What does strategy work actually look like?

Strategy consulting is basically helping organisations make big decisions about where to play and how to win. In practice, that means working with senior leaders to answer questions like: Should we enter a new market? How do we grow faster? Why are profits declining? How should we price a new product? What capabilities do we need to build?

Day-to-day, the work usually looks like:

• Breaking a big question into smaller, structured problems
• Gathering data (internal reports, interviews, market research)
• Analysing it in Excel / SQL etc.
• Turning insights into recommendations
• Presenting them in slides to senior stakeholders

The “output” is normally:

• Executive-level PowerPoint presentations
• Financial models / sizing
• Implementation roadmaps
• Hypotheses and insights backed by data

For example, on a growth strategy project I worked on, we:

1. Defined which market segments had the highest potential

2. Modelled revenue / margin impact

3. Interviewed customers to understand needs

4. Built a go-to-market plan for leadership

So while the work feels analytical, the real value is:

- clarifying choices

- aligning stakeholders

- reducing uncertainty

- guiding major investment decisions

Whether in-house or consulting, the themes are similar. The main difference is that external consultants tend to work across more industries with shorter timelines, while in-house teams go deeper into one business over time.

Strategy work is about helping companies make big decisions. Should we enter this market? Should we acquire this company? Where should we cut costs? How do we grow? The output is usually a recommendation backed by analysis, delivered as a presentation to senior executives.

What you actually do as a junior consultant: lots of research, data gathering, and Excel modeling. You might spend a week sizing a market. How big is it, how fast is it growing, who are the key players. You might analyze a client's cost structure to find where they are inefficient. You might interview customers or industry experts to understand trends. Then you synthesize all of that into slides that tell a clear story.

A typical strategy project might be a three-month engagement where you help a consumer goods company decide whether to launch a new product line. You would analyze the market opportunity, look at competitors, assess what capabilities the client has or lacks, model out the financial returns, and present a recommendation with a clear go or no-go.

The actual output is usually a PowerPoint deck. Maybe 50 to 100 slides. But behind those slides is weeks of Excel work, interview notes, and internal debates about what the answer should be.

What makes it interesting: you are working on problems that matter to the CEO. The decisions are real. What makes it hard: the ambiguity. There is no textbook answer. You have to figure it out, often with incomplete data, and then convince smart skeptical people you are right.

That is strategy work. Less glamorous than it sounds, but genuinely interesting if you like solving messy problems.

That's a fantastic question, and one that often causes confusion because the word "strategy" is applied to almost everything under the sun in consulting.

The simplest way to define core strategy work is that it focuses exclusively on answering the "three big questions" for the C-suite: Where to play? How to win? And What capabilities do we need to execute that? If the deliverable doesn't directly inform a $100M+ decision or change the long-term direction of the company, it's probably not core strategy.

The output is rarely a complex tech stack or a massive implementation roadmap. Instead, the final product is often a deeply researched, financially modeled, and highly defensible recommendation, usually structured as a definitive argument presented to the CEO or Board. Think of it as high-velocity, structured hypothesis testing. For example, a pure strategy engagement might be a full-scale market entry assessment (Should we enter Southeast Asia?), an M&A commercial due diligence (Is the target company’s revenue growth truly achievable?), or a zero-based competitive response (How should we react to our main competitor launching a new product line?).

On a day-to-day level, this means your time is spent less on process mapping and more on intensive external interviewing of market experts, building complex scenario models in Excel, and constantly pressure-testing your core recommendations against competitive moves and market dynamics. It requires intellectual curiosity and the ability to synthesize massive amounts of conflicting data into a clear, actionable narrative. It sucks up huge amounts of time, but it’s where you learn how the true economic levers of an industry work.

All the best!

The output is a deck of slides telling the client what they should do (and why). That's basically it. 

The topic of the 'strategy' can vary widely - i.e. pricing strategy, market entry strategy, revenue growth strategy etc...

The work you do to get there would involve analyzing and synthesizing data to get there - whether that is client data or 'external' market data etc. 

But at the end of the day, strategy consulting is advisory work - so the output is actually ideas and a story trying to convince the client of what/how they should do. 

hey there :)

strategy work is about answering a very concrete top management question and turning it into a clear recommendation with a plan to execute, so the output is usually a sharp storyline, a set of slides and sometimes a roadmap or business case. Day to day you break down ambiguous problems, analyze data, interview stakeholders, test options and synthesize insights into a simple message that helps leaders decide what to do. It is much less about theory and much more about structured thinking, judgment and communication under uncertainty. If you want, feel free to reach out and I am happy to share concrete examples or talk through a real project.

best,
Alessa :)

Hi there,

In practice and with a high-level lens, strategy work is about helping leaders make a few big decisions with clarity. The outputs are usually things like a clear recommendation on where to play (e.g. geographies, customer segments) and how to win (e.g. differentiation factors, operations), an investment or growth roadmap, prioritization of initiatives, and a simple narrative the leadership team can align around. Day to day, that means a mix of problem structuring, data analysis, market and competitor research, stakeholder interviews, and a lot of synthesis into clear slides with a clear storyline. It is less about coming up with abstract ideas and more about turning messy questions into concrete decisions that a CEO or exec team can actually act on.

For instance, Coca-Cola Slovenia wants to define their next steps in the market for the following 3-5 years. 

They have a consulting firm assess the industry, it's trajectory, think through Coca Cola's strenghts, what they did in other markets, figure out how to adjust it to Slovenia, align with Coca Cola's leadership what are the metrics they ideally would want to optimise for, then define specific initiatives. 

This takes 2-4 months in most cases.

This is a strategy case. High level defining what are the most important things to focus on. 

Best,
Cristian

The output is a proven hypothesis on a business topic - supported by tens of analysis that support that hypothesis (a subproduct is a bunch of disproved hypothesis and respective analysis as well). You support by performing primary and secondary research and analysis quantitative and qualitative data.