Solutions Strategist

Vaan is a Shopify Platinum design & technology agency and the home of Brand Conversion Design.

We migrate, design, and build high performing eCommerce experiences leveraging our Brand Conversion Design framework, industry partnerships & deep eCommerce technical expertise. Solving the tension between optimization and design, we help brands make the most of their eCommerce.

About the role

Vaan partners with direct-to-consumer and B2B brands from $5M to $1B in GMV, across new builds, platform migrations, and ongoing optimization retainers. Our work spans development, design, A/B testing, and strategic roadmapping in one of the fastest-moving platform environments in commerce.

The Solutions Strategist sits between client understanding and technical execution. This is not a developer role and does not require one. It requires someone who can walk into a complex merchant environment, understand how systems connect, identify friction, and turn that into a requirements picture engineering and design can build against.

We value specificity over generalism, forward-thinking over comfort with the status quo, and partners over vendors.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery for new engagements, migrations, and major projects, surfacing the requirements others miss
• Run structured sessions with client stakeholders across technical, marketing, and ops functions, and turn what surfaces into documentation the full team can act on
• Translate ambiguous business needs into scoped functional and technical requirements, including an explicit account of what is out of scope and why
• Decompose requirements into epics and stories an engineer can pick up without a follow-up conversation, working alongside the Product Owner to keep the backlog accurate as the engagement moves
• Maintain the requirements record page by page and section by section, covering features and functions, metafields, and the apps in play, with every line traceable to scope
• Work with Tech Leads to document architecture, data flows, and business rules, and to validate feasibility and scope before requirements become commitments
• Build and maintain the discovery frameworks and templates the rest of the team works from
• Translate what a client asks for into what they actually need, then identify the tool that serves it, with reasoning legible to the client, engineering, and the account team
• Maintain working awareness of what is already implemented across our portfolio, so recommendations build on existing stack decisions instead of duplicating or contradicting them
• Evaluate third-party tools across loyalty, search, reviews, personalization, subscriptions, and headless commerce, knowing each category well enough to ask the right questions and judge honestly
• Recognize when someone else on the team knows a tool better than you, and pull them in early
• Track Shopify platform updates, deprecations, and roadmap signals, and translate what changes into client guidance
• Advise on stack composition with a focus on long-term maintainability, scalability, and cost
• Map complex client environments across ERPs, PIMs, OMS platforms, CRM systems, and marketing stacks, including how they connect and where Shopify fits
• Identify integration requirements, data flows, and failure points before they become project risks
• Audit existing Shopify implementations for technical debt, architectural gaps, and unused platform capability, and articulate what should change and why
• Understand how AI works inside the apps our clients already run. Most of the ecosystem is adding AI features across search, merchandising, personalization, support, and retention. The question is never whether the feature exists. It is whether turning it on moves a business objective this client actually has
• Hold a working read on where AI creates genuine value in ecommerce and where it is noise, and be able to explain the difference to a client without hedging
• Identify where AI-enabled tooling could improve conversion, retention, or operational efficiency for a client, and build the case
• Use AI in your own delivery work: drafting specs, scripting audits, analyzing rulesets, reconciling data, roughing out wireframes to move a conversation along
• Work as a peer to Growth Strategists. You are the reason a commercially attractive roadmap item is deliverable, or the reason it gets reshaped before it is promised to a client
• Contribute technical context to scoping and estimation that makes the numbers more accurate
• Keep engineering, design, and the account team working from the same requirements picture, and surface the conflict early when they are not

Qualifications

• A track record of picking the right tool for a specific client context and being able to defend the choice to both the client and the engineers who have to live with it
• Working familiarity with Shopify Plus across admin, metafields, theme architecture, and B2B, enough to reason about what is possible without needing to build it
• Understanding of headless and composable architectures, and of when they are the wrong call
• Comfort saying you do not know a tool well, and a habit of finding the person who does
• A track record of leading discovery on complex digital projects, with documentation habits that survive contact with a deadline
• Ability to run stakeholder sessions that surface the real requirements, meaning what clients actually need rather than what they say they want
• Experience writing requirements engineering can execute against with minimal ambiguity, and breaking them down to a granularity a developer can pick up
• Experience holding requirements for several clients at once without context bleeding between them
• Exposure to platform migration from Magento, BigCommerce, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus
• Working comfort in Figma or FigJam, Jira, and Excel. You don't need mastery. You should be able to run a session on a canvas, author a story, and keep a structured requirements sheet clean
• Experience evaluating AI features inside tools a merchant already pays for, rather than only standalone AI products, and judging whether switching one on is worth the change
• Comfort with rapid change. You update your position when the evidence warrants it, and you say so out loud
• Confident in client-facing environments, able to ask hard questions diplomatically and explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Able to propose a compromise a client will accept, an engineer will respect, and the account team can still deliver inside the SOW
• Strong written communication. Your requirements documents, briefs, and follow-ups are clear and trusted by the people who use them