We often hire bizops or strategy team members (type A, high achieving, highly motivated people) but because these roles are "G&A" and less tied to a direct product/revenue/metric, it can often be hard for new leaders to communicate "how to grow" or "how to excel" in this very ambiguous role. This career doc was created to help communicate core pillars of internal strategy excellence (also was adapted and used by our biz dev team). 

Some context on what I mean by "ambiguous role" here: 

This is not a standard "career ladder" document. Use this as a way to frame conversations (1:1's and professional development chats) with your team.

If I were to redesign this, I would build in more examples of "what does good versus great look like" in each of these categories.

Helen Kupp

When I saw a need for a tool to communicate "how to grow" or "how to excel" to G&A roles such as bizops or strategy team members, I created these expectations and charter to support my team with their professional growth.

: A consolidated set of team-related documents to support strategy/bizops team management. Copied and sanitized to share.

This document defines the dimensions we want for our Strategy talent, and to set expectations with, manage and develop our team.

We have all done Strategy.  We know who is a “great strategy person”.  In fact, we believe we have the best ones on this team.   Yet, none of us have ever been able to systematically articulate and measure why those people are great.  In addition, our own performance has never been measured against any concrete dimensions by our past managers.

We want to clearly define those dimensions.

Equally important, we need to set expectations with ourselves and with our team members.   

Only about one-third of U.S. workers are engaged at work -- and that figure has barely budged in more than a decade.  Worse, just 13% of employees worldwide are engaged.

Among the 12 elements of employee engagement, Gallup research suggests that setting clear expectations may be the most foundational element

Only about half of all workers strongly indicate that they know what is expected of them at work.

Even if employees feel energized and motivated, those who lack clear expectations and spend too much time working on the wrong things can't advance key initiatives to create value for an organization.


In line with the Gallup research, setting clear expectations with our employees is one of the major impact areas that we as a company can do much better.  Therefore:

We need to set clear expectations with our team.


To begin, it is important to acknowledge that unlike many other functions such as design, engineering or sales, there is little standard definition or agreement out there of what Strategy, Corporate Development, and Business Operations is, even the name.  But here are a few decent articles to get us started: 

Also, because of the nature of what we do, our output is not always immediate and directly visible to the world.  For example, we may be the drivers behind international strategy and execution.  But, the visible deliverables from that initiative is product localization (done by PMs, CE), a launch and/or announcement (PR, marketing), and (hopefully) more enterprise sales deals in-market (AEs, CSMs).



So, if we can’t measure our impact, how do we manage the team?

  “Even if you can’t measure exactly what you want, you can learn about the area with related data”, and “without precise measure though you have to use judgment.”

Below is a set of dimensions for setting expectations with ourselves, our team members, and our stakeholders

 (e.g. internal counterparts, external partners).

There are two distinct tent poles we believe our team members should be evaluated against:  

.  Within each of them, there are dimensions and components of those dimensions that we believe are important to set expectations against.

of this subset of slides was to help to explain “what we do” to new team members, new leaders in the organization, and key stakeholders in the team’s ongoing projects.

(not shown here): Project prioritization framework (We used the Eisenhower matrix of urgent v. important), and OKRs/Roadmap for the team.

Business Strategy Team Expectations and Charter at Slack

Business Strategy Team

Strategy Team Expectations

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