Company Context

Northstar Health is a digital health company offering a subscription-based care navigation app for employers and health plans. The company generated $84M in revenue last year, serves 2.1M covered lives, and operates in a crowded market with larger incumbents bundling navigation, telehealth, and benefits advocacy. Northstar's leadership has set three company priorities for the next 12 months: (1) grow enterprise revenue, (2) improve gross margin, and (3) reduce member churn. You are the new Strategy Manager, and the COO wants a practical approach to ensure your team's work stays tightly aligned to those priorities rather than becoming a collection of disconnected projects.

Strategic Situation

Northstar has a 14-person strategy and operations team supporting sales, product, customer success, and partnerships. Over the last two quarters, the team launched 11 initiatives, but only 4 were clearly tied to annual goals. Several senior leaders believe the team is spread too thin: product wants more custom client requests, sales wants faster RFP support, and customer success wants retention programs for at-risk accounts. The CEO has asked for a recommendation on how to align strategy work to company priorities, including what to stop, how to prioritize new work, and how to measure whether the portfolio is actually advancing company goals.

Data Points

Additional operating facts:

• Revenue mix: 72% existing enterprise clients, 18% new enterprise sales, 10% SMB channel
• Last 6 months of strategy work allocation: 35% custom client requests, 25% growth initiatives, 20% retention initiatives, 20% internal analytics/ad hoc support
• Estimated impact of current initiative pipeline: $6M revenue upside, 1.5 margin points, 1 point churn reduction if all succeed
• Leadership estimate of required impact to hit plan: $16M revenue upside, 6 margin points, 4 points churn reduction

Deliverables

As the Strategy Manager, prepare a recommendation for the COO:

1. Define a framework for evaluating whether work is aligned to company priorities.
2. Assess the current portfolio and identify what appears misaligned or underweighted.
3. Recommend how the team should allocate capacity across growth, margin, retention, and ad hoc work.
4. Propose a governance process for intake, prioritization, and review.
5. Define the metrics leadership should use to track alignment and business impact.

Constraints

• No additional headcount or budget for the next 9 months
• Existing executive priorities cannot be changed this year
• At least 15% of team capacity must remain available for urgent executive requests
• Recommendations must be implementable within one quarter