James Valentine Headshot

Strategic Operations Leadership

I build decisioning infrastructure for better products, programs, and projects.

(Jobs to be done)

Get off the hampster wheel.

Improve planning horizons with better confidence in your prioritization strategy.

Make collaboration functional.

Accelerate decisioning with shared mental models and less gatekeeping.

Put the pain in the right place.

Use feedback loops and escalation paths to test and tie decisions to their results.

Inspect what you expect.

See the total cost of ownership with better visualize risks and dependencies.

Manage strategic ambiguity with better decisioning infrastructure.

Intentional decisioning leads to insights that create repeatable results even in the most uncertain of circumstances.

Are you fully accessing your organization’s intellectual horsepower?

Power plays and priority politics stiffle contributions when cross-functional teams lack common frames of reference.

Clear workflows set the stage for workflow automationLet’s get aligned.

(Cases)

Case 1

2023-2026

CFPB Consent Order Remediation

Credit.com settled a dispute with the CFPB. I

Case 2

2014

Communicating for Change

My personal field guide to influencing without authority.

Case 3

2023

The Big Four Questions

Brand identity for an online learning platform

Case 4

2014

Functional Theory of Decision Making

Insights from designing corporate governance for a global UX pattern library.

(About Me)

I began my career helping product managers to measure and validate their assumptions through iterative testing. I developed a consultative approach based on deep expertise in optimization and addressing operational and strategic blindspots it uncovered, which then grew into progressively larger operational and strategic leadership roles — moving from measuring performance to shaping the operating models that drive it.

Across 15 years I’ve been consistently pulled toward ownerless priorities in complex, regulated, or transformation environments where clarity of process and executive alignment are the difference between good intentions and real outcomes.

(Principles)

Optimization

An organization is perfectly designed to get the results it achieves.

Success is Learned

When our perceptions reflect reality, we can successfully predict outcomes—systematic validation of what we think we know leads to repeatable outcomes.

Cultural Integrity

Every experience employees have with leadership and structures will either reinforce or undermine our stated beliefs.

XXXX

We can’t get a perfect result right away. But we can move toward it step by step.

XXXX

I speak honestly, even when it’s uncomfortable. Better to know about a problem now than later.

Positive Psychology

Teams that can remain present in a sense of progress towards their potential are more resilient and deliver better business outcomes.