Senior Vice President, Transformation Lead (Freelance) Greater New York City, NY Area

Company description

Hi there—at Razorfish, we’re leaders in what's next. Since the dawn of the internet, we’ve helped brands move first through every era of transformation, defining what digital means for business and now leading brands into the age of AI. Everyone has a prediction. Razorfish has a track record.

Named a Most Innovative Agency three years running (2024–2026) by Campaign US, our work reflects a proven ability not just to anticipate what’s coming, but to help our clients actively shape the future. No matter the trend or cultural moment, delivering real business impact wouldn’t be possible without our people. We bring together curious, driven, and diverse thinkers who challenge convention, push boundaries, and hold a high bar for creative excellence.

If you’re motivated to work alongside top performers, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and help define where technology, business, and marketing are headed next—this is the place to do it.

Join us at razorfish.com.

This role at Razorfish will serve as a member of Publicis Groupe's strategic internal agency, Constellation.

Constellation serves as an internal-facing brand formed by a collective of Publicis Groupe agencies to address our client's creative, data, strategy, media, and technology requirements. Team members collaborate across agencies while functioning as sub-divisions within their respective brands to provide dedicated support for the client. By acting as a unified interface, Constellation eliminates operational silos and presents a single service entity and primary point of contact for the client.

Overview

Constellation is Publicis Groupe's dedicated agency for Samsung, bringing together client leadership, strategy, media, data, CRM, creative, technology, delivery, and operations in service of a single client. The Senior Vice President, Transformation Lead works directly with the Executive Vice President, Business Operations to turn Constellation's most important and complex business problems into implementable change.

Constellation is entering a period of significant transformation. Like the wider marketing-services industry, we need to evolve how work gets done to create a more efficient, scalable, and outcome-oriented operating model. Many of today's workflows are highly bespoke, complex, and capacity-constrained. Over the next 12 months and beyond, Constellation will redesign priority areas of the business using process re-engineering, automation, AI, data, and new operating models to improve productivity, quality, speed, and scalability while continuing to deliver exceptional outcomes for Samsung.

This is not a conventional project-management role. The Transformation Lead is expected to understand the realities of a modern marketing-services organization, take ambiguous cross-functional problems, establish the facts, diagnose what is not working, define a practical future state, help senior stakeholders make the necessary choices, and translate the agreed direction into an actionable implementation plan.

The closest shorthand is a strong, experienced management consultant with meaningful agency or marketing-services experience who has moved beyond producing recommendations and knows how to drive implementation. The successful candidate will operate independently, exercise sound judgment, and reduce rather than add to the leadership burden.

This is a senior practitioner role. The Executive Vice President sets the transformation agenda and executive mandate; the Transformation Lead takes major assignments, develops the answer, and drives them through decision, mobilization, and implementation.

*Please note that this is a 6 month contract position.

Responsibilities

The ask:

Lead transformation work across selected priority business and operating-model challenges.

Redesign priority areas of Constellation's operating system to improve efficiency, scalability, and business performance.

Turn poorly defined problems into clear transformation briefs, practical choices, and executable plans.

Connect organizational, process, technology, data, commercial, and change implications so that the whole problem is addressed.

Move work from diagnosis and design through decision, mobilization, and implementation.

Key responsibilities

Structure ambiguous problems: Take complex or poorly defined business issues and turn them into clear questions, hypotheses, workplans, and decision points.

Establish the fact base: Gather and synthesize the evidence required to understand the current state, including business needs, workflows, roles, handoffs, pain points, performance data, and stakeholder perspectives.

Diagnose the current state: Identify root causes in processes, operating models, organization, governance, technology, or ways of working rather than simply cataloguing symptoms.

Design the future state: Develop practical future-state processes and operating models, including capabilities, workflows, roles, decision rights, governance, talent implications, and enabling technology.

Develop options and recommendations: Frame realistic choices for senior stakeholders, make trade-offs and implications explicit, and provide a clear point of view rather than merely recording competing opinions.

Lead senior working sessions: Plan and facilitate cross-functional discussions that test the work, resolve disagreement, and move stakeholders toward decisions.

Translate decisions into implementation: Convert an agreed future state into a sequenced roadmap with outcomes, workstreams, owners, dependencies, resources, risks, milestones, and measures of success.

