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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.
Prepare for and personally facilitate high-value D&F engagements with customer executives, mission leaders, operators, technical stakeholders, acquisition leaders, and other key participants.
Lead the most strategic, complex, or ambiguous engagements while developing additional D&F practitioners to handle increasing volume.
Establish the D&F methodology, engagement model, playbook, question bank, templates, quality standards, and examples of what great looks like.
Determine capacity requirements and build the D&F team as demand grows.
Coach and develop D&F practitioners while remaining personally involved in important customer engagements.
Work with the account team before each engagement to establish:
The hypothesis provides structure without predetermining the answer.
Move the customer conversation beyond the initial technical request to understand:
Continue asking why until the team understands the underlying mission problem rather than simply the requested technology.
Turn discovery into a clear problem definition the customer recognizes as their own.
Define:
The problem should be expressed in the customer's language—not Defense Unicorns product language.
Quantify the problem wherever possible using measures such as:
Establish a baseline so the customer can determine whether the problem has actually been solved.
Help the customer establish the outcomes and success criteria that indicate meaningful improvement.
Answer two questions:
What must change?
How will we know it changed?
Identify the people and organizations involved in moving the problem toward action, including:
Understand the relationships, incentives, concerns, and gaps among them.
Determine what must happen for the customer to act, including:
Every D&F engagement should result in a concise, customer-ready readout.
The Head of D&F owns the quality of these outputs across the function.
Each output should include:
The output should be useful enough that the customer and account team can act on it immediately.
Discovery & Framing is not a disguised product pitch.
The D&F function objectively determines whether a meaningful problem exists, whether solving it matters, and whether Defense Unicorns has a credible role in helping address it.
A successful D&F engagement may:
A strong D&F engagement follows five stages:
Research the account, mission, technical environment, stakeholders, and opportunity context. Align with the account team on hypotheses, unknowns, participants, and objectives.
Facilitate a customer-first conversation to understand the current state, mission, root problem, constraints, workarounds, stakeholders, and impact. Ask questions until evidence replaces assumptions.
Turn what was discovered into a clear, measurable problem statement. Connect the problem to mission impact, desired outcomes, and consequences of inaction.
Validate the problem framing with the customer. Test the problem, impact, urgency, baseline, desired outcomes, success criteria, stakeholder roles, decision criteria, and remaining assumptions.
Deliver the customer readout and establish a dated mutual next step. Connect the problem to a Defense Unicorns capability only where there is a legitimate fit.
Account Executive / Mission Seller: Owns the customer relationship, account and opportunity strategy, commercial process, and follow-through on agreed actions.
Head of Discovery & Framing: Owns the D&F methodology, engagement preparation, facilitation, synthesis, customer-facing outputs, quality standards, team development, and capacity.
Discovery & Framing Strategist: Supports and leads D&F engagements under the methodology and standards established by the Head of D&F. Conducts research, facilitates assigned engagements, analyzes findings, produces customer outputs, and maintains internal records.
Solutions Engineer / Technical Lead: Owns technical discovery, architecture, feasibility, solution design, and technical validation once the mission problem and desired outcomes are sufficiently understood.
Sales Leadership and Enablement: Reinforce adoption, qualification discipline, coaching, and follow-through.
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.
Able to ask difficult questions respectfully, challenge assumptions, manage competing perspectives, and help senior stakeholders arrive at clarity.
Exceptional ability in:
Ability to rapidly learn and operate within the customer's mission context.
Trust requires more than knowing the technology. You learn the mission language, operating environment, organizational pressures, constraints, failure modes, and consequences of failure.
You can translate across mission, operational, acquisition, business, and technical perspectives.
Outstanding written and verbal communication with the ability to turn hours of complex customer discussion into a short, clear, defensible executive readout.
Experience building, scaling, or leading a consulting, strategy, advisory, professional services, or customer-facing team.
You know how to establish a methodology, develop people, maintain quality, and determine when additional capacity is needed.
Better discovery: Customers validate that D&F accurately reflects their mission problem rather than simply restating a technical request.
Measurable problems: A growing percentage of engagements establish quantified impact, baselines, desired outcomes, and success criteria.
Better qualification: Opportunities progress with fewer unknowns around mission value, stakeholders, decision process, funding, acquisition, and urgency.
Strong customer outputs: Post-session readouts are timely, concise, customer-validated, and useful enough for customers and account teams to act on immediately.
Opportunity movement: D&F engagements result in a clear decision to advance, redirect, investigate further, or disqualify.
Fewer late surprises: Reduce late-stage problems caused by unclear customer pain, weak mission value, missing stakeholders, uncertain funding, undefined decision processes, or unsupported assumptions.
A scalable D&F capability: Build a team of D&F practitioners capable of delivering consistent customer engagements under a common methodology and quality standard.
Understand the mission. Discover the real problem. Frame it in measurable terms. Validate it with the customer. Then determine what should happen next.
Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States.
Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.
We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.
Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.
Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed.
At Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
