Mission 🙏
To build and maintain successful, long-term client relationships by working with clients to understand their needs and leading amazing projects that meet those needs.
Definition of Success 📈
- Set realistic and reasonable outcome goals for each project they lead. Meet those goals at least 75% of the time.
- Achieve a minimum 50% average profit margin each quarter across all projects led.
- This means that if we take in $1 in project fees from the client we should be spending at most $0.50 on labor and vendors.
- Minimize client attrition to at most 25% in a year.
- This means losing at most one out of every four clients you start with each year.
Key Responsibilities
- Leads the end-to-end design process and ensures that the design team has all the resources needed for doing great work and for delivering on time, on spec and on budget.
- Embraces responsibility for the team’s success. Collaborates with Strategists, PMs and Developers in order to deliver excellent work.
- Establishes a vision that is informed by research, and linked to business outcomes.
- Establishes an aesthetic and has a keen eye for detail.
- Is comfortable presenting ideas and concepts to the clients and guides designers to do as well.
- Handles new requests for work from clients.
- Explores complex problem statements with an open mind. Feels comfortable navigating ambiguous briefs. Is able to assess information and quickly generate multiple solutions.
- Recruits and trains new designers.
- Fosters an inclusive, empathetic culture where people feel productive, creative, and safe. Is not afraid to pinpoint problems and works towards solving them.
- Hands off problems to the team. Ensures that all tasks that reach the team are clarified and actionable.
- Reviews the solutions the team comes up with and validates that the problem has been solved.
- Becomes a partner with the client/stakeholder and has a keen understanding of their business realities and how we could solve them.
Compensation Notes
- Strategists earn a “Strategy Bonus” in addition to their regular wages. For full-time strategists, this bonus will ultimately represent a large % of their total take-home pay.
- Strategists may play other roles in the company as well, and so this role will often be blended with others to determine final comp.
Key Skills 🤹🏽
| Skill | Roles | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Task Clarification | Strategist | Can handle small to medium inbound requests for work from clients and clarify them to be actionable and ready for a sprint | Can handle any conceivable request from a client including for full new platforms or projects, and spec/clarify them in coordination with internal experts | |||
Strategic Planning | Strategist | Understands the basic business realities of their clients and plans our work to align with their business goals | Is an important strategic advisor to client not just on our work. Proactively makes smart suggestions for projects and | |||
Budget and Timeline Management | Strategist | Keeps a close eye on project timeline and budget status and makes modifications when necessary to avoid problems | We almost never miss deadlines or go over budget on this person’s projects. | |||
Review & Feedback | Strategist | Can review and assess work against agreed-upon Definitions of Done. Can verify when we have completed tasks successfully according to client requests. | Can provide creative and technical feedback on the level of a creative or technical director. Can guide work proactively by providing unique insight. Can synthesize client feedback with our own requirements to find novel solutions. | |||
Project Capabilities | Strategist | Is able to handle smaller clients with simpler needs such as webflow sites, light branding, etc | Is able to handle clients at any level of technical and design complexity. Can open up new markets for Cantilever based on unique domain knowledge (ex. someone who knows the medical field really well allows us to work in that field) |