Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per week

Business Overview

New York Life is advancing strategic transformations designed to fundamentally reimagine critical enterprise capabilities through business process redesign, technology, data, analytics, automation, and AI. Business Discovery & Solution Strategy is an enduring leadership capability within the technology organization, responsible for turning complex and ambiguous business opportunities into future-state workflows, solution strategies, prioritized roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.

The initial assignment focuses on Performance & Enterprise Decision Support within Enterprise Plan to Perform (EPP), including Performance Management and NEXUS. The leader will help reimagine how executives, Finance leaders, FP&A practitioners, and business leaders understand performance, investigate drivers, evaluate scenarios, and take action, moving beyond static reports and dashboards toward intelligent and increasingly agentic decision workflows.

Role Overview

The Corporate Vice President, Business Discovery & Solution Strategy provides senior leadership at the intersection of business strategy, product thinking, technology, data, analytics, and AI. The role is accountable for taking complex and often ambiguous enterprise business problems and translating them into clearly defined outcomes, future-state workflows, solution strategies, capability roadmaps, and prioritized investments that can be executed by business and technology teams.

This is not a traditional business-analysis, requirements-management, or program-management role. The leader is expected to bring a strong product mindset: start with users, decisions, and outcomes; challenge stated requirements where appropriate; develop and test hypotheses; make explicit prioritization choices; define capability and solution boundaries; and maintain accountability for the integrity of the solution strategy from discovery into delivery.

A critical aspect of the role is identifying where AI and agentic capabilities can do more than automate existing processes. The leader will help reimagine workflows around what machines can increasingly understand, analyze, generate, recommend, and execute while preserving appropriate human judgment, governance, security, and controls. The role operates with significant autonomy and executive influence across organizational boundaries and is expected to shape consequential transformation choices and investments.

What You'll Do

Business Discovery & Problem Framing
• Lead discovery across complex enterprise domains, working directly with senior executives, business leaders, practitioners, and technology stakeholders.
• Start with the decisions, users, business outcomes, and underlying problems that matter rather than accepting current processes, systems, reports, or stated requirements as the definition of the solution.
• Structure ambiguous business problems, develop hypotheses, identify critical assumptions, and determine what evidence is required before committing significant technology investment.
• Develop a deep understanding of user personas, decision journeys, workflows, pain points, information needs, and desired outcomes.
• Distinguish requested features from underlying business needs and constructively challenge senior stakeholders when a different approach may create greater value.

Future-State & Agentic Reimagination
• Define future-state business workflows and experiences that materially improve how work is performed and decisions are made.
• Identify where AI, agentic capabilities, analytics, automation, and modern technology can fundamentally change a workflow rather than simply digitize or accelerate the current state.
• Determine which activities should remain human-led, which should be augmented by technology, and which can increasingly be performed autonomously with appropriate governance and controls.
• Bring external perspectives and emerging practices into discovery to challenge internal assumptions and identify new possibilities.
• Use prototypes, experiments, and working solutions to validate hypotheses with users and refine the future state.

Product & Solution Strategy
• Translate business discovery into clear product and solution strategies, capability definitions, boundaries, roadmaps, and prioritized outcomes.
• Make deliberate tradeoffs across business value, user needs, complexity, feasibility, dependencies, reuse, and speed to learning.
• Establish clear value hypotheses and success measures for major capabilities and investments.
• Ensure MVPs test meaningful business and product hypotheses rather than simply deliver smaller versions of predetermined solutions.
• Define a coherent evolution path from MVP through subsequent increments and broader enterprise adoption.

Discovery to Delivery Continuity
• Translate future-state strategy into prioritized roadmaps, requirements, hypotheses, backlogs, and delivery increments.
• Partner closely with Integrated Delivery, Domain Technology Leads, Product Owners, Solution Engineering & Architecture, Data Architecture, Data Engineering, and strategic partners.
• Maintain continuity between the original business outcome and what ultimately gets engineered and deployed.
• Participate throughout delivery to validate whether working solutions continue to solve the intended problem and recommend changes as new evidence emerges.
• Ensure solution decisions account for enterprise architecture, data, controls, security, operational requirements, and reuse without allowing current technology constraints to unnecessarily define the future state.

Executive Leadership & Capability Building
• Develop trusted relationships with senior business, Finance, investment, and Technology executives and serve as a strategic thought partner on transformation opportunities.
• Facilitate complex discussions involving competing stakeholder perspectives and drive groups toward clear choices and decisions.
• Communicate complex business and technology concepts through clear executive narratives, recommendations, and visual artifacts.
• Influence senior stakeholders without relying solely on formal authority and constructively challenge established assumptions where necessary.
• Help establish and mature Business Discovery & Solution Strategy as an enduring leadership capability across New York Life strategic transformations.

