I’m really curious about strategy consulting but I haven’t been able to dissect what it’s really about; what type of work does strategy consultants actually do (what’s the output produced) - I’m mostly interested to hear from people who has done actual strategy engagements whether in an in-house role or externally as a consultant advising clients!
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Thanks for sharing insights on real strategy engagements, highly appreciated!
What are other common type of strategy engagements and how do you generally prepare for the on-the-job role as a new analyst to best be able to assist on those complex projects?
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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.
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.
What are other common type of strategy engagements and how do you generally prepare for the on-the-job role as a new analyst to best be able to assist on those complex projects?
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
