Job DescriptionAbout the roleHelp shape what service should become next.Service is changing quickly. Customer expectations are rising, technology is expanding what is possible, and many of the most valuable opportunities do not arrive as neatly defined projects. They begin as unresolved questions: Where can service create more value? Which ideas are worth testing? What should we scale, rethink, or stop?
As Manager, Business Strategy and Operations, you will sit at the center of those questions. You will turn customer needs, market shifts, and business realities into strategies and experiences worth building, then help move the strongest ideas from possibility to proof.
This is not a traditional project-management or analytics support role. You will form a point of view, bring structure to ambiguity, connect insight to action, and bring the right people together to turn strong ideas into evidence-backed decisions. Your work will influence how we evolve service for customers, partners, and the business, and your portfolio will evolve as new priorities and opportunities emerge.
What You Will Do
- Shape service strategy: Bring together customer, partner, market, competitive, operational, and financial evidence to develop a clear point of view on where and how our service strategy should evolve.
- Spot and shape new opportunities: Find promising ways to improve or reinvent service, turn them into clear opportunities, and determine which are worth pursuing.
- Turn ambiguity into action: Take broad or unresolved questions and create a practical path forward, including the learning agenda, analysis, stakeholders, decisions, and next steps required.
- Figure out what's worth pursuing: Build the case for where we should invest, weighing customer and partner value, growth potential, economics, feasibility, and what it will actually take to make an idea work.
- Design tests that answer real questions: Translate promising opportunities into concepts, hypotheses, experiments, pilots, success measures, and decision criteria.
- Help make the best ideas real: Work across teams to move validated concepts toward launch, keeping the customer problem, intended value, and measures of success intact along the way.
- Shape important decisions: Give senior leaders a clear point of view on what we should do, why, what the evidence says, and what we're trading off.
- Build a repeatable innovation capability: Help us get better at finding, testing, and advancing good ideas so innovation becomes a repeatable discipline, not a series of one-off projects.
The Kind of Person Who Will Thrive Here
- You are energized by important questions that don't yet have obvious answers.
- You can see the bigger opportunity without losing sight of what it will take to make it real.
- You connect customer insight, market context, financial thinking, and operational realities rather than treating them as separate exercises.
- You know the difference between an interesting idea, an opportunity worth testing, and one worth scaling.
- You form a point of view, challenge assumptions constructively, and are willing to recommend stopping when the evidence isn't there.
- You can influence executives and working teams through judgment, clarity, and credibility, not formal authority.
- You can make complex work simple and make the decision or next step obvious.
- You enjoy creating new capabilities and ways of working, not just operating established processes.
- You want the opportunity to shape the work, not simply execute a strategy someone else has already defined.
What Success Looks Like
- We are making smarter choices about where service can create meaningful value for customers, partners, and the business.
- Promising ideas move from "interesting" to tested, evidence-backed opportunities.
- Ideas that don't hold up get challenged, reshaped, or stopped before we invest heavily in them.
- Leaders have better evidence and a clearer point of view when making investment and roadmap decisions.
- Teams understand the problem they're solving, why it matters, and what needs to be true for an idea to succeed.
- You've helped build a stronger muscle for finding, testing, and advancing new service ideas.
- As the business evolves, so does your portfolio, giving you room to take on new questions and opportunities.
How You Will Work
You'll have a lot of autonomy, but you won't work in a vacuum. You'll partner across the business to bring the right perspectives into the work, challenge thinking when needed, and create momentum around promising opportunities.
You'll move constantly between strategy and execution. One day that may mean framing a new opportunity or digging into customer research; another may mean pressure-testing a business case, working through a concept with Product and Technology, or helping leaders decide whether an idea is ready to move forward.
You won't always be handed a clean problem statement. A big part of the job is figuring out what question we should be asking in the first place.
Role Scope
This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad program and functional leadership responsibility. The role does not have direct reports or formal personnel-management authority. Leadership comes through ownership, judgment, cross-functional influence, and the ability to turn complex questions into decisions and action. The scope of the role will evolve as business priorities and the service portfolio change.
Qualifications- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
- Typically 10+ years of related experience in strategy, service innovation, customer experience, consulting, incubation, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- A track record of owning complex work that crosses teams, functions, or business areas and turning it into tangible decisions and outcomes.
- Experience developing strategic recommendations, business cases, experiments or pilots, roadmaps, and plans for bringing ideas to life.
- Experience advising senior leaders and driving work forward when the answer, ownership, or path isn't obvious.
- Strong strategic problem solving, synthesis, executive communication, facilitation, and stakeholder influence.
- Advanced analytical skills; comfort working with both qualitative and quantitative evidence and turning analysis into business decisions.
Experience That Could Set You Apart
- Experience in protection plans, insurance, repair, warranty, subscription services, or another complex service ecosystem.
- Experience with customer research, journey discovery, competitive benchmarking, opportunity sizing, or value-proposition development.
- Experience partnering with Product and Technology teams to move ideas from discovery into experimentation, MVPs, or roadmap decisions.
- Experience with tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or Python can be helpful, but aren't required.
Additional InformationAt SquareTrade you'll have access to:
- Medical, dental and vision coverage with network optionality and the ability to contribute to a savings account (HSA or FSA)
- Up to 4% company match into 401(k) and contributions into your company-sponsored pension
- $75/month budget to help prioritize your physical wellbeing
- $80/month stipend to subsidize connectivity costs
- Mental health resources including free 1:1 therapy, coaching sessions and digital resources
- Supportive leave policies
- Competitive PTO program with 9 paid Company Holidays
- Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250 per year to further your personal educational advancement desires
- Hybrid work arrangements with regular investment in gatherings/offsites to spend time together as team
- Various corporate perks and discounts
SquareTrade estimates the possible base compensation for this role, if hired in the U.S, to be in the range: $110K-$160K
