Director of Discovery & Framing
Role Mission
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.
The Role
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.
What You Will Own
Lead Discovery & Framing Engagements
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.
Build the Discovery & Framing Function
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.
Start With a Hypothesis
Work with the account team before each engagement to establish:
- What we believe we know
- What remains an assumption
- What we need to learn
- Who must participate
- What decision or next step the engagement needs to advance
The hypothesis provides structure without predetermining the answer.
Discover the Real Problem
Move the customer conversation beyond the initial technical request to understand:
- The mission being performed
- Current state
- What is not working today
- Root causes
- Existing workarounds
- Constraints
- Who is affected
- Why the problem matters
- Why it matters now
- What happens if nothing changes
Continue asking why until the team understands the underlying mission problem rather than simply the requested technology.
Frame the Problem
Turn discovery into a clear problem definition the customer recognizes as their own.
Define:
- The mission problem
- Who experiences it
- Root causes
- Measurable impact
- Current workarounds
- Desired future state
- Consequences of inaction
- The gap between current and desired states
The problem should be expressed in the customer's language-not Defense Unicorns product language.
Make the Impact Measurable
Quantify the problem wherever possible using measures such as:
- Mission readiness
- Time
- Cost
- Operational risk
- Availability
- Deployment speed
- Reliability
- Workforce capacity
- Manual effort
- Delays
- Failure rates
- Mission outcomes
Establish a baseline so the customer can determine whether the problem has actually been solved.
Define Success
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?
Map the Decision System
Identify the people and organizations involved in moving the problem toward action, including:
- Mission Influencer
- Mission Hero
- Buyer
- Requirements owner
- Funding owner
- Acquiring organization
- Technical stakeholders
- People who can advance the decision
- People who can block the decision
Understand the relationships, incentives, concerns, and gaps among them.
Expose the Path to Action
Determine what must happen for the customer to act, including:
- Decision criteria
- Decision process
- Funding source
- Acquisition path
- Contracting path
- Competitive alternatives
- Status quo
- Organizational barriers
- Evidence still required
- Events creating urgency
- Timing constraints
Own the Customer-Facing Output
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:
- Validated mission problem
- Current state and root causes
- Quantified impact
- Current workarounds
- Consequences of inaction
- Desired future state
- Success criteria
- Stakeholder and buying map
- Decision criteria and process
- Funding and acquisition path
- Remaining evidence gaps
- Owners and dates
- Agreed mutual next step
The output should be useful enough that the customer and account team can act on it immediately.
Maintain Independence of Judgment
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:
- Advance an opportunity
- Redirect an opportunity
- Identify additional discovery required
- Reveal that another problem should take priority
- Disqualify an opportunity
The D&F Engagement
A strong D&F engagement follows five stages:
1. Prepare
Research the account, mission, technical environment, stakeholders, and opportunity context. Align with the account team on hypotheses, unknowns, participants, and objectives.
2. Discover
Facilitate a customer-first conversation to understand the current state, mission, root problem, constraints, workarounds, stakeholders, and impact. Ask questions until evidence replaces assumptions.
3. Frame
Turn what was discovered into a clear, measurable problem statement. Connect the problem to mission impact, desired outcomes, and consequences of inaction.
4. Validate
Validate the problem framing with the customer. Test the problem, impact, urgency, baseline, desired outcomes, success criteria, stakeholder roles, decision criteria, and remaining assumptions.
5. Mobilize
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.
How You Will Work
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.
What You Bring
Client-Facing Strategy Depth
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.
Executive Facilitation
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.
Structured Problem Solving
Exceptional ability in:
- Hypothesis-led discovery
- Issue structuring
- Root-cause analysis
- Five Whys
- Stakeholder mapping
- Impact quantification
- Business and mission analysis
- Synthesis
- Executive communication
Mission Intimacy and Translation
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.
Crisp Executive Communication
Outstanding written and verbal communication with the ability to turn hours of complex customer discussion into a short, clear, defensible executive readout.
Team-Building Leadership
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.
Especially Valuable
- Experience working with complex, mission-driven organizations
- Experience operating in regulated or highly secure environments
- Acquisition and contracting fluency
- Familiarity with enterprise software, DevSecOps, cloud, cybersecurity, platform engineering, software delivery, or mission systems
- Experience connecting operational requirements to funding and acquisition
- Familiarity with MEDDPICC or another rigorous enterprise qualification methodology
How Success Will Be Measured
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.
What This Role Is
- Functional leader of Discovery & Framing
- Senior customer strategist
- Executive facilitator
- Structured problem solver
- Builder of the D&F methodology
- Builder and leader of the D&F team
- Independent tester of customer problem and fit
- Bridge between mission problem and capability need
What This Role Is Not
- A quota-carrying Account Executive
- A general sales enablement role
- A product marketer
- A Solutions Engineer
- A technical architecture role
- A one-time workshop facilitator
- A presentation resource
- A disguised product pitch
Operating Principle
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.
Remote - USA
$204,000—$276,000 USD
Who We Are
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.
What We Do
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.
Who We Serve
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.
What We Work On
- Kubernetes
- Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
- Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
- Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
- GitOps
- Containers
- CNCF projects and open source products and packages
- Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
- Building and improving security delivery
- Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications
Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy
Health:
- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
Financial:
- 401k Retirement Plan
- Company Stock Options
- Home Office Budget
Leave:
- We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
- Paid Parental Leave
Learning:
- Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)
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.