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Salary: USD 204,000 - 276,000 / annual
Defense Unicorns is seeking a Director of Discovery & Framing to own, lead, and scale a new function that helps defense and federal customers identify, define, and quantify their most critical mission problems before moving into solution design.
This is a senior, hands-on strategy role combining customer engagement, problem definition, and team leadership. You will lead high-value customer engagements with mission leaders, operators, and executives to move beyond initial technical requests and uncover root causes. You will establish the Discovery & Framing methodology, quality standards, playbooks, and templates. As the function scales, you will build and coach a team of D&F practitioners while remaining personally involved in the most strategic and complex engagements.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead the highest-priority customer engagements, facilitating working sessions with senior customer leaders, operators, and technical stakeholders to understand mission context, current state, constraints, and root problems.
- Establish the D&F methodology, engagement model, playbook, question bank, templates, and quality standards that define what great looks like.
- Turn discovery conversations into clear, measurable problem statements expressed in the customer's language, not product language.
- Quantify problem impact using mission-relevant measures (readiness, time, cost, operational risk, availability, deployment speed, reliability, workforce capacity, failure rates, mission outcomes).
- Help customers establish success criteria by answering: What must change? How will we know it changed?
- Map the decision system, identifying stakeholders who can advance or block decisions, and understand their incentives and concerns.
- Expose the path to action by determining decision criteria, funding sources, acquisition paths, competitive alternatives, and organizational barriers.
- Own the quality of customer-facing outputs, which should include validated mission problem, current state, quantified impact, desired future state, success criteria, stakeholder map, decision process, and agreed next steps.
- Maintain independence of judgment—D&F is not a disguised product pitch. Engagements may advance, redirect, or disqualify opportunities based on objective findings.
- Determine capacity requirements and build the D&F team as demand grows.
The role follows a five-stage engagement model: Prepare (research and align with account team), Discover (facilitate customer conversation), Frame (turn findings into clear problem statement), Validate (test framing with customer), and Mobilize (deliver readout and establish next steps).
You will work closely with Account Executives (who own customer relationships and commercial process), Solutions Engineers (who own technical discovery and design), and Sales Leadership (who reinforce adoption and coaching).
Requirements:
- 8+ years of experience in strategy consulting, management consulting, customer strategy, value advisory, or similar highly structured client-facing strategy work.
- Demonstrated ability to walk into ambiguous customer situations, ask incisive questions, separate symptoms from root causes, and synthesize complex discussions into clear, measurable problem statements.
- Deep familiarity with defense, federal, or mission-critical customer environments, including their language, operating tempo, constraints, failure modes, and stakeholder dynamics.
- Proven track record facilitating executive-level conversations and building trust with senior customer leaders.
- Strong analytical and synthesis skills; ability to quantify problems and establish baselines.
- Experience building functions, establishing methodologies, and coaching teams.
- Comfort with ambiguity and ability to maintain objectivity when findings may not align with internal preferences.