Mobilize the work: Help establish the right team, ownership, governance, and initial operating cadence so that agreed changes move into execution.

Integrate business and technology change: Ensure AI, automation, data, platforms, and technical solutions follow the business problem and future workflow rather than becoming the starting point.

Track value and adoption: Define practical baselines and success measures, test whether changes are working, and adapt the plan where implementation is not producing the intended outcome.

Communicate with clarity: Create concise, decision-oriented materials for senior agency and client leaders that make complex issues understandable without oversimplifying them.

How the role works

With the Executive Vice President, Business Operations: The EVP sets the mandate, priorities, and executive context. The Transformation Lead develops the fact base, shapes the answer, and drives the work toward decision and implementation.

With accountable business owners: Business owners retain accountability for subject-matter decisions and outcomes. The Transformation Lead provides the method, structure, challenge, and momentum needed to move the work forward.

With Delivery / PMO: Delivery / PMO manages plans, cadence, dependencies, status, and delivery discipline. The Transformation Lead owns the transformation logic: diagnosis, future-state design, options, recommendations, and the integrity of the implementation roadmap.

With Technology, Data, and AI: Technical leaders own architecture and build. The Transformation Lead defines the business problem and future workflow, ensures requirements are coherent, and connects the solution to adoption and value.

With Change, Communications, Talent, and Finance: Specialist partners lead their respective interventions. The Transformation Lead ensures those interventions are grounded in the agreed future state and brought into the work at the right time.

Qualifications

15+ years of experience in business transformation, operating-model design, management consulting, or business operations, including substantial experience in an agency, marketing-services, media, CRM, creative, digital, or comparable client-services environment.

Deep understanding of agency and marketing-services operating models, including how complex client work is scoped, staffed, delivered, and scaled across functions.

A demonstrated ability to redesign complex, bespoke, capacity-constrained workflows using process re-engineering, automation, AI, data, and enabling technology, with measurable improvements in productivity, quality, speed, scalability, and margin.

A demonstrated record of taking ambiguous, cross-functional business problems from diagnosis through future-state design and into implementation.

Strong process and operating-model capabilities, including current-state assessment, root-cause analysis, workflow design, organizational design, roles and decision rights, governance, and implementation planning.

The ability to connect organizational, process, technology, data, commercial, and change considerations without treating them as separate exercises.

Sound judgment and the confidence to form a point of view, make trade-offs explicit, and challenge senior stakeholders constructively.

The ability to influence and drive decisions without relying on direct authority.

Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication, with the ability to make complex issues simple without making them simplistic.

A bias toward action and implementation, including comfort producing a strong first cut, testing it with others, and improving it quickly.

Additional information

The Power of One starts with our people! To do powerful things, we offer powerful resources. Our best-in-class wellness and benefits offerings include:

Paid Family Care for parents and caregivers for 12 weeks or more

Monetary assistance and support for Adoption, Surrogacy and Fertility

Monetary assistance and support for pet adoption

Employee Assistance Programs and Health/Wellness/Comfort reimbursements to help you invest in your future and work/life balance

Tuition Assistance

Paid time off that includes Flexible Time off Vacation, Annual Sick Days, Volunteer Days, Holiday and Identity days, and more

Matching Gifts programs

Flexible working arrangements

‘Work Your World’ Program encouraging employees to work from anywhere Publicis Groupe has an office for up to 6 weeks a year (based upon eligibility)

Business Resource Groups that support multiple affinities and alliances

The benefits offerings listed are available to eligible U.S. Based employees, are reviewed on an annual basis, and are governed by the terms of the applicable plan documents.

Razorfish is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Our employment decisions are made without regard to actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, disability, medical condition as defined by applicable state law, genetic information, marital status, military service and veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws and ordinances.

If you require accommodation or assistance with the application or onboarding process specifically, please contact USMTTACompliance@publicis.com.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Compensation Range: USD $86.64 - USD $144.06/Hourly. This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. This role may also be eligible for bonus or incentive compensation. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time. Temporary roles may be eligible to participate in our freelancer/temporary employee medical plan through a third-party benefits administration system once certain criteria have been met. For regular roles, the Company will offer medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401k, and paid time off. The Company anticipates the application deadline for this job posting will be 12/1/2026.