Director of Strategy or Director of Operations?

[Anonymous]

In an org where I’ll be able to make my own role, and considering either Director of Strategy or Director of Operations? Which is a better trajectory? (Healthcare; heavily involved in post-merger implementation, orchestration of operational tactics, and project management efforts.)

[Anonymous]

Strategy implies a career trajectory where you are undertaking a lot of work looking at the competitive space with regard to project and market fit, pricing etc and continually benchmarking your org and its projects and go to market approach against those. Will you be doing that or will you be mostly focused on the internal workings of the company and the day to day trains on tracks from a people and financial pov?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Strategy implies a career trajectory where you are undertaking a lot of work looking at the competitive space with regard to project and market fit, pricing etc and continually benchmarking your org and its projects and go to market approach against those. Will you be doing that or will you be mostly focused on the internal workings of the company and the day to day trains on tracks from a people and financial pov?

In my current organization it would be more internally focused due to its location (remote, with only one major competitor).

[Anonymous]

My last job title had strategy in it. My current job title has operations in it. I think the former opens more doors than the latter, personally. Good strategic thinkers can strategize about operations; good operations people cannot always be strategic, and are often more tactical.

Why not Director of Strategic Operations?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My last job title had strategy in it. My current job title has operations in it. I think the former opens more doors than the latter, personally. Good strategic thinkers can strategize about operations; good operations people cannot always be strategic, and are often more tactical.

Why not Director of Strategic Operations?

DP. All good points. And that's the title we use a lot where I work.

[Anonymous]

I do both in my role and have found the Operations side of thing to be limiting from an advancement perspective at my company. I've been actively trying to downplay/delegate the Operations side of thing and lean in on the Strategy/Growth side. Operations is appreciated, but not many top roles aside from COO. Where I am, strategy seems to offer more upward flexibility, so I play that up in my title and narrative.

[Anonymous]

Strategy is better. I was fir OPS and while growth and new business was part of my job, in reality most time and energy was devoted to taking care of day to day ops and fires. I was promoted to dir strategy and now oversee multiple operations with their individual leads taking care of the day to day things. If you look at linked in, dir operations can be a manager of a CVS or store/car dealership. Those people arent making any big organizational direction decisions. .

[Anonymous]

Strategy is all fluff, with poorly tracked metrics and will offer the best course to advancement. Operations is about getting stuff down, usually with measurable deliverables and by the nature of reality hurts advancement because Murphy lurks everywhere. And they can’t risk promoting you, because you get sh#t down that needs to get down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Strategy is all fluff, with poorly tracked metrics and will offer the best course to advancement. Operations is about getting stuff down, usually with measurable deliverables and by the nature of reality hurts advancement because Murphy lurks everywhere. And they can’t risk promoting you, because you get sh#t down that needs to get down.

Haha yeah I am an inhouse lawyer and mostly just an observer but this checks out.

Making power points and maybe accomplishing things or maybe nothing at all = strategy

Actually accomplish things = operations

Strategy probably best for career but good ops folks have more respect by me. They are the ones actually keeping the lights on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Strategy is all fluff, with poorly tracked metrics and will offer the best course to advancement. Operations is about getting stuff down, usually with measurable deliverables and by the nature of reality hurts advancement because Murphy lurks everywhere. And they can’t risk promoting you, because you get sh#t down that needs to get down.

It depends. I think part of it is selection bias. A lot of data analysts/scientists work with business leaders to support strategy, but some leaders don't really understand data. Ideally strategy and operations should go hand in hand. People in operations are running things but they're not exactly coming up with ways for a business to stay competitive.

[Anonymous]

I work at an agency and in the past have worked at startups. If you are in strategy at those places you are expected to be able to do competitor audits and landscape analysis and then make recommendations and build decks and business models and cases to support. You can call yourself whatever you want in theory but it only opens doors for you going forward if you are going to be actually doing this kind of work and gaining experience in it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Strategy is all fluff, with poorly tracked metrics and will offer the best course to advancement. Operations is about getting stuff down, usually with measurable deliverables and by the nature of reality hurts advancement because Murphy lurks everywhere. And they can’t risk promoting you, because you get sh#t down that needs to get down.

It depends. I think part of it is selection bias. A lot of data analysts/scientists work with business leaders to support strategy, but some leaders don't really understand data. Ideally strategy and operations should go hand in hand. People in operations are running things but they're not exactly coming up with ways for a business to stay competitive.

Exactly, it’s not like high quality and stable prices with reliable supply chains contribute to competitive stance. Outcomes depend upon ad campaigns and market demographic targeting, and picking the right influencers to be spokesperson

[Anonymous]

Neither of these words means anything, as this discussion demonstrates.