Senior Principal, Enterprise Strategy & Strategic Opportunities

The Senior Principal, Enterprise Strategy & Strategic Opportunities is a senior leader within Enterprise Strategy, Ventures & Innovation responsible for shaping and advancing high-value enterprise and business strategies. The role will own a portfolio of consequential opportunities and unresolved strategic questions, with primary focus on critical problem solving, business opportunities, and new growth and business innovation. The Senior Principal will turn broad, ambiguous questions into clear strategic choices, opportunity cases, and executive-ready recommendations that drive enterprise value.

The Senior Principal will also provide senior leadership capacity across the broader Enterprise Strategy agenda, including enterprise strategic positioning and competitive strategy and enterprise-choice work, long-term enterprise strategy and strategic priorities strategy development, and selected strategic planning priorities. The role will operate across enterprise trade-offs, portfolio implications, and cross-business opportunities, regularly engaging ELT members, business unit and corporate function and shared services leaders, and other senior stakeholders. Two positions may be hired against this common role profile, with portfolios flexed over time based on enterprise priorities, individual strengths, and demand.

This leader is expected to combine strong external orientation, strategic judgment, commercial insight, and the ability to lead through influence. The Senior Principal will autonomously drive major bodies of work, mobilize cross-functional teams, build trusted relationships across the enterprise, and serve as a thought partner to senior leadership on opportunities, risks, and new solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Opportunities & Critical Problem Solving

• Own a portfolio of the most important unresolved enterprise or business questions and convert broad asks into structured, decision-ready strategic options.

• Identify and evaluate growth opportunities, strategic adjacencies, partnerships, capability plays, and business development pathways that can create meaningful enterprise value.

• Lead rigorous problem framing, issue-tree development, strategic and economic analysis, scenario assessment, and recommendation development.

• Clarify enterprise trade-offs, value-creation logic, risks, dependencies, and execution requirements for senior leadership decisions.

• Mobilize and lead cross-functional teams and flexible strategy pods, maintaining pace, quality, and alignment from question definition through leadership decision.

New Growth and Business Innovation

• Shape new growth and business innovation strategies that create new growth, strengthen scaled core businesses, or evolve future business models.

• Identify opportunities where new propositions, channels, partnerships, technologies, capabilities, or combinations of enterprise assets can improve customer value, economics, growth, or long-term advantage.

• Develop innovation and opportunity theses, future-state models, growth platforms, and incubation or investment logic.

• Partner with business units, innovation, Corporate Development, Finance, and enterprise leaders to pressure-test concepts, build opportunity cases, and determine which ideas merit further investment or action.

• Move beyond idea identification by defining the strategic path, critical choices, evidence requirements, and early actions needed to advance priority opportunities.

Enterprise Strategic Positioning, Long-Term Strategy & Enterprise Direction Support

• Lead or support high-consequence enterprise strategic positioning and competitive strategy and enterprise-choice work involving where the enterprise plays, where value shifts, which moves matter, and what trade-offs leadership must make.

• Help steward and advance long-term enterprise strategy and strategic priorities by translating the enterprise direction into sharper choices, priorities, guardrails, growth hooks, and implications for businesses and corporate functions and shared services.

• Develop portfolio, pathway, competitive-position, and strategic-option analyses for Board and ELT discussions.

• Integrate external, customer, competitor, financial, and internal capability perspectives to challenge assumptions and strengthen enterprise recommendations.

• Partner with the VP of Enterprise Strategy and other senior strategy leaders on sensitive, confidential, and highly ambiguous priorities.

Strategic Planning & Cross-Team Leadership

• Provide senior strategy capacity to selected planning priorities, including challenging business strategies, testing strategic assumptions, and synthesizing implications across businesses and corporate functions and shared services.

• Partner with the Strategic Planning & Integration Lead to connect opportunity and innovation work to enterprise priorities, planning choices, and strategy-linked financial considerations.

• Contribute to enterprise planning reviews, leadership forums, and Board readiness where applied strategy expertise is required.

