Strategy Roles Explained for STEM Researchers - What It's Like & How to Get There

Corporate Development and Strategy Roles

What strategy actually means inside a real company

I hear a lot of people say they want to work in strategy.
But then I usually ask one simple question: what is strategy, really?

So let me answer that first from the perspective of a publicly traded corporation. And then I will tell you very concretely what I did during my 3.5 years in a corporate development team at one of the leading robotics and automation companies.

This is written for researchers in STEM who are curious about what happens beyond the lab.

How companies actually operate

Publicly traded companies operate on a yearly financial cycle.

Budgets for the year are prepared in advance, approved, and then released progressively as the year goes on. If projected revenue is reached, there is usually no problem releasing the planned costs. If times are difficult, concessions are made. Projects are delayed, investments paused, sometimes people are laid off. If revenue is higher than expected, more investment into the business can be made.

Most companies have a core business, or several if there are multiple divisions. These businesses are governed by an executive board, which in turn is controlled by the board of directors elected by shareholders.

The executive board has to make decisions on how the company grows its core business and how it expands into adjacent fields.

This is where strategy comes in.

Strategy is a long-term bet, not a buzzword

If you have read my PM toolkit, you already know that everything starts with market analysis and a Mekko chart.

The company and its competitors are mapped across relevant markets using revenue and growth estimates. This gives an overview of the total addressable market. Adjacent markets are added to understand where the company could expand beyond its core.

Strategy is typically a five-year vision of where the business wants to be in terms of revenue, portfolio, geographies, technologies, and potential acquisitions. So you build of the coming year’s budget and add another 4 lines to revenue, costs and profit, broadly speaking, accounting for all projects you plan to run as part of this 5-year strategy.

It’s a huge excel sheet that is developed with R&D, product management, sales and finance. That’s one big reason you need a busines background to work in strategy – just reading financial statements is a must-have skill.

Yet, none of these projections are certain. These are best guesses based on available data, market trends, and internal execution plans. The company needs to make an educated guess and bet on is success. The better the analysis, the clearer the logic, and the more concrete the execution plan, the higher the chances the board of directors will approve the strategy.

Let’s pause for a second. Isn’t it cool to work on this?

Who actually does strategy work?

Strategy teams are small. Very small.

Even in large companies, we are talking about five to ten people. These teams work very closely with top decision makers and subject matter experts across the business.

In my case, I joined a team of just a few people. Everyone had a STEM background plus something else. Business school, consulting, or banking.

This is why I keep repeating that STEM plus business is a winning combination.

These people typically have broader exposure than most technical roles in the company. They work on high-profile topics and are paid a premium for it.

How I ended up in corporate development

I joined for an MBA internship. The head of the team also had an MBA and intentionally hired summer trainees as a source of future full-time employees. Three months is long enough to see if someone fits the role and actually delivers.

My task for those three summer months was to analyze one specific market adjacent to the company’s core business.

Sounds straightforward. It was not.

I had some courses during my MBA, but no one really tells you how market analysis is done in real life. Where do you find numbers. Which trends matter. How do you actually draw a Mekko. A what?? But essentially, neither did I know where to get the data, nor how the final outcome should look like (spoiler: it’s a 100 page long powerpoint deck crammed with information).

Luckily, the team invested a lot of time in forming me and supporting me. But mentally, I had to stop being a scientist and put on a business hat.

Which often meant sitting at my desk thinking: what the hell am I supposed to do now?

And the more I work in business, the more I keep asking myself this question. On very many occasions, there’s no blueprint – you have to come up with solutions yourself. Try, and fail, and try again to success.

So very Winnie-the-Pooh style. Think, think, think.

What market analysis really looked like

I started by making a plan that was mostly about people. Who could I talk to internally. Which SMEs could help me. Who externally might be willing to share insights.

That turned out to be part of the right approach.

On top of that, I was asked to identify a credible market report and purchase it for the team. And then there was a lot of desk research. Googling. Competitor websites. Patents. LinkedIn profiles. White papers. Application notes.

