🦸 Team Lead Data & AI Strategy

🤖 The Role

We’re looking for someone who wants to do more than consult. As Team Lead for our Strategy team in the Strategy & Analytics unit, you’ll combine hands-on client delivery with leading a growing team that helps organisations shape how they create value with data and AI.

This is a hybrid role. You stay active in client work to keep your edge sharp, while taking real responsibility for coaching, direction, quality, and team growth. Expect to spend roughly 80-90% on client delivery, with leadership time scaling as your team grows and with any additional responsibilities you take on.

What makes this different?

This is a young team in full development. That means you won’t inherit rigid ways of working. You’ll help define them. The culture, the processes, and the identity of Strategy, both internally and externally. You’ll have a real hand in shaping all of it.

We’ve structured the role so you have dedicated time for leadership, scaled to your team size. Because leading people properly takes time, and we're not interested in half-measures.

🧭 What you'll actually do

Lead people, not just projects

​​Your primary responsibility is making sure your team thrives. You’re their coach. Together with the Unit Lead, you support individual growth and match people with opportunities that fit their ambitions. You keep the team aligned, unblocked, and growing. You spot challenges early, have the hard conversations when needed, celebrate wins, ensure visibility, and build a team where people feel supported and connected.

Own your team's health

You foster an environment where everyone feels engaged, supported, and part of a cohesive team. You take responsibility for the essentials: communication, knowledge sharing, workload balance, and team spirit. As the team grows, you help refine how we operate by strengthening what needs improvement and scaling what works well.

Stay in the game

You continue doing client work. This keeps your expertise fresh and means your guidance comes from real, recent experience, not outdated playbooks. It ensures you stay close to the work that matters.

Shape our direction

You join the Strategy & Analytics leadership team, where you help shape how we work, how we grow, what we stand for, and how we position ourselves in the market. As the Data & AI Strategy team and the unit evolves, you help refine our ways of working by strengthening what needs improvement and scaling what already works. You don’t just execute strategy. You help create it.

🌱 Why consider this?

Accelerate your career

This role combines leadership responsibility, strategic visibility, and real delivery work. It’s the kind of experience that opens doors to senior roles. It's a genuine accelerator, not just a title change.

Leadership that's grounded in reality

You coach and mentor people while staying hands-on with clients. This lets you bring real-world experience directly into your leadership. Along the way, you’ll strengthen your leadership skills: effective coaching, strategic thinking, performance management, stakeholder alignment, and handling difficult situations with confidence.

Genuine influence, not just input

Your voice matters. You’re part of the core leadership team that shapes how the Strategy & Analytics unit evolves: our direction, our culture, our values, how we work, and how we show up for clients. This isn't symbolic, but real day-to-day impact.

Build something from the ground up

The Strategy team is still taking shape. You get to help define it. The identity, the collaboration style, the operating model. All of it is in motion, and you’ll have a meaningful hand in how it comes together.

A role you can tailor to your ambitions

Want to get involved in account management, commercial work, or talent initiatives? These optional pillars give you the freedom to broaden your impact and tailor the role to your ambitions without being forced into a predefined mold.

 💪 What you bring

Strategy expertise

You are a strategist first. You can take an ambiguous “we need to do something with data and AI” and turn it into decisions, priorities, and a plan that survives contact with reality. You bring experience in several of these:

• Strategy framing and problem structuring: you run a crisp diagnosis. Hypotheses, options, trade-offs, and a storyline that holds at exec level. You translate messy input into a decision-ready narrative.

• Value framing and business casing: you quantify value and build credible benefits models and investment recommendations, not just “business value bullets”. You pressure-test assumptions with finance and business owners.

• Roadmap and portfolio prioritisation: you identify opportunities, prioritise initiatives, and create a roadmap that sequences sensibly across value, feasibility, risk, and dependencies.

• Operating model and governance design: you design the “how it runs” layer. Decision rights, roles, ways of working, governance cadence, and a practical operating model that makes strategy executable.

• Executive advisory and stakeholder navigation: you advise senior stakeholders, handle pushback, align conflicting incentives, and move groups from debate to commitment.

• From strategy to delivery traction: you translate strategy into actionable workstreams, clear scope, and concrete next steps. Workshops that end with owners and decisions, not “alignment”.

• Consulting leadership and commercial contribution: you help shape proposals, craft client narratives, and build reusable frameworks, playbooks, and templates that scale beyond you.

Team lead skills 

You know how to support people in a way that actually moves them forward. You coach with honesty, give clear feedback, and help consultants grow in a direction that makes sense for them and for the team. You create clarity, structure, and connection, the things a team needs to stay healthy and do great work.

• Ability to coach, challenge, and support consultants in their development, providing clear feedback, and helping them grow intentionally

• Strong focus on team engagement and wellbeing, creating a supportive, connected, and collaborative team environment

• Clear and structured internal communication, helping maintain a healthy team rhythm and smooth coordination

• Ability to contribute to documentation, internal alignment, and knowledge-sharing assets that strengthen the team’s ways of working

💰 The Offer

• An attractive salary package with extralegal benefits including a company car and fuel card or mobility budget, hospitalisation insurance, group insurance, and a high-end laptop and smartphone

• A personal and team training budget to support your ongoing professional growth

• An innovation budget to experiment, learn, and work on educational, challenging, or open-source projects within your guild

• Regular virtual and in-person team buildings, gatherings, and sports initiatives to stay connected and unwind

• Access to an internal coach to support your growth

Apply now and help us build the strategy capability that turns data and AI ambition into decisions, roadmaps, and traction.

🇧🇪 Our main offices are in Leuven and Ghent, with co-working spaces in Antwerp. These locations are always available for day-to-day work, brainstorming sessions or team events. In general for Dataroots team members, much work can be performed remotely, but you will most likely also visit our clients on-site frequently.