• Maintain durable ownership of assigned strategy lanes while deploying flexibly across the Enterprise Strategy portfolio as needs evolve.

• Help prioritize and deploy supporting talent across projects and develop Principals and Advisors through clear direction, coaching, and high-quality feedback.

External Insight, Relationships & Executive Influence

• Maintain a deeply external perspective on healthcare markets, customer and employer needs, competitors, policy, technology, capital flows, and emerging business models.

• Identify external developments that create enterprise opportunities, risks, strategic inflection points, or the need for new solutions.

• Build trusted relationships and an active network across business units, enterprise corporate functions and shared services, Corporate Development, Finance, innovation, peer groups, the Strategy Community, and senior leadership.

• Engage leaders to sharpen questions, surface diverse perspectives, create alignment, and improve the quality and speed of strategic decisions.

• Develop compelling executive narratives, presentations, and communications and represent Enterprise Strategy in leadership and cross-functional forums.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor's degree required; MBA or other relevant advanced degree strongly preferred.

• 10+ years of experience in corporate strategy, management consulting, business development, investment banking, private equity, innovation, or related strategic leadership roles.

• Demonstrated success leading enterprise-level strategy development, growth strategy, critical problem solving, or business opportunity work in complex organizations.

• Proven ability to autonomously lead ambiguous, high-consequence work and influence senior executives without direct authority.

• Exceptional strategic thinking, external orientation, commercial judgment, structured problem-solving, and executive communication skills.

• Strong analytical capabilities, including market and competitive assessment, business case development, financial analysis, scenario evaluation, and strategic synthesis.

• Experience mobilizing cross-functional teams and driving alignment across matrixed organizations.

• Proven ability to build broad, trusted relationships and navigate sensitive or confidential topics with sound judgment.

Preferred

• Experience in healthcare, health services, insurance, pharmacy, or adjacent industries.

• Experience in enterprise strategy, portfolio strategy, growth platforms, business model innovation, partnerships, or inorganic opportunity evaluation.

• Experience supporting Board, ELT, or comparable senior governance discussions.

• Demonstrated ability to develop talent and lead project teams across formal and informal reporting lines.

What Success Looks Like

• Enterprise and business leaders receive clear, differentiated, and decision-ready strategies on the most consequential opportunities and problems.

• New growth and business innovation priorities move from broad ideas to well-defined strategic choices, opportunity cases, and paths forward.

• Enterprise strategic positioning and competitive strategy, long-term enterprise strategy and strategic priorities, and planning work is strengthened by rigorous external insight, enterprise judgment, and clear articulation of trade-offs.

• The Senior Principal autonomously drives major work while creating meaningful leverage for the VP of Enterprise Strategy and other senior leaders.

• Strong relationships across business units, corporate functions and shared services, peer groups, the Strategy Community, and senior leadership improve Enterprise Strategy’s access, influence, and impact.

• Principals and Advisors develop through strong project leadership, coaching, and exposure to high-value strategic work.

If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 175,100 - 291,800 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.

This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus and long term incentive plan.

At The Cigna Group, you’ll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you’ll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year, paid holidays, and leaves of absence. For more details on our employee benefits programs, click here.

About The Cigna Group

Doing something meaningful starts with a simple decision, a commitment to changing lives. At The Cigna Group, we’re dedicated to improving the health and vitality of those we serve. Through our divisions Cigna Healthcare and Evernorth Health Services, we are committed to enhancing the lives of our clients, customers and patients. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.

Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.

If you need a reasonable accommodation to complete the online application process, please email [email protected] for assistance.  Please note that this email inbox is dedicated to accommodation requests only and cannot provide application updates or accept resumes.

The Cigna Group has a tobacco-free policy and reserves the right not to hire tobacco/nicotine users in states where that is legally permissible. Candidates in such states who use tobacco/nicotine will not be considered for employment unless they enter a qualifying smoking cessation program prior to the start of their employment. These states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington State.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.