I joke that I became an expert in three months. Obviously not true. No one becomes an expert in three months. But doing this non-stop, including overtime, made me learn an insane amount in a very short time. My first business emersion (romanticizing it here…)

At the same time, the company was in the middle of a due diligence for an acquisition. Just sitting there, I overheard how parts of this process worked. And I was so jelous – THIS was the coolest work. You explore how companies work, create business cases, pitch to the CEO. I did all that once they emplyoed me full time and I genuinely was terriried by it and love it.

To wrap up, also conferences were a big part of information gathering. There was one exactly on my topic in Princeton, so they flew me from Zurich to New York, all expenses paid, to attend, learn, and talk to SMEs.

That part was genuinely amazing. All of it was amazing. To the point that when the Executive Vice President handed me the full time offer on the last day of my internship I was so exstatic that I accepted it without negotiating the package! The dumbest mistake of my life… but I learned my lesson lol.

From slides to the management board

Long story short, I built the Mekko. I prepared slides on technologies, trends, differentiators, competitive positioning, and possible strategic directions.

And this still sounds insane, but it is true. I presented my recommendations to the management board at the monthly management meeting. There were the CEO, CFO and other board members asking me detailed questions about the market. I thought I’d pee my pants, but obviously I gathered all my courage and presented like the most informed person in the room to the best of my ability.

I also got to realize what outstanding personas the CEO and the CFO were. Just judging by their questions and remarks during my presentation. Boy I want to be as smart as them when I grow up….

They agreed with most of my suggestions. Years later, I saw a competitor implement very similar moves to what I suggested back in 2016. Not because anything was leaked, but because someone else did a similar analysis and reached the same conclusions. Looking back ten years later, I can clearly see how that market evolved. And yes, a lot of it was spelled out back then and worked out. I am proud of this work even though my company didn’t get to benefit from it.

My point is this. You need business frameworks to make sense of markets, but you also need to learn a lot, talk to people, and be extremely diligent.

Why strategies fail

I have also seen the opposite. Two companies developing very similar technologies for the same application and the same addressable market. Both failed.

To this day, I sometimes wonder how so many smart people could get it so wrong. And I am not blaming them, it’s genuinely surprising to me. But business is unpredictable and from what I have seen, strategies usually fail for two reasons.

First, the strategy looks good on paper, but implementation is weak or incomplete. The plan is not really lived. Nothing materializes. Watching a master plan sink like this is painful.

Second, the strategy itself is wrong. Wrong assumptions. Wrong understanding of what customers want, in which form, and at what price. I have seen acquisitions and investment decisions destroy value.

We are all human.

Why I eventually left corporate development

And this is also why I left corporate development at some point. This group creates the plan, but rarely implements it.

When I later started running the business unit myself, based on my own strategy from my corp dev days, I could see that some things I suggested earlier were right. And some were very wrong.

I fell on my face more than once. You adapt. You learn. You move on.

You never know everything in advance.

Your takeaway as a STEM professional interested in breaking into strategy roles

Behold my friend, breaking into industry is one thing but into strategy – it’s a double challenge. If you are considering strategy or corporate development roles, here is the honest takeaway.

• Strategy roles are exciting. You help top management shape the company’s future over a five-year horizon.
• These roles are extremely scarce. Even big companies have very small strategy teams.
• They typically hire people with double profiles, in our space usually STEM plus business.
• Business can come from an MBA, consulting, banking, or hands-on industry experience i.e. you work for 5-10 years in product manegement, business development, operations or any form of internal consulting.
• You work close to power, with incomplete information, and high expectations.
• You often work “round the clock” as companies are global and so are the projects. You may need to travel a lot and clock in long ours (similar to consulting).
• You get compensated a premium.

If you like thinking big picture and influencing direction rather than executing experiments, strategy might be for you.

Just make sure you understand what the job really is.