Director, Strategic Initiatives

About the Role

Dow Jones is seeking a highly strategic, analytically rigorous, and execution-oriented Director of Strategic Initiatives to operate at the intersection of Global Business Operations and the Office of the CEO. This role will help translate the company’s highest-priority strategic objectives into clear initiatives, decision-ready recommendations, and measurable outcomes. The Director will serve as a connective tissue across the enterprise—bringing structure to ambiguous opportunities, aligning senior stakeholders, surfacing risks and interdependencies, and ensuring that important work moves from executive intent to coordinated execution.

Responsibilities

• Enterprise Strategy and Executive Partnership:
  • Partner closely with the Head of GBO and OCEO to translate enterprise priorities into actionable strategic agendas, roadmaps, and operating plans.
  • Serve as a trusted thought partner to senior executives, helping frame complex questions, evaluate options, and make clear recommendations.
  • Prepare executive-ready decision papers, briefings, narratives, and presentations that synthesize data, risks, trade-offs, and proposed actions.
  • Establish a fact base for strategic decisions by combining quantitative analysis, stakeholder input, operating context, and external or market perspectives as appropriate.
  • Anticipate emerging issues and opportunities that require executive attention, and bring forward practical paths to resolution.
• Strategic Portfolio Leadership:
  • Build and maintain visibility into the portfolio of company-wide strategic initiatives sponsored by GBO and/or OCEO.
  • Create consistent approaches for initiative intake, prioritization, scoping, governance, milestone tracking, risk management, and value realization.
  • Assess initiatives against strategic alignment, expected business impact, urgency, complexity, dependencies, and organizational capacity.
  • Identify gaps in ownership, decision rights, resources, or execution discipline, and work with leaders to close them.
  • Track progress against agreed outcomes and provide concise, high-quality updates to the appropriate executive forums.
  • Surface cross-functional dependencies, duplication, delivery risks, and critical decisions before they become blockers.
• Initiative Design and Delivery:
  • Step into high-priority initiatives that require enterprise coordination, particularly those that are ambiguous, cross-functional, or not yet owned by a single department.
  • Translate broad strategic intent into problem statements, success measures, workstreams, milestones, governance, and accountability.
  • Lead structured discovery, business-case development, prioritization, and validation in partnership with relevant business and functional leaders.
  • Facilitate alignment across stakeholders with competing priorities, ensuring that decisions are documented and translated into action.
  • Partner with GBO project and program management resources, business-unit teams, and functional experts to accelerate delivery without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
  • Adapt the operating approach to the needs of each initiative while maintaining appropriate standards for transparency, accountability, and executive visibility.
• Operating Model and Continuous Improvement:
  • Identify opportunities to improve how Dow Jones makes decisions, allocates resources, manages strategic work, and measures results.
  • Develop practical frameworks, templates, and ways of working that improve strategic execution across the organization.
  • Use process redesign, technology, automation, and data to reduce friction and improve the quality and speed of execution.
  • Build feedback loops and lessons-learned practices that continuously strengthen the strategic initiatives portfolio.
  • Help clarify the roles of OCEO, GBO, executive sponsors, business units, and functional partners across the lifecycle of an initiative.
• Communication and Change Leadership:
  • Create clear, audience-appropriate communications that connect enterprise priorities to the work of teams across Dow Jones.
  • Lead stakeholder and executive working sessions that produce alignment, decisions, and defined next steps.
  • Build trust across functions and geographies by being transparent about context, constraints, risks, and trade-offs.
  • Drive adoption of new operating practices by understanding stakeholder needs, anticipating resistance, and tailoring change approaches.
  • Represent GBO and the OCEO partnership with credibility, discretion, and a consistently enterprise-minded perspective.

What Success Looks Like

In the first 12 months, you will be expected to:

• Establish a clear, trusted view of the highest-priority strategic initiatives spanning GBO and OCEO.
• Create a pragmatic portfolio-management and executive-reporting cadence that improves visibility and decision quality.
• Help move priority initiatives from broad ambition to defined scope, accountable ownership, measurable outcomes, and active execution.
• Improve executive readiness by delivering concise, decision-oriented analyses and recommendations.
• Identify and resolve critical cross-functional dependencies, ownership gaps, and risks.
• Build strong working relationships across the ELT, GBO, OCEO, business units, and functional teams.
• Demonstrate measurable progress in the speed, clarity, alignment, and value realization of strategic work.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in strategy, management consulting, business operations, corporate development, transformation, enterprise program management, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex, enterprise-level initiatives in a global, matrixed organization.
• A track record of converting ambiguous business problems into clear strategies, decisions, and executable plans.
• Experience working directly with C-suite, executive, or senior leadership stakeholders.
• Strong business and financial acumen, including the ability to evaluate opportunities, quantify impact, and articulate trade-offs.
• Exceptional analytical, structured-thinking, and problem-solving skills.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex issues simple and compelling.
• Strong project, portfolio, governance, and risk-management capabilities.
• Experience developing executive operating cadences, performance reporting, OKRs, KPIs, or similar management systems.
• Proven ability to influence outcomes without formal authority and lead through collaboration, credibility, and judgment.
• Comfort handling confidential information and navigating sensitive organizational dynamics.
• A bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience; an advanced degree is a plus.

Skills

• Think enterprise-first and naturally connect people, priorities, systems, and decisions.
• Move between strategy and execution without losing sight of either.
• Bring calm, clarity, and momentum to ambiguous or fast-changing situations.
• Have the judgment to know when a lightweight intervention is sufficient and when stronger governance is required.
• Be rigorous about outcomes but practical about how work gets done.
• Challenge senior stakeholders respectfully and productively.
• Build trust quickly and operate effectively across different functions, cultures, and levels of the organization.
• Be energized by high-impact work that does not always come with a pre-defined playbook.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Plans
• Paid Time Off
• Retirement Plans
• Comprehensive Insurance Plans
• Lifestyle Programs & Wellness Resources
• Education Benefits
• Family Care Benefits & Caregiving Support
• Commuter Transit Program
• Subscription Discounts
• Employee Referral Program
• Financial Health Programs
• Cybersecurity Protection

Location: NYC - 1211 Ave of the Americas
Employment Type: Full time
Business Area: Dow Jones - Global Business Operations
Job Category: General Management
Union Status: Non-Union role
Base Pay Range: $195,000 - $235,000

We’re committed to offering competitive and flexible compensation to attract top talent. This pay range reflects our good faith estimate for the role and may vary based on a candidate’s experience, skills, location, and other relevant factors. For bonus-eligible roles, targets are determined based on multiple considerations, including market benchmarks and individual contributions. For benefits-eligible roles, we offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package covering health, retirement, wellbeing, and more, along with optional benefits to meet the diverse needs of our employees.