Corporate Vice President, Business Discovery & Solution Strategy

New York Life•New York, NY

11d•$185,000 - $264,500•Hybrid

About The Position

The Corporate Vice President, Business Discovery & Solution Strategy – AI Reimagination provides senior leadership at the intersection of business strategy, product thinking, technology, data, analytics, and AI. The role turns complex and ambiguous enterprise business opportunities into defined outcomes, future-state workflows, user journeys, solution strategies, capability roadmaps, and prioritized investments that business and technology teams can execute. It is a product-strategy and transformation leadership role, not a traditional business-analysis, requirements-management, or program-management role. The initial assignment focuses on Enterprise Plan to Perform (EPP), a strategic transformation to reimagine enterprise planning, forecasting, performance management, scenario evaluation, and decision support. The role partners with Finance, business, and Technology leaders to define how AI, data, analytics, and modern technology can improve workflows, experiences, and decisions. It operates with autonomy and executive influence across organizational boundaries. The leader identifies how AI and agentic capabilities can fundamentally reshape workflows, determining which activities should remain human-led, be technology-augmented, or become increasingly autonomous while maintaining appropriate governance, security, and controls. The role maintains continuity from discovery through delivery and value realization, and helps establish Business Discovery & Solution Strategy as an enduring capability across New York Life transformations.

Requirements

15+ years of progressively responsible experience in business or technology strategy, product strategy, digital transformation, management consulting, technology, data and AI, or related disciplines, including leadership in complex enterprise environments.
Demonstrated experience framing ambiguous business problems and translating them into strategies, future-state capabilities, roadmaps, and executable initiatives.
Strong experience working directly with senior business and technology executives and influencing consequential decisions across organizational boundaries.
Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives involving business, technology, engineering, data, architecture, operations, and risk and control stakeholders.
Experience translating customer, user, or business needs into future-state workflows, capabilities, and technology-enabled solutions.
Ability to prioritize competing opportunities and make explicit choices based on business value, user outcomes, evidence, feasibility, dependencies, and speed to learning.
Strong understanding of modern technology, data, analytics, automation, generative AI, and agentic capabilities and their potential to transform workflows and decision-making.
Experience taking initiatives from early-stage ambiguity and discovery through solution definition, roadmap development, delivery, and value realization.
Experience operating within large federated or matrixed enterprises and navigating complex stakeholder environments.
Strong analytical, facilitation, communication, and executive-presentation capabilities, with learning agility and the ability to rapidly develop domain depth.
Product mindset: starts with users, problems, decisions, and outcomes rather than features, current systems, or predetermined solutions.
Strategic problem-framing ability: structures ambiguity, identifies underlying problems, develops hypotheses, and distinguishes symptoms from root causes.
Business discovery capability: uses stakeholder engagement, data, observation, research, and experimentation to develop an evidence-based understanding of problems and opportunities.
Future-state reimagination ability: challenges current-state assumptions and defines materially different ways of working rather than incremental digitization.
AI and agentic transformation understanding: recognizes how AI changes workflow possibilities and distinguishes meaningful transformation from superficial AI applications.
Product and solution strategy skills: defines capability and solution boundaries, roadmaps, MVPs, priorities, value hypotheses, and success measures.
Executive influence: constructively challenges senior stakeholders, synthesizes competing perspectives, and creates alignment around difficult choices.
Business and technology fluency across strategy, data, architecture, engineering, analytics, AI, controls, and enterprise constraints.
Systems thinking across processes, organization, data, technology, controls, and user behavior.
Value orientation focused on measurable business outcomes and value realization.
Learning agility to rapidly develop domain understanding and adapt hypotheses and recommendations as evidence changes.

Nice To Haves

Experience in complex business domains such as Finance/FP&A, enterprise performance management, insurance, asset management/investments, financial planning, banking, or other financial-services environments.
Experience in business discovery, solution strategy, design thinking, service design, digital transformation, management consulting, or related disciplines.
Experience shaping AI-enabled, data-driven, or agentic transformation in complex or highly regulated environments.
Experience working with multidisciplinary business and Technology teams using rapid prototyping, iterative validation, and outcome-based roadmaps.
Demonstrated ability to rapidly develop domain depth and apply transferable discovery and transformation methods across business contexts.

Responsibilities

Lead discovery across complex enterprise domains with senior executives, business leaders, practitioners, and technology stakeholders.
Frame ambiguous business problems around important decisions, users, outcomes, and underlying needs rather than accepting current processes, systems, reports, or stated requirements as the solution definition.
Develop hypotheses, identify critical assumptions, and determine what evidence is needed before significant technology investment.
Develop understanding of user personas, decision journeys, workflows, pain points, information needs, and desired outcomes.
Challenge requested features and stakeholder assumptions when another approach may better serve underlying business needs.
Define future-state workflows and experiences that improve how work is performed and decisions are made.
Identify how AI, agentic capabilities, analytics, automation, and modern technology can fundamentally change workflows, and determine which activities should remain human-led, be augmented, or be performed autonomously with appropriate governance and controls.
Bring external perspectives and emerging practices into discovery; use prototypes, experiments, and working solutions to validate hypotheses and refine future-state designs.
Translate discovery into product and solution strategies, capability definitions and boundaries, roadmaps, prioritized outcomes, value hypotheses, and success measures.
Make tradeoffs across business value, user needs, complexity, feasibility, dependencies, reuse, and speed to learning; shape MVPs to test meaningful hypotheses and define their evolution toward broader adoption.
Translate future-state strategy into prioritized roadmaps, requirements, hypotheses, backlogs, and delivery increments.
Partner with Integrated Delivery, Workstream Technology Leads, Product Owners, Solution Engineering & Architecture, Data Architecture, Data Engineering, and strategic partners.
Maintain continuity between intended business outcomes and engineered and deployed solutions; participate in delivery to validate solutions and recommend changes as evidence emerges.
Account for enterprise architecture, data, controls, security, operational requirements, and reuse without allowing current technology constraints to unnecessarily define the future state.
Build trusted relationships with senior business, Finance, and Technology leaders and serve as a strategic thought partner on transformation opportunities.
Facilitate complex discussions, align stakeholders with competing perspectives, drive clear decisions, and communicate recommendations through executive narratives and visual artifacts.
Influence senior stakeholders without relying solely on formal authority and constructively challenge established assumptions.
Help establish and mature Business Discovery & Solution Strategy as an enduring leadership capability across New York Life strategic transformations.
Lead business discovery and solution strategy across priority Enterprise Planning & Performance capabilities and workstreams.
Partner with Finance, business, and Technology stakeholders to translate critical decisions, user needs, workflows, and outcomes into future-state capabilities and experiences.
Reimagine EPP workflows using AI, agentic capabilities, data, analytics, and automation; shape capabilities, solution boundaries, value hypotheses, priorities, and roadmaps using prototypes and evidence.
Identify common EPP capabilities, patterns, and reuse opportunities while preserving domain context for individual Finance processes.
Lead through influence across matrixed Business and Technology organizations, facilitate cross-functional teams, mentor colleagues, and establish repeatable discovery and reimagination practices.