Lead, Digital Business Strategist

About us

National Grid is hiring a Lead, Digital Business Strategist for our Digital Solutions team in New York (Syracuse/Brooklyn/Albany).

Every day we deliver safe and secure energy to homes, communities, and businesses. We are there when people need us the most. We connect people to the energy they need for the lives they live. The pace of change in society and our industry is accelerating and our expertise and track record puts us in an unparalleled position to shape the sustainable future of our industry.

To be successful we must anticipate the needs of our customers, reducing the cost of energy delivery today and pioneering the flexible energy systems of tomorrow. This requires us to deliver on our promises and always look for new opportunities to grow, both ourselves and our business.

The Digital Solutions organization works in a harmonized partnership with the National Grid group of diverse energy businesses to deliver technology which revolutionizes the way we operate. As we lead the charge towards a carbon-free future, our teams are embracing disruptive changes in our industry by working with Agile methodologies and adopting Digital mindsets to drive efficiency and bring new capabilities for our internal and external customers.

Job Purpose

The scope of this role will be within the New York Electric Network Operations Product Line, which is responsible for successfully enabling our critical control center and meter data capabilities. Key products in this portfolio include the Energy Management System (EMS), Advance Distribution Management System (ADMS), Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS), and Meter Data Management System (MDMS).

The Digital Business Strategist is responsible for supporting the business and operations work stream within a multi-disciplinary digital product team structure. They partner closely to execute several activities, such as identifying assumptions, building the value case, defining the future-state process vision, executing change management plans, etc.

Key Accountabilities

• Support strategic planning process and define business future state vision based on stakeholder input and industry trends
• Define future-state operations solution and lead gap assessments (incl. people, process, tech, data, regulatory)
• Drive digital product planning by coordinating business capability assessments, product design, and roadmapping with cross-functional teams
• Build relationships with business stakeholders and represent their needs and priorities by defining business requirements to be addressed by digital solutions
• Develop business cases, including value projections and detailed investment estimates, and track objectives and key results to assess benefit realization of products
• Support business/operation work stream team, participating in Agile sprints, guiding prioritization, and driving progress throughout product lifecycles
• Support change mgmt. and product release plans, with help from the change mgmt. team as needed
• Provide support to product & technical workstreams (e.g., RFP support, process mapping, stakeholder mgmt., value alignment, PMO & governance)
• Identify and escalate risks to delivering on-time, on-budget, and in line with desired outcomes and lead risk mitigation efforts to optimize value
• Prepare materials for key stakeholder readouts (e.g., Digital Board meetings) and regulatory engagements

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, technology, engineering or relevant field
• 5-8 years relevant business experience, such as product management, digital transformation, and strategic business planning
• Experience working with/within electric utilities, DER developers, and/or utility technology providers – electric utility operations experience highly preferred
• Experience in Agile product or project management
• Excellent analytical problem solving and strategic thinking skills

Experienced Desired

• Strong interest in the utility industry and energy transition
• Experience working across cross-functional teams and managing broad groups of stakeholders
• Ability to think strategically and present a compelling vision that represents stakeholder perspectives
• Ability to assess and document current state operations, identify customer/user pain points, and help translate business needs into product requirements
• Ability to design future-state processes and solutions that address user frictions, including articulating any changes needed to reach the future-state process
• Ability to build and refine a product business case, including benefits (financial, non-financial, strategic) and costs
• Knowledge of digital product implementation fundamentals and Agile product or project management
• Ability to execute change management and product release plans, including communications plan, user adoption strategy, etc.
• Ability to perform data analytics and communicate meaningful insights from data
• Ability to create and present compelling materials to senior stakeholders from different organizations