Job Description

Associate Strategist, Business Analyst

Associate Strategists play a critical role on our teams, gathering and synthesizing data from a variety of primary and secondary sources and keeping tabs on how our work intersects with how our clients work. On any given project, they explore emerging influences on client business and contribute toward bringing their ideas to market. They conduct desktop and primary research, help find proxies for innovative business models, and support more senior teams in developing opportunity models. As an Associate Strategist, you will be trained on Proto’s approach to innovation strategy and contribute to its advancement.

What you will do:

• Apply quantitative rigor and creative thinking to our client’s business;
• Leverage limited or imperfect data and identify smart proxies, triangulate from multiple sources, and clearly document assumptions;
• Explore comparable business models, market dynamics, and financial statements to surface meaningful patterns, benchmarks, and strategic implications that inform business critical insights and decision-making;
• Create data models that are clean, well-structured, and easy to follow while clearly documenting your assumptions and logic so stakeholders can understand and pressure-test;
• Apply strong judgment to cut through complexity, prioritize the variables that actually drive business impact, and avoid getting lost in analysis for analysis's sake;
• Collaborate with, and take input from brand, innovation, and experience strategists, engagement managers, designers, and clients from different backgrounds;
• Synthesize learnings into clear and actionable strategic deliverables including competitive, financial, market sizing, segmentation, and other quantitative analyses as needed;
• Work with internal and client teams to develop and present work products to executive audiences.

Qualifications

• Up to 2 years of client side or consulting experience in product/service development, enterprise innovation, or corporate strategy;
• Undergraduate and/or graduate degree in economics, finance, engineering, accounting, or related disciplines preferred;
• Experience working with large data sets to identify insights and commercial opportunities;
• A foundational command of Excel and willingness to learn financial modeling tools (bonus: Python, Claude Cowork knowledge);
• Comfortable working with collaboration tools and communication platforms (Slack, Google Suite, AI, Figma, etc.) and willing to experiment with new ones;
• Comfortable moving forward amidst ambiguity and working with imperfect data sets;
• Based in New York metro area;
• Willing to travel up to 25% for client meetings.

In New York City, the base salary for this position is $65-80K. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors including business needs, years of relevant experience, level of responsibility and qualifications. This position reports into our Associate Director, Strategy.

Proto is a New York based company with offices at 3 World Trade. Our staff is encouraged to work-from-office on days of their choosing based on personal preferences, collaboration moments, client meetings, and all-company gatherings. We also support workplace flexibility and have made work-from-anywhere available to all staff (within a 3-hour time zone of eastern standard time zone). Our core business hours are generally 9:30am-6:00pm EST; however, due to our client service model and collaborative working culture, individual working hours fluctuate to reflect client deadlines and deliverables.