State Digital Platform Strategist

This position entails spearheading a critical initiative to empower state-level policymakers with actionable data, sectoral insights, and contextual tools for effective governance and development outcomes.

As the Lead for this engagement, you will foster high-quality strategic alignment with senior stakeholders across central and state ministries, ensuring the platform's relevance, adoption, and long-term impact. This role requires strong advisory and research-driven capabilities, leveraging deep sectoral expertise, evidence-based analysis, and policy insight to shape the platform's governance and strategic evolution.

You will work closely with internal teams across content, data, technology, and outreach tracks to drive a user-centric, scalable, and impactful digital experience for public sector decision-makers. Strong collaboration and communication skills are essential in this role.

Key Responsibilities:

• Establish and maintain trusted relationships with key government and non-government stakeholders.
• Facilitate multi-stakeholder consultations, co-creation workshops, and review forums to gather insights, drive alignment, and encourage shared ownership.
• Represent in strategic forums with policymakers, driving thought leadership on data-driven governance and state capability development.
• Navigate complex government structures and political contexts to enable the adoption and integration of the platform at the central and state levels.

Sectoral Research & Insight Generation:

• Anchoring in-depth research and knowledge generation across primary development sectors (e.g., education, livelihoods, skilling, etc.) to inform platform content and strategic direction.
• Enabling meaningful synthesis of evidence from diverse sources into actionable insights tailored for central and state-level decision-makers.
• Supporting in identifying use cases where data-driven decision-making can be enabled at different levels of the government using public and credible private sector data.
• Staying abreast of key trends in public policy, digital transformation, and sectoral innovations to inform content quality and the platform's evolution.

Platform Governance & Evolution:

• Collaborating with product, content, and data teams to co-create a platform roadmap that is user-centric, impactful, and scalable.
• Managing the command center to continuously monitor platform adoption; gauging and analyzing user experience and feedback on an ongoing basis to guide iterative improvements.

Program & Team Leadership:

• Leading project planning, timelines, deliverables, financials, and quality assurance to ensure desired outcomes are achieved.
• Managing a multidisciplinary team comprising policy researchers, data analysts, consultants, and product specialists to ensure timely and high-quality delivery.
• Driving cross-functional collaboration between internal teams and government partners.
• Building a high-performance culture anchored in ownership, learning, and innovation; facilitating internal learning, capacity building, and performance management within the team.

Requirements:

• 16+ years of experience in government advisory, digital governance & transformation, consulting, finance, research, or development sector leadership.
• Master's degree in Economics, Data Sciences, Statistics, or a related field. Additional certifications or executive programs in public policy, public administration, digital transformation, or data for development are a plus.
• Proven experience in working on research and data across diverse sectors.
• Proven experience in analyzing public data and working with government data systems. Experience in digital product development or digital public infrastructure initiatives is highly desirable.
• Demonstrated experience in primary development sectors such as education, health, livelihoods, etc., is highly desirable.
• Proven experience working with or advising senior government stakeholders at the central and/or state level.
• Proven track record of managing complex programs, including strategy, execution, stakeholder management, and team leadership.
• Outstanding communication skills in English and Hindi, with an ability to present complex ideas clearly and persuasively to diverse audiences.