Initial Assignment Focus
• Lead discovery and solution strategy for Performance Management, NEXUS, and related enterprise decision-support capabilities.
• Challenge approaches that simply reproduce existing PDFs, reports, or dashboards in a new interface and define what would make the experience materially more useful and decision-oriented.
• Determine what insights should be proactively surfaced, what users should explore dynamically, what analysis agents can perform on their behalf, and what actions should follow from the insights generated.
• Partner with business performance and analytics leaders to identify common enterprise metrics and decision needs while preserving appropriate business-specific depth.
• Define how NEXUS should evolve as a cross-EPP decision-support experience, including persona needs, product boundaries, value hypotheses, MVP priorities, and future increments.

Talent & Organizational Leadership
• Build, lead and develop high performing teams with strong domain knowledge and modern technology and engineering capabilities.
• Attract, develop and retain forward deployed and other high caliber technology talent, while building technology leadership and domain expertise across the organization.
• Establish clear accountability and a culture of collaboration, innovation, engineering discipline and continuous improvement.
• Lead effectively through both direct authority and matrixed relationships across Business, Product, Technology and partner teams.

What You'll Bring

Required Experience
• 15+ years of progressively responsible experience in business or technology strategy, product strategy, digital transformation, management consulting, technology, data and AI, or related disciplines, including significant leadership responsibility in complex enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated experience framing ambiguous business problems and translating them into clear strategies, future-state capabilities, roadmaps, and executable initiatives.
• Strong experience working directly with senior business and technology executives and influencing consequential decisions across organizational boundaries.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives involving business, technology, engineering, data, architecture, operations, and risk and control stakeholders.
• Experience translating customer, user, or business needs into future-state workflows, capabilities, and technology-enabled solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize among competing opportunities and make explicit choices based on business value, user outcomes, evidence, feasibility, dependencies, and speed to learning.
• Strong understanding of modern technology, data, analytics, automation, generative AI, and agentic capabilities and their potential to transform business workflows and decision-making.
• Experience moving initiatives from early-stage ambiguity and discovery through solution definition, roadmap development, delivery, and value realization.
• Experience operating within large federated or matrixed enterprises and navigating complex stakeholder environments.
• Strong analytical, facilitation, communication, and executive-presentation capabilities, with demonstrated learning agility and ability to rapidly develop domain depth.

Required Skills
• Product Mindset - Starts with users, problems, decisions, and outcomes rather than features, current systems, or predetermined solutions.
• Strategic Problem Framing - Structures ambiguity, identifies underlying problems, develops hypotheses, and separates symptoms from root causes.
• Business Discovery - Uses stakeholder engagement, data, observation, research, and experimentation to develop an evidence-based understanding of the problem and opportunity.
• Future-State Reimagination - Challenges current-state assumptions and defines materially different ways of working rather than incremental digitization.
• AI & Agentic Transformation - Understands how AI changes what is possible within workflows and can distinguish meaningful transformation from superficial application of AI.
• Product & Solution Strategy - Defines capability and solution boundaries, roadmaps, MVPs, prioritization choices, value hypotheses, and measures of success.
• Executive Influence - Constructively challenges senior stakeholders, synthesizes competing perspectives, and creates alignment around difficult choices.
• Business & Technology Fluency - Connects business strategy to data, architecture, engineering, analytics, AI, controls, and enterprise constraints without defaulting to technology-first solutions.
• Systems Thinking - Understands how process, organization, data, technology, controls, and user behavior interact as an integrated system.
• Value Orientation - Maintains focus on measurable business outcomes and value realization rather than activity, features, or project completion.
• Learning Agility - Rapidly develops domain understanding and adapts hypotheses and recommendations as evidence changes.
• People Management - Develops and empowers talent through clear expectations, actionable feedback, effective coaching, and accountability, while fostering an inclusive, high-performing team environment.

Preferred Experience
• Experience with performance management, management reporting, executive decision support, FP&A, analytics, or enterprise performance capabilities.
• Experience designing executive or practitioner experiences that combine data, analytics, AI, and workflow.
• Experience in enterprise product management, product strategy, design thinking, service design, management consulting, or strategic transformation.
• Experience leading AI-enabled or agentic business transformation in a highly regulated enterprise.
• Experience working with multidisciplinary product and engineering teams using rapid prototyping, iterative customer validation, and outcome-based roadmaps.

Why This Role
• Shape strategic enterprise transformations. Influence what gets built and why by framing the highest-value problems, defining future-state capabilities, and making explicit prioritization choices.
• Reimagine work, not just technology. Challenge current workflows and identify where data, analytics, AI, and agentic capabilities can fundamentally improve decisions and outcomes.
• Operate at enterprise scale. Work directly with senior leaders across business, Finance, Investments, Technology, Data, Architecture, Risk, and strategic partners.
• Create continuity from strategy to execution. Maintain the integrity of the business outcome from discovery and solution strategy through delivery and value realization.
• Build an enduring capability. Help establish Business Discovery & Solution Strategy as a repeatable leadership discipline that can be deployed across New York Life strategic transformations.