Managing Director, Strategy

About this role

The Managing Director of Strategy at 829 Studios runs the Strategy department day-to-day: a team of Group Strategy Directors, Strategy Directors, and Strategists supporting clients across the agency's portfolio.This role owns how the department performs: the quality of strategic work shipped to clients, the health of the accounts it supports, and the growth of the people producing it.

Reporting to the VP of Strategy, the Managing Director translates the department vision and priorities into the operating plans, management systems, and accountability required for consistent execution.The role remains close to client work through portfolio reviews, quality inspection, executive sponsorship, and recovery leadership, stepping into direct account leadership selectively when business need or development value warrants it. This role is designed for an operational leader who develops strong managers, drives adoption, and maintains a clear view of the work without becoming embedded in day-to-day account execution.

What You'll Do

Department Operations & Leadership

- Run the day-to-day operations of the Strategy department, translating department priorities into clear operating plans and owning performance across utilization, capacity, staffing ratios, strategic quality, and execution. Use these signals to identify gaps, recommend action, and elevate material decisions to the VP of Strategy.

- Manage strategist allocation and workload balancing across the department, and drive staffing and headcount planning based on client demand.

- Manage escalation pathways for strategic disagreements and client concerns across the department, resolving issues before they require executive intervention.

- Contribute to org design, measurement standards, and department planning as a member of the department's leadership team.

- Partner cross-functionally with Account Management leadership to strengthen client retention strategies, establish best-in-class client management practices, and ensure account teams proactively address relationship risks and growth opportunities.

Client Leadership

- Serve as the senior strategic lead on 1-2 key client accounts, leading from the front and modeling the standard for strategic work across the department.

- Run the client health and portfolio review cadence for Strategy, maintaining a consolidated view of performance, relationship health, scope, staffing, retention risk, and growth opportunity. Ensure identified risks have clear recovery plans, owners, timelines, and expected outcomes.

- Lead recovery plans for at-risk accounts as the department's senior strategic operator, partnering with Client Services on resets and scope changes.

- Oversee strategic onboarding of new clients, ensuring a clean handoff from sales and a strong strategic foundation from day one.

- Run Strategy's side of the cross-sell and upsell initiative, ensuring teams identify, shape, and hand off growth opportunities in partnership with Account Management.

Team Development

- Lead and develop a team of Group Strategy Directors and Strategy Directors, providing coaching, performance feedback, and career development, and building strong succession candidates behind every seat.

- Own career pathing, development plans, and performance reviews for the Strategy team.

- Recruit and hire into the Strategy team, setting a high bar for strategic and technical talent.

Systems, Quality & Innovation

- Build and run implementation plans for department frameworks, SOPs, templates, and AI-enabled tooling; assign owners, define adoption measures, inspect usage, and correct gaps until the new operating standard is embedded.

- Hold the quality bar for strategic deliverables across the portfolio, including QBRs, annual plans, forecasts, and executive recommendations, with clear feedback loops when work misses the standard.

- Own delivery and staffing of the department's productized strategy offerings, keeping delivery consistent with the packaged scope.

- Stay current on emerging channels, platforms, and AI developments, and feed what's working on individual accounts back into the department's playbook.

What You'll Bring

- 12+ years in digital marketing with a proven record in senior strategic leadership, including direct management of strategists or strategy teams. Agency experience is required.

- A player-coach profile: proven ability to carry direct client ownership while running a department, without letting either side slip.

- Demonstrated success leading leaders: developing directors and senior strategists, building succession behind key seats, and raising performance at the department level rather than the account level.

- An operator's command of agency mechanics: utilization, capacity planning, staffing ratios, margin, and the tradeoffs between them.

- Deep working knowledge across paid search, paid social, programmatic, SEO, lifecycle, creative, content, and analytics, with the judgment to direct integrated strategy without personally doing every craft.

- Strong analytical skills, with fluency in performance data, measurement frameworks, and forecasting, and the ability to coach others to translate data into prioritized recommendations.

- A record of driving process and tooling adoption across teams, making standards stick in day-to-day client work.

- Executive-level communication, comfortable presenting to CMOs, CEOs, and founders, and coaching others to run those rooms.

- Experience leading client recovery: diagnosing at-risk accounts, building the plan, and holding teams to it.

- Business acumen across pricing, scoping, and packaging, with experience delivering productized or repeatable service offerings.

- Comfort operating with executive leadership: crisp written and verbal updates, clean escalation judgment, and follow-through.

- Working fluency with AI tools in strategy workflows, with a bias toward adopting what works and standardizing…