Building a Strategy Team: A Practical Guide for Establishing and Scaling Your Strategy Function

Most guidance on building a strategy team starts with an organisation chart: a Chief Strategy Officer, a VP, a few managers and analysts, perhaps a specialist for acquisitions. The chart is the last decision, not the first, and starting there is how companies end up with a well-staffed function that produces excellent documents and changes nothing.

The first decision is the mandate. What is this function accountable for, and what will be different because it exists? Everything about size, seniority, reporting line and hiring sequence follows from that answer, and none of it can be derived without it.

What the function is accountable for

A strategy function that earns its cost does four things. Analysis appears in all of them and is the means rather than the purpose.

Supporting the decisions that allocate the future. Every organisation makes a small number of decisions each year that genuinely determine what it becomes: which markets to enter or leave, which products to stop, where capital goes, whether to buy or build. Most executives make these decisions with less evidence than they would demand for a routine procurement. The function's first job is to make sure the handful of decisions that matter are properly framed and properly informed.

Maintaining the evidence base. Competitor moves, market structure, customer economics, the company's own performance by segment. Not a monthly report nobody reads, but a picture that is current when someone asks. The value of this shows up as speed: an organisation that already knows the answer does not lose six weeks to a study when a decision arrives.

Running the cadence. Annual planning, quarterly review, the mechanism by which a choice becomes a commitment with an owner and a date. This is the least glamorous of the four and the one that most determines whether the function has influence.

Holding the portfolio view. In any organisation past a certain size, nobody has the whole picture. Business unit leaders see their own units. Finance sees the numbers without the market context. The strategy function is where the complete view lives, which is why it belongs close to the CEO.

Notice that producing documents appears nowhere on this list.

The failure mode, and where it comes from

The standard criticism of internal strategy teams is that they produce decks nobody uses. It is usually accurate, and the cause is structural rather than a matter of individual competence.

A team measured on output will produce output. Requests arrive from executives, the team is helpful, work is delivered, and the volume of analysis rises. None of it is attached to a decision with a date and an owner, so none of it forces anything to happen. Within eighteen months the function is regarded as an internal consultancy with slower turnaround than the external option.

The correction is uncomfortable and simple. Every piece of work is attached to a named decision, a decision date and a decision owner. Requests that have none of those are declined, or converted into one before work starts. A function that owns the decision cadence cannot be ignored. A function that supplies documents can be, and eventually is.

Reporting line

The reporting line determines what the function becomes, more than its title does.

To the CEO is the default and usually correct. It gives access to the decisions and the standing to challenge business unit positions.

To the CFO gradually converts the function into financial planning. The gravitational pull of the budget cycle is strong, and market and competitive questions lose to it every time.

To the COO gradually converts it into programme management. Useful work, but the questions become about delivery rather than about what should be delivered.

If the CEO line is not available, the thing to protect is attendance. The function must be in the room where resourcing is decided. Without that, it is producing advice for people who have already decided.

Sizing

Strategy functions should be smaller than most people expect, because capacity that exists will be used, and unrequested analysis is the main product of an oversized team.

Below roughly a hundred million in revenue, one or two people. The work is genuinely part-time at this scale and is often better held by a founder or a general manager with support.

Between that and around a billion, three to six. Enough to hold the evidence base, run the cadence and support two or three major decisions at once.

Beyond that, specialisation into corporate development, competitive intelligence and planning starts to justify its coordination cost. Below that threshold, splitting these roles creates handoffs where there was previously a conversation.

The hiring sequence

First hire: a senior generalist. Someone who can build the analysis and sit in the room where it is used. Hiring a pure analyst at this stage produces work nobody acts on. Hiring a pure figurehead produces opinions with nothing underneath them. The requirement is seniority enough to say no to an executive, and craft enough to support the no.

Second hire: analytical depth. Once the first person is spending most of their time in decision rooms, the modelling and research capacity has to come from somewhere. This is the point at which an analyst hire works, because there is now someone to convert the output into decisions.

Third hire: depends on the pattern of work. If acquisitions are recurring, corporate development. If the planning cycle is consuming the team, a planning lead. If competitors are moving faster than the company understands, market intelligence. Hire against the constraint that is actually binding rather than filling out a template.

Titles matter less than most organisations assume, with one exception: the first hire needs a title senior enough to be in the room. That is a real constraint and it is worth paying for.

Influence without authority

Strategy functions rarely have line authority, and the ones that try to acquire it by escalation win the first argument and lose the working relationships that made them useful.

The durable form of influence is process ownership. The function that sets the planning agenda, defines what a credible business case must contain, and runs the review where commitments are checked shapes decisions continuously without overruling anyone. Business unit leaders retain their decisions and make them inside a structure the function designed.

This is slower to establish and considerably more robust than authority granted from above, which lasts exactly as long as the sponsor does.

Skills that matter

Problem structuring. Turning a vague executive concern into a question that can be answered. This is the skill that separates a strategy hire from a good analyst, and it is visible in the first hour of an interview if you ask for it.

Quantitative credibility. The model must survive challenge from finance. Not sophistication for its own sake, but numbers that hold.

Industry depth. Enough to know which questions are worth asking. This can be hired or built, but it cannot be skipped.

Writing that changes minds. A different craft from writing that summarises. Most strategy output fails here: it is complete, accurate and does not move anyone.

Political judgement. Knowing when a recommendation is correct and unimplementable, and what to do about that. The hardest to interview for and the most common reason a technically strong hire fails.

Internal team or external support

The two are not substitutes and the choice is usually made on the wrong grounds.

External support suits work that is one-off, needs expertise the company will not need again, or benefits from independence. A portfolio review where internal positions are entrenched is better run from outside, because an internal team has to keep working with everyone afterwards.

An internal function suits recurring work: the planning cycle, the market picture, the review cadence, the institutional memory of why the last three decisions were made.

The common error is using consultants for the recurring work. The analysis is often excellent, and it leaves with the engagement. Two years later the same questions are asked again, and paid for again, because nothing was retained.

Fractional and interim arrangements sit sensibly in between for companies that need senior judgement before they can justify a full-time executive.

The first ninety days

A new strategy function has one job in its first quarter: prove that it changes decisions.

Start by finding out where decisions are currently made, which is rarely where the org chart suggests. Then pick one live decision, ideally one that is stuck, and work it end to end until it is made. A single decision unblocked does more for the function's standing than a comprehensive strategy review, which will be well received and quietly shelved.

Only after that is there a case for building the cadence, the evidence base and the team.

What to measure

Not documents produced. Useful indicators are whether decisions happened when they were due or slipped, whether the assumptions in past cases held when checked afterwards, whether resources actually moved between priorities rather than being spread evenly, and whether the executive team can state the current strategy consistently without opening a document.

The last is the strongest single test of whether a strategy function is working, and almost nobody measures it.

When you do not need one

A company small enough that the founders can hold the whole picture does not need a strategy function; it needs the founders to spend time on the question. A company in the middle of a crisis needs decisions rather than a planning cycle. A company whose executives have not agreed on the strategy will use a new strategy function as a way of not having that argument, and the function will spend two years producing documents that substitute for a decision nobody wants to make.

The point

Define the mandate, then staff to it. Report to the CEO if possible and attend the resourcing meetings regardless. Stay smaller than feels comfortable. Attach every piece of work to a decision with a date and an owner. Own the cadence rather than the deck. Measure the function on decisions made rather than analysis delivered.

At go:lofty we help organisations design and install the strategy function alongside the operating cadence that gives it teeth.

Talk to us about a strategy function that changes decisions.