[Hiring] Director of Discovery & Framing @Defense Unicorns

Role Description

Own, lead, and scale Discovery & Framing at Defense Unicorns—help customers identify and clearly define the mission problems that matter, quantify their impact, establish what success looks like, and create the clarity needed to determine the right path forward.

The Head of Discovery & Framing will lead the highest-priority customer engagements, establish the D&F methodology and quality standard, and build the team required to deliver the discipline at scale.

Defense Unicorns is creating a dedicated Discovery & Framing function to improve how we understand customer problems before moving into solution design. This is a senior, hands-on strategy role for someone who knows how to walk into an ambiguous customer situation, ask the questions others miss, separate symptoms from root causes, and turn a complex discussion into a clear and measurable mission problem.

Trust is built by knowing the customer's mission intimately—its language, operating tempo, constraints, failure modes, stakeholder pressures, and consequences of getting it wrong.

The Head of D&F must be equally comfortable facilitating a working session with senior customer leaders, interviewing operators and technical stakeholders, analyzing what was learned, and producing a concise executive-quality output afterward.

This is not a traditional sales role, product presentation role, or technical discovery role. Operating principle: Help the customer define and measure the right problem before asking them to choose a solution.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in strategy consulting, management consulting, customer strategy, value advisory, or another highly structured client-facing problem-solving environment.
• Meaningful experience at firms such as McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, or a comparable strategy or advisory organization is highly valued.
• A strong record of personally leading executive interviews, workshops, diagnostic engagements, and cross-functional working sessions.
• Exceptional ability in hypothesis-led discovery, issue structuring, root-cause analysis, stakeholder mapping, and impact quantification.
• Ability to rapidly learn and operate within the customer's mission context.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication with the ability to turn complex customer discussions into concise executive readouts.
• Experience building, scaling, or leading a consulting, strategy, advisory, professional services, or customer-facing team.

Requirements

• Lead Discovery & Framing Engagements
• Build the Discovery & Framing Function
• Start With a Hypothesis
• Discover the Real Problem
• Frame the Problem
• Make the Impact Measurable
• Define Success
• Map the Decision System
• Expose the Path to Action
• Own the Customer-Facing Output
• Maintain Independence of Judgment

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision - Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget
• Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
• Paid Parental Leave
• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)