Digital Strategist - UK

Digital Strategist – UK

At Horizontal Digital, we hold ourselves to one key belief: You’re only as good as your worst customer experience. This mantra is what drives our digital consultancy to think beyond the easy answers and instead create websites, apps, portals and other experiences that solve customer needs for Fortune 500 companies in intuitive and empathetic ways. And we make this lofty standard a reality by fusing strategy, data, design and technology together to arrive at solutions that set the bar higher for everyone.

We use these values to fuel superior results:

Lock arms
We forge relationships that make our impact 1,000x stronger. This means working across departments and engaging both our clients and our communities to deliver the greatest good.

Show hustle
We’re not ones to sit on our hands and wait. Instead, we anticipate opportunities, collectively roll up our sleeves and find ways to execute the exceptional.

Embrace change
From new technologies to workplace philosophies, we welcome the unexpected and constantly anticipate what’s next.

Elevate empathy
We listen before we take action. This means understanding a variety of perspectives and holding ourselves to a higher standard of accountability.

Never settle
We motivate each other to push past the easy answers and collectively arrive at bigger, more inspiring ideas.

But enough about us. Let’s talk about you.

This is not a traditional strategist role, and it’s not account management.

As a Digital Strategist, you sit at the intersection of strategy, product thinking, platform capability and commercial growth. You act as a strategic partner to clients, owning the value proposition rather than the delivery plan, and ensuring everything we build is tied to clear outcomes, measurable impact, and long‑term growth.

What you’ll do:

Product Strategy & Ownership

• Define and evolve digital product and experience vision in partnership with senior client stakeholders.
• Translate business goals into clear, prioritised roadmaps grounded in customer needs, lifecycle thinking, and platform capability.
• Ensure delivery is aligned to outcomes, not just outputs, connecting features, content and journeys to measurable impact.
• Act as the internal voice of the client and the external voice of the product.
• Use structured approaches such as KPI/OKR Mapping to align experience goals, CRO opportunities, content strategy and platform investment.

Client Partnership & Strategic Growth

• Own & develop senior client relationships, acting as the strategic counterpart and trusted advisor.
• Shape future work based on performance, insight and evolving business needs, not just reactive briefs.
• Identify opportunities to grow accounts through optimisation, roadmap evolution, retainers and multi‑year programmes.
• Lead strategic commercial conversations including scope shaping, prioritisation trade‑offs, investment planning and SOW definition.
• Support clients with broader business design, experience strategy and go‑to‑market thinking where appropriate.
• Take shared responsibility for client retention, account development and long-term partnership growth across assigned strategic accounts.
• Support quarterly and annual planning conversations, helping clients align budgets, priorities and roadmap decisions to measurable business outcomes.
• Work with Delivery, Technology and client leadership to turn strategic opportunities into clearly defined follow-on phases, retained engagements and transformation programmes.

Platform‑Aware, Customer‑First Strategy (Sitecore Focus)

• Advise clients on how best to leverage Sitecore XP, XM Cloud, Personalise, CDP and SitecoreAI to support lifecycle marketing, content operations, personalisation and optimisation.
• Balance customer‑first strategy with deep platform understanding, ensuring technology enables strategy, never leads it.
• Collaborate closely with Technology, Data and Experience Design teams to ensure strategies are feasible, scalable and measurable.
• Help clients evolve their platform usage over time (e.g. XP → XM Cloud, AI enablement, composable architectures).

Pre‑Sales & New Business Leadership

• Lead strategic pre‑sales conversations, discovery phases and early‑stage engagements.
• Shape compelling visions, roadmaps and phased approaches that clearly articulate value, impact and ROI.
• Contribute to RFPs, proposals and pitches, representing Horizontal’s strategy‑led, product‑oriented approach.
• Help qualify opportunities, ensuring alignment between client ambition, budget and our capabilities.
• Act as a visible face of Horizontal Strategy in pitches and prospect conversations.
• Help shape commercially credible scopes and phased approaches that balance ambition, feasibility, value and long-term partnership potential.
• Bring strategic and commercial perspective to proposals and pitches, helping clients and prospects understand not just what to do next, but why it matters commercially.

Internal Collaboration & Stewardship

• Partner closely with Delivery, Design, Data and Technology leads to align on value, capacity and direction.
• Provide clear strategic direction to teams without owning day‑to‑day delivery management.
• Escalate, reframe or reset when scope, goals or priorities shift, always anchoring back to outcomes.
• Support the evolution of Horizontal’s strategy proposition, tools, processes and ways of working.
• Act as an internal champion for client goals, commercial context and growth opportunities across cross-functional teams.
• Help teams understand the broader account context behind priorities, ensuring recommendations support both client outcomes and long-term value creation.

What you bring:

• 5+ years’ experience in digital strategy, product strategy or consultancy, ideally within a digital agency or platform‑led environment.
• Strong experience working with Sitecore platforms (XP, XM Cloud, Personalise, CDP and/or SitecoreAI).
• Ability to confidently articulate how platform tools can be used to achieve marketing, content, personalisation and experience goals.
• Strong product thinking, comfortable moving from ambiguity to clarity, vision to roadmap.
• Proven experience leading senior client relationships and strategic conversations.
• Commercial confidence, comfortable shaping scopes, SOWs and long‑term investment plans.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, able to translate complexity into clarity.
• A strategic mindset paired with pragmatism, focused on impact, not theory.
• Experience contributing to client retention, account growth or strategic account development within an agency, consultancy or platform-led environment.
• Confidence leading commercially minded conversations around investment, prioritisation, phased roadmaps and long-term value creation.
• Ability to spot growth opportunities and translate insight, performance and platform potential into future strategic work.

Role Expectations

This role balances high-value strategic delivery with client development and growth activity. You will play a key role in shaping and leading strategic engagements, while also contributing to pre-sales, account expansion and long-term partnership development. As a senior member of the Strategy team, you will carry growth and retention expectations aligned to client satisfaction, strategic impact and commercial performance. This role carries clear expectations around contribution to client satisfaction, retention, account development and strategic commercial growth. Success will be measured through a blend of strategic impact, strength of client relationships, growth contribution and long-term value creation.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with other DXPs or composable platforms, in addition to Sitecore (e.g. Adobe, Optimizely, Contentful).
• Familiarity with analytics, measurement and CRO frameworks (GA4, experimentation, KPI frameworks).
• Experience with content strategy, content operations or governance models.
• Exposure to AI‑enabled content, personalisation or optimisation workflows.
• Experience working across multiple markets or enterprise‑scale organisations.

Our UK Benefits include:

• 22 days holiday
• 2 floating holiday days
• 2 volunteering days
• Defined contribution pension scheme
• Flexibility + remote working

Application Tips

To help us review your application as smoothly as possible, we recommend submitting a clear, ATS-friendly CV using a simple format and standard headings such as Experience, Skills, and Education. Avoid complex layouts or graphics so your experience is captured accurately.

If you're unsure how to make your CV ATS-friendly, this guide provides helpful practical tips:
https://www.myperfectresume.com/career-center/resumes/how-to/ats-friendly

The above description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.