What does a strategist do?

When I tell people I’m a strategist (they’ve usually just asked me what I do for a living!) – I’m often met with a blank look. I suppose it’s fair enough, ‘strategist’ is a pretty vague title and not everyone I meet works in the same field as me.

For context, my experience broadly covers marketing, customer experience, and service design — it would be interesting to hear whether my explanation rings to true for other strategists. That said, this is my explanation of what a strategist does. It is quite simple; the role is made up of three broad stages:

1. Understanding

The initial stage is heavily based in research. The main goal is to quickly get to grips with the topic (and write a list of questions that need further info). Ideally this stage should have direct input from key stakeholders, front-line staff, end users, clients, reviews etc. — listen to those you’re trying to deliver for. Activities may include interviews, surveys, observation sessions, user testing, in addition to desk research, and background reading to help digest relevant information. In simple terms: the first stage is about uncovering details on the needs and drivers from your client’s business and their target audience(s). This is where I’m looking to uncover the real problem.

2. Knowledge

The aim of the second stage is two-fold; first, to distill all of the information gathered during the first stage and second, present the distilled information in a format that can be shared easily and clearly with stakeholders – along with recommendations. Your recommendations are what people are most interested in, but you might need to do things like data analysis, customer journey maps, and competitor reviews to be able to make strong, informed recommendations.

3. Influence

Drawing on your knowledge, the next step is to help inform and shape outcomes. Drawing on the research, or knowledge, and articulating a narrative is crucial at this stage. Persuading, framing and storytelling are a big part of this final stage.

For every new project the role of a strategist goes something like this: gain an understanding, distill that understanding into knowledge and then apply that knowledge to positively influence outcomes and the direction of a project or business activity.

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Arguably the first two stages are the most important and require the majority of time however the final stage is really where the value of the role is realised. It’s at this final stage that the purpose, narrative and plans (the strategy) are outlined and shown to stakeholders. Without the underlying understanding and knowledge the output at the influence stage can be little more than guesswork.