Strategy Manager

Position Summary:

The Strategy Manager has a critical role in developing and implementing the company’s growth strategy. This role focuses on developing the critical market and competitive analyses needed as the foundation for strategic planning, growth and business development initiatives.  The Strategy Manager will work with business unit leaders to develop global market insights, competitive and technology trends to support critical decisions on business growth priorities.  Working in a collaborative, cross-functional environment, they have an active role preparing and supporting the highest impact decisions on the direction of the company, ensuring that the senior leadership team has a consistent, reliable basis of facts and analyses to guide their discussions.  

Position Responsibilities:

Strategy Development

• Collaborate with Leadership in developing, communicating and refining business strategy frameworks together with business unit line managers across the Methode global portfolio.
• Collaborate with and support business unit leaders in their development of near-term tactics, competitive strategies, product and technology roadmaps and longer-term transformation plans, aligned with the company's overall strategic objectives.

Market and Competitive Analysis

• Take primary responsibility for identifying and developing a portfolio of quantitative market and competitive information sources, aligned with the most important products, technologies and geographies to company performance.
• Leverage a broad portfolio of syndicated, open source and unstructured data sources to become the company authority on overall market sizing, segmentation, forecasted development and change drivers. 
• Lead the utilization of advanced data mining and statistical refinement tools and techniques to triangulate, compare, and otherwise improve the reliability and resolution of quantitative competitive data across diverse industry segments and markets.
• Collaborate with business unit commercial and product strategy leaders to refine the relevance and accuracy of market and competitive outlook information. 

Change Management and Stakeholder Engagement

• Play a leading role in raising the quality, depth, reliability and consistency of quantitative market and competitive information used globally, across the entire Methode business portfolio.
• Work closely with stakeholders across business units to build understanding, engagement and global collaboration in developing, implementing and continuously improving top-down and bottom-up business planning activities
• Design and implement performance dashboards, tracking actual business performance against product, market and customer development targets
• Develop proactive trend and anomaly detection analyses, to accelerate the cycle of issue identification through analysis, response planning and resolution together with relevant business unit and functional leaders
• Build excitement and momentum for quarterly business strategy sessions, by ensuring that the process improves clarity, delivers insights and accelerates decision-making on the topics most critical to the company’s overall success.

Transaction Support

• Develop ad-hoc analyses to support business unit performance improvement activities, e.g., quantitative support for pricing negotiations where supply and demand conditions deviate from planned program assumptions
• As needed, provide analytical and logistical support for M&A initiatives, contributing to due diligence, data gathering, and project management.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Economics, Engineering, Data Science or other quantitative discipline.  MBA or MS Business Analytics helpful.
• Minimum of five years of relevant work experience, ideally in strategy, consulting or equity research.
• A passion for global business strategy and competitive analysis above and beyond explicitly required competencies
• Demonstrated analytical abilities applied to business challenges, with a proactive approach to understanding the “story behind the numbers”, to uncover insights from anomalies and gaps
• Highly numerate and analytical.   Creative in developing alternative sources of information and analytical techniques to fill in gaps and assess reliability.  Able to work both inductively and deductively to understand and leverage probabilistic analysis (e.g., correlations, covariance, time-series and macro-economic effects)
• Inherent intellectual curiosity, with a natural disposition to find new sources, techniques and methods that may offer greater insight and actionability to strategic business decisions. 
• Demonstrated ability to work across cultures and geographies, ideally with prior work experience or residency in a foreign country.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with experience packaging insights for various audiences, including executives.
• Proficiency in data visualization, analysis, modeling, and business presentation tools.

Perform other duties as assigned

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds.  Frequent hand motion and repetitive tasks including using a computer for typing.  While performing the duties of this job, the employee will occasionally do immediate reaching and overhead reaching to perform various duties, frequent standing for varied amounts of time to perform various duties, frequent walking for varied amounts of time to perform various duties.  Squat or bend to perform various duties.  Occasionally climb stairs.

Benefits and Perks

Methode offers US employees Medical, Dental, Vision, Hearing, Life & Disability insurance, a wellness program, and time off benefits.

Voluntary benefit plans include Accident, Hospital Indemnity and Pet Insurance.  

Methode provides an Employee Assistance Program, and participation in the Company’s 401(k) plan which includes a company contribution.

Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Hourly employees will also be paid overtime pay when working qualifying overtime hours.

Methode Electronics is an equal opportunity employer.  We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information and other legally protected characteristics per the EEO Poster available here . If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please send an e-mail to [email protected] or call (708) 867-6777 and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.