US Health & Benefits Data Strategist

Company:

Mercer

Description:

The US H&B Data Strategist is responsible for defining and advancing the US Health & Benefits (H&B) business data strategy across digital products, platforms, and consulting solutions. This role leads the development of the US H&B data vision, strategy, and cross-functional roadmaps to ensure data assets are intentionally structured, governed, and leveraged to enable innovation and support scalable digital capabilities. Serving as a strategic partner to product, platform, analytics, and consulting leaders, the Data Strategist connects business objectives to practical data investment decisions, ensuring data is treated as a core product capability and a durable enterprise asset that drives differentiated client value.

Key Responsibilities

Data Strategy & Vision

• Define and evolve the US H&B data strategy in alignment with product, platform, analytics, and innovation priorities, ensuring clear outcomes, sequencing, and value realization.

• Establish a strategic point of view on how US H&B should use data to differentiate offerings (e.g., insight-driven consulting, benchmarking, predictive analytics, workflow automation) and create competitive advantage.

• Translate business needs into an actionable multi-horizon roadmap of data capabilities (foundational, enabling, and differentiating) with measurable success metrics.

Data Product Identification & Development

• Identify opportunities to transform raw and fragmented data into structured, reusable, well-documented data products that are discoverable and fit-for-purpose across multiple use cases.

• Drive standardization of metric definitions and calculation logic across US H&B to enable consistent reporting, benchmarking, and analytics at scale.

• Define how data should be modeled, curated, and reused across products and solutions (e.g., canonical entities, shared measures, reference data, metadata standards).

Product & Platform Partnership

• Ensure data models, pipelines, and governance approaches align with the long-term product and platform strategy, enabling modularity, reuse, and scale.

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Analytics to embed strong data foundations into solution design (e.g., instrumentation, lineage, quality controls, semantic layers).

• Support the development of benchmarking, analytics, and insight capabilities by defining required data inputs, readiness criteria, and operationalization patterns.

Data Governance & Alignment

• Partner with Marsh Innovation and Data Office and enterprise data teams to align US H&B efforts to enterprise data standards, policies, and shared capabilities.

• Advocate for clear data ownership, stewardship, access principles, and usage policies; help establish processes to ensure adoption and sustained compliance across US H&B.

• Proactively identify and mitigate data duplication and fragmentation across tools, teams, and products by promoting common assets, shared definitions, and intentional reuse.

Insights & Value Generation

• Identify opportunities to create new insights, improve analytics, and increase client value by aligning data strategy with business priorities and user workflows.

• Partner with business and product leaders to define new metrics and analytical frameworks, including how insights are packaged into products and consulting offerings.

• Define value hypotheses and measurement approaches for data initiatives (e.g., revenue impact, margin improvement, adoption, cycle time reduction, quality/accuracy gains).

Innovation & Market Opportunity Support

• Partner with the Health Innovation Studio to evaluate data-driven opportunities and define data requirements for potential products, accelerators, and analytics solutions.

• Assess feasibility and value of new datasets and data sources (internal and external), including partnership and acquisition considerations where relevant.

• Represent data strategy perspectives in cross-functional forums to support prioritization, decision-making, and investment planning.

Additional Skills & Experiences

• Data Product Mindset : Treats data as a product with defined users, quality expectations, documentation, governance, and lifecycle management.

• Analytical Rigor : Brings structured problem-solving, metric discipline, and hypothesis-driven approaches to roadmap and investment decisions.

• Communication & Stakeholder Management : Builds trust with technical and non-technical leaders; facilitates effective decisions across competing priorities.

• Strategic Thinking & Storytelling : Synthesizes complex business and technical topics into clear narratives, trade-offs, and decisions for senior stakeholders.

• Cross-Functional Leadership : Influences across a matrix of product, engineering, analytics, consulting, and enterprise partners; aligns teams around shared priorities and standards.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data/analytics strategy, product strategy, data product management, or related roles.

• Demonstrated ability to translate business problems into structured data approaches, including roadmaps, reusable assets, and standard metrics.

• Strong understanding of how data supports digital products, platforms, and analytic solutions (including data modeling, governance, and quality principles).

• Experience partnering with product, engineering, and analytics teams in a matrix environment to deliver measurable outcomes.

• Preferred experience in healthcare, benefits, insurance, or other analytic-driven industries and environments.

• Strong executive communication skills, with a track record of influencing senior stakeholders and driving alignment across diverse teams.

Why Join Us

This role sits at the center of Mercer US Health & Benefits’ data-driven transformation—helping shape a unified data foundation that powers both consulting workflows and scalable digital products. You will work with leaders across product, analytics, and innovation to build reusable data assets, consistent metrics, and governance practices that unlock insights and differentiated client value. The opportunity combines strategy and execution, offering high visibility, deep cross-functional partnership, and the ability to make measurable impact on how US H&B uses data to innovate, grow, and deliver better outcomes.

Mercer is a business of Marsh (NYSE: MRSH), a global leader in risk, reinsurance and capital, people and investments, and management consulting, advising clients in 130 countries. With annual revenue of over $27 billion and more than 95,000 colleagues, Marsh helps build the confidence to thrive through the power of perspective. For more information about Mercer, visit mercer.com, or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

Marsh is committed to embracing a diverse, inclusive and flexible work environment. We aim to attract and retain the best people and embrace diversity of age background, disability, