Strategy
Information Systems / Computer Science
Finance / Economics
Industrial / Systems Engineering
Management Consulting / Technology Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:
5–10 years of progressive experience in business analysis, solution strategy, product management, or consulting with demonstrable experience in enterprise solution delivery.

Preferred:
8+ years of experience including a mix of consulting and in-house delivery on CRM/ERP/cloud transformation programs, with a proven track record of developing and executing solution roadmaps, vendor selection, and measurable business outcomes.