Lead Business Systems Analyst

The Lead Business Systems Analyst serves as the strategic liaison between business leadership and the Technology department, converting high-level business asks into clear, actionable technology requirements that engineering teams can build and quality teams can validate.

RESPONSIBILITY LEVEL:

The Lead Business Systems Analyst serves as the strategic liaison between business leadership and the Technology department, converting high-level business asks into clear, actionable technology requirements that engineering teams can build and quality teams can validate.

The role operates as a strategic partner to senior business leadership, ensuring alignment of technology initiatives to business strategy, operational priorities, and enterprise outcomes. The role pairs deep business curiosity with structured analytical inquiry to uncover the true intent behind a request, shape it into a defensible solution approach, and shepherd it through delivery to a tested, adopted outcome.

The role owns alignment between business demand, enterprise technology direction, and portfolio prioritization, ensuring that technology investments maximize business value, manage risk, and scale across the organization.

This role is deployed on Goodwill s highest-priority, most complex initiatives and operates with substantial independence. It carries hybrid accountability for business analysis, requirements authorship, project leadership, and quality assurance, while also influencing roadmap development, prioritization decisions, and enterprise capability planning.

In addition to delivery accountability, the role contributes to technology roadmaps, long-term solution direction, and strategic planning efforts across business and IT leadership. Typically works on projects and initiatives that span 12 months- 2 years.

PRINCIPAL DUTIES:

Business Partnership, Strategy & Demand Alignment

1. Acts as a trusted advisor to senior business leadership, building partnerships to understand strategy, operational needs, and priorities.

2. Leads intake, shaping, and prioritization of business demand, aligning work to enterprise technology direction and organizational capacity.

3. Collaborates with business and IT leadership to develop and maintain technology roadmaps aligned to business outcomes, risks, and opportunities.

4. Provides guidance on tradeoffs, prioritization, risks, and sequencing of initiatives.

5. Ensures alignment between business strategy and enterprise technology direction across initiatives.

Business Discovery & Analytical Inquiry

6. Lead business discovery to uncover underlying intent, define root problems, establish measurable success criteria, and align technology work to business strategy and operational realities.

7. Serve as a trusted advisor to business leaders by reframing ambiguous requests into clear problem statements, prioritized opportunities, and actionable initiatives aligned to enterprise strategy and roadmap direction.

Requirements Translation & Technical Specification

8. Translate business needs into engineering-ready requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, specifications, and process documentation that support build, test, and delivery.

9. Partner with architects, engineers, cybersecurity, and platform teams to confirm feasibility, manage scope, document assumptions and constraints, and support intake and prioritization of new work while ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, data strategy, and long-term technology direction.

10. Ensure solutions are scalable, sustainable, and aligned with enterprise standards and integration patterns.

Project Leadership & Delivery on Strategic Initiatives

11. Lead technology delivery for high-priority, complex initiatives, owning scope, risks, dependencies, and key decision points while aligning work to broader business and technology priorities.

12. Maintain clear communication, status reporting, decision-making forums, and release transition support to move work forward and prepare solutions for ongoing support.

Quality Assurance & Solution Validation

13. Lead solution validation by designing and executing test strategies, test cases, and UAT coordination across functional, integration, regression, and acceptance testing.

14. Confirm delivered solutions meet business intent and release criteria, while strengthening QA capability over time through practical experience and targeted development.

Research, Innovation & Continuous Improvement

15. Identify technology trends, automation opportunities, and process improvements that increase business efficiency, including practical uses of AI and Copilot, while promoting consistent analysis and QA practices across the team.

Enterprise Influence, Roadmapping & Continuous Improvement

16. Contribute to and influence enterprise technology roadmaps, capability planning, and long-term solution direction

17. Recommend technology investments, process improvements, and innovation opportunities that drive efficiency and business value

18. Provide input into technology policies, standards, and practices that improve consistency across the organization

Other

19. Leading and Developing Talent: May partner with coworkers to advance their development.

20. Project and Change Management: May serve as a team member, or subject matter expert, for formal or department projects. Contributes ideas and helps develop solutions, while balancing demands of project work and routine job responsibilities. Engages effectively in change affecting her/him, communicating appropriately with supervisor. Follows through on learning, skill building, and practice necessary to adapt to change.

21. Problem Solving: Light supervision; works independently. Periodic review of work by manager or direct customer. Researches, analyzes, and evaluates situations and reports on findings. Solves advanced problems.

22. Technical Skill: Advanced knowledge of professional principles and skills. Comprehensive knowledge of principles, practices and procedures of particular field of specialization.

23. Community Engagement: Champions Goodwill s community engagement initiatives. Aware of Goodwill s community partner organizational and participates in volunteer opportunities as pertains to role and interest. Participates in industry/knowledge groups.

24. Responsible for completing other duties / responsibilities as assigned.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Two years of college education or experience equivalency, and a minimum of 7 years progressive experience in business analysis, systems analysis, or a comparable business / technology translation role.

2. Bachelor s degree in Information Systems, Business Administration, Data / Analytics, or related field preferred.

3. Demonstrated ability to elicit, document, and validate functional requirements, user stories, and data integration specifications that engineering teams can build directly from.

4. Demonstrated experience partnering with senior business stakeholders to align technology initiatives with business strategy

5. Proven ability to influence prioritization, roadmap planning, and decision-making

6. Experience leading complex, cross-functional, enterprise initiatives

7. Strong understanding of enterprise technology environments, including architecture, data, and integration.

8. Project management experience leading complex, cross-functional initiatives end-to-end (12 24 months in scope); PMP, CAPM, IIBA CBAP/CCBA, or equivalent certification preferred.

9. Working knowledge of QA testing practices, test strategy, test case authorship, UAT coordination, and defect triage, with willingness to deepen this capability on the job, or equivalent exposure to UAT coordination.

10. Strong analytical and inquiry skills with comfort exploring data, processes, and edge cases to validate problem definition before recommending a solution.

11. Proven facilitation and executive communication skills; able to translate fluently between business and technical audiences.

12. Familiarity with modern enterprise platforms typical of Goodwill s portfolio (e.g., Microsoft 365, Dynamics, data warehouse / BI tooling, Copilot / AI-assisted workflows) preferred.

CORE CULTURAL COMPETENCIES:

1. Customer Focus: Independently anticipate and meet customer needs, while searching for ways to improve customer service. Internalize customer feedback and follow up with customers to ensure problems are solved by providing innovative ideas to meet their future needs.

2. Values Differences: Seeks out the diverse perspectives and talents of others, striving to work effectively with others who have different perspectives, backgrounds, or styles. Behave with sensitivity towards differences in cultural norms, expectations, and ways of communicating.

3. Communicates Effectively: Shares information and updates with others, while ensuring clear, concise, and professional communication through reports, documentation, written and other communications. Listens with interest to what others have to say.

4. Situational Adaptability: Demonstrates flexibility of responses to different situations through adapting to the changing needs, conditions, priorities, or opportunities. Monitors how well an approach is working to see if a change is needed, recognizing cues that suggest a change in approach or behavior is needed.

5. Drives Results: Demonstrates a strong drive to achieve meaningful results, through driving tasks to successful completion and closure. Sets high standards for own performance, showing determination in the face of obstacles and setbacks.

6. Ensures Accountability: Takes responsibility and ownership for successes and failures in own work. Monitors progress of performance and changes approach accordingly, following through on commitments.

PHYSICAL/SENSORY DEMANDS:

Remain stationary for extended periods of time, repetitive use of hands, vision required to develop, design and implementation.