Director, Transformation and Strategy

Braven; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Braven seeks a Director, Transformation and Strategy to join the Office of the CEO. This in-person role will drive multi-year pilots, develop compelling business cases, and partner across teams to scale Braven’s program model.

You’ll design programs, analyze outcomes, and build the operational backbone for sustainable growth across university partnerships and local contexts. You’ll lead with ambiguity, balancing strategic vision with practical execution, and report to the Head of Transformation

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent.
• 7+ years of strong track record in transformation, strategy, or program management.

Responsibilities

• Develop a scalable, multi-year strategy for key pilots and translate insights into an evidence-based business case.
• Lead pilots and build a framework to replicate success across contexts while respecting local needs and cultures.
• Define consistency vs. adaptation across pilot sites, forging genuine partnerships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Design operational scaffolding—checklists, timelines, templates—that support scalable, sustainable programs beyond direct involvement.
• Create project plans with milestones and dependencies, maintaining momentum with minimal oversight.
• Manage end-to-end logistics and communications for program launches, reviews, and post-mortem learnings.

Skills

Strategic thinking

Stakeholder management

Data analysis

Program design

Financial modeling

Evidence-based decision making

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

Job Title: Director, Transformation and Strategy

Team: Office of the Chief Executive Officer

Location: In-Person strong preference for Chicago (IL), also possible; Atlanta (GA), Newark (NJ), or New York City (NYC)

Employment Type: Full-time

FLSA Classification: Exempt

Start Date: ASAP

About Braven

Braven is a national nonprofit that prepares promising college students to secure a strong first opportunity after college graduation through a career-accelerating program.

We work with higher education and employer partners to offer a life-changing experience that begins with a semester-long course for college students, followed by support that lasts through graduation.

Together, our ambition is to help rebuild the middle class and revitalize the American Dream.

To learn more, take a look at Braven's Jobs Report.

About the Role

In order to achieve its ambition of serving 80,000-100,000 Fellows over the next decade, Braven is hiring a Director, Transformation and Strategy, to join the newly formed Transformation team. Transformation is charged with ensuring we see around corners and are prepared to maximize strategic opportunities in our future. Your role is to incubate and then hand off initiatives that are critical to our organization’s success.

You’ll do the work of launching pilot projects, figuring out what should be consistent across the organization, and determining what has to be unique to meet the needs of the student population and/or local landscape to scale. You bring a broad toolkit: you will design and execute programs, articulate and assess the business case for initiatives, analyze data and learnings, and build the operational foundation that makes the initiative sustainable and scalable - and you thrive on this.

While you don’t manage anyone directly, you will manage across many internal stakeholders, and your ability to move people toward shared outcomes without direct authority is critical to your success. You’re energized by ambiguity, you take initiative before being asked, you think in systems, and you genuinely love figuring out what "cutting edge" means for an organization that is paving the way. You enjoy bringing structure to ambiguous problems without flattening the complexity, and you know when to slow down and define the question before rushing to answer it.

This role calls for adaptability as Braven's transformation agenda evolves, and your scope will grow with it. To start, you will play a pivotal and dynamic role in deepening our career partnerships with universities, helping to explore and launch an evolution of our core model. Strong contributors here thrive in a startup environment where job descriptions are starting points, not ceilings, and are willing to roll up their sleeves to support whatever the mission needs. This is a small team culture where everyone pitches in, shares credit, and stays focused on student impact.

This role is a part of the Office of the Chief Executive Officer and reports directly to the Head of Transformation.

What You’ll Do

Set Strategy and Own the Business Case (40%)

• Develop and own Braven's multi-year strategy for key pilot initiatives - synthesizing insights from program delivery, partner relationships, financial modeling, and student outcome data into a coherent, evidence-based framework
• Build and maintain the business case for key pilot initiatives as a scalable Braven offering: model unit economics, cost per student, and revenue potential across partner types; translate findings into recommendations for Braven leadership and, where appropriate, external stakeholders
• Establish consistent measurement baselines (including financial, programmatic metrics) so we can make data-driven decisions and meaningful comparisons over time and across pilot partners, surfacing ROI and risks/opportunities on an ongoing basis
• Gather updates from across the team and synthesize them into cohesive, well-structured presentations that reflect both progress and honest challenges
• Prepare materials, briefings, and talking points for board meetings - distilling complex program activity into clear, compelling narratives for a non-operational audience
• Conducts ongoing landscape research to stay current on what is happening in the industry (on university campuses, peer organizations, etc.) and test our assumptions about the model.

Deliver Program Outcomes (35%)

• Develop a scalable program framework and multi-year roadmap that aligns with Braven's mission and current model, and enables us to pivot towards new future opportunities

• Execute pilots, launching a suite of programming at initial partner sites, and assess what’s working and build a clear framework for what can be replicated versus what needs to be redesigned for each new context, culture, and student population

• Define what should be consistent across pilot contexts and what must be adapted, honoring institutional differences while staying true to our model and principles

• Build authentic relationships with collaborating teams to understand their goals and constraints well enough to be a genuine thought partner (vs. a vendor)

• Define how we partner effectively with internal and external stakeholders to strengthen relationships, increase efficiency, and ensure strong outcomes

• Build the operational scaffolding behind launch work - the checklists, timelines, communication templates, and handoff documents that make programs sustainable beyond your direct involvement

• Create and own project plans across program initiatives - timelines, milestones, cross-functional dependencies - and keep work moving forward with minimal oversight

• Conceive, design, and execute specific programs that get participants genuinely excited about the results

• Create and own the project plans behind our program initiatives while building timelines, setting milestones, tracking dependencies, and keeping cross-functional work moving forward

• Manage all logistics end-to-end: vision, venue, promotion, materials, execution, and follow-up with little hand-holding and strong attention to detail

• Debrief every program honestly - what worked, what flopped, what to try next time - and feed those insights back into the overall design

Drive Organizational Learning and Operations (25%)

• Design and run a data collection campaign to capture key outcomes
• Build the forms, trackers, and processes that make data collection feel easy for stakeholders - low friction, high compliance
• Synthesize findings into clear, compelling narratives for a wide variety of audiences - from student-facing summaries to Alignment Team briefings to board-level presentations
• Ensure data is actionable, not just reported; ensure reports are simple and useful
• Develop high-quality memos, briefings, and presentation materials for high-stakes meetings with external key stakeholders
• Document learnings from each launch in a way that makes the next one faster and smarter and we add to our institutional knowledge base
• Support the broader team in understanding what the data says about the outcomes, and implications for future decisions

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent
• 7+ years of strong track record of