Strategy & Planning Lead

About this role

Who We Are

At Picnic, we’re reinventing the way employees experience lunch at work. By partnering with top local restaurants and batching hundreds of orders, we make it easy for companies to offer high-quality, individually packed meals, without fees or tips. Our mission is to create a seamless, affordable, and joyful lunch experience that benefits both employees and employers.

About the Role

As Strategy & Planning Manager, you’ll turn a fast-moving business into a well-organized, goal-driven machine. You’ll own the planning cadence, performance infrastructure, and analytical firepower that keeps every team rowing in the same direction.

This is not a staff role. You’ll own outcomes, not just analyses — and you’ll see the direct impact of your work on how Picnic grows.

What You’ll Own

Planning & Goal-Setting

• Drive quarterly and annual planning processes across all Picnic teams — owning the calendar, the templates, and the quality of outputs.

• Partner with the Head of Picnic to define company-level and functional OKRs grounded in business priorities and market realities.

• Build and maintain the performance frameworks (KPIs, leading indicators, scorecards) that tell us whether we’re winning.

Performance Tracking & Insights

• Own the weekly and monthly business review cadence: synthesize data from across the org into a clear picture of where we stand.

• Flag risks early, surface opportunities proactively, and come with a point of view — not just a dashboard.

• Work closely with the Data team to translate raw analytics into decisions. SQL and Python fluency will help you move fast without waiting on others.

Budgeting & Resource Allocation

• Lead budgeting and forecasting cycles in partnership with our Strategic Finance lead.

• Analyze historical trends to inform headcount, spend, and operational decisions.

• Track budget performance and identify where we’re over- or under-resourced relative to priorities.

Cross-Functional Alignment

• Keep teams accountable to their commitments — in a way that’s collaborative, not policing.

• Run cross-functional planning sessions and project coordination on high-priority initiatives.

• Ensure that what leadership decides actually gets executed: translate direction into clear workstreams, owners, and timelines.

Special Projects & Executive Support

• Lead strategic analyses and special projects on behalf of the Head of Picnic — market sizing, operational deep-dives, growth opportunity assessments.

• Prepare exec-level presentations and business reviews that are sharp, well-structured, and decision-ready.

• Be the connective tissue between strategy and execution: wherever something matters and doesn’t have a clear owner, that’s often you.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s from a top university

• 3–6 years of experience in strategy, business operations, consulting, investment banking, private equity or a similar high-output analytical role — ideally in a high-growth startup or tech-adjacent environment.

• Exceptional at translating complexity into clarity: you can take a messy business problem, structure it, analyze it, and tell a coherent story about what to do.

• Strong command of data — you’re comfortable building models, pulling your own data, and knowing when a number doesn’t pass the sniff test.

• SQL proficiency is required

• Track record of owning cross-functional processes — not just contributing to them.

• Low-ego, high-agency: you’re comfortable being behind the scenes and energized by enabling others to execute well.

• Excellent written and verbal communication — you write clearly, present confidently, and calibrate to your audience.

• Project management chops: you can hold multiple workstreams without letting anything fall.

Why join us

• Drive…