Lead Business Analyst

Manulife • Boston, MA

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Lead / Principal Business Analyst is the anchor individual contributor responsible for translating a business line strategy into a coherent future-state operating model and clear, testable, traceable requirements across multiple workstreams and new systems. This role partners closely with business leaders, technology delivery partners, and external vendors to ensure outcomes are delivered with speed, consistency, and regulatory defensibility. The successful candidate thrives in ambiguity, influences without authority, and drives alignment across diverse stakeholder groups. Key Outcomes A single coherent set of business requirements, business rules, and acceptance criteria that enables configuration/build and testing readiness across workstreams. Future-state process design and documentation (process flows, handoffs, exceptions, controls) that enables operational readiness and training inputs. Strong requirements governance: traceability, decision logging, dependency tracking, and audit-quality documentation. Effective cross-functional alignment and vendor coordination to prevent fragmentation and rework.

Requirements

• 7+ years of business analysis experience delivering outcomes across multiple concurrent workstreams in a complex environment (financial services/insurance strongly preferred).
• Demonstrated expertise in requirements management, traceability, and creating high-quality analysis artefacts (functional specs, business rules, user stories, acceptance criteria).
• Proven experience partnering with technology teams and vendors to review and shape deliverables toward business outcomes.
• Exceptional facilitation and stakeholder management skills; able to simplify complexity and influence decisions across senior and diverse groups.
• Structured, conceptual thinking and problem-solving; able to operate effectively with ambiguity and changing priorities.
• Strong written and verbal communication; can present complex requirements and decisions clearly to varied audiences.
• Ownership mindset: drives requirements through delivery and validation, not just documentation.
• Collaboration and influence: builds alignment, mitigates conflict, and drives consensus across multiple teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in net-new builds, platform implementations, or integration-heavy programs.
• Familiarity with regulated environments and supporting audit documentation / change management practices.
• Relevant certifications (CBAP, PMI-PBA, CSM) are preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery and requirements elicitation across Distribution, Operations, Finance, Marketing and other stakeholders to define the future-state operating model (net-new design, not current-state documentation).
• Develop and maintain a structured requirements inventory and traceability from business objectives through functional requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and business rules.
• Facilitate prioritization and trade-off decisions; document assumptions, decisions, open items, and dependencies in a clear decision log to maintain momentum and transparency.
• Drive convergence across stakeholders by simplifying complex topics, clarifying options, and building consensus without formal authority.
• Translate business needs into actionable requirements for technology delivery partners; ensure stakeholders understand implications across the end-to-end journey.
• Act as a central connector between business, technology, and vendors to reduce disconnects and ensure consistent outcomes across workstreams.
• Partner with technology counterparts (e.g., business systems analysts, solution teams) to ensure requirements are feasible, testable, and aligned to delivery milestones.
• Review vendor deliverables (e.g., requirements, solution designs, integration specifications) to confirm alignment to business intent, scope, and assumptions.
• Ensure vendor timelines and assumptions align with program milestones; proactively surface risks, ambiguities, or missing inputs.
• Produce future-state process flows covering end-to-end lifecycle, handoffs, decisioning, exception handling, escalation/routing, and operational controls.
• Define requirements needed for operational controls, reporting, data feeds, and escalation management; ensure traceability through build and test.
• Support test readiness by defining acceptance criteria, supporting test scenarios, and ensuring requirements are verifiable.
• Provide inputs to SOPs and training support plans needed for launch readiness and ongoing operations.
• Ensure requirements and documentation meet regulatory, risk, and compliance needs; support audit-ready documentation and disciplined change control.

Benefits

• Manulife/John Hancock offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans.
• We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension/401(k) savings plans and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources.
• Our generous paid time off program in the U.S. includes up to 11 paid holidays, 3 personal days, 150 hours of vacation, and 40 hours of sick time (or more where required by law) each year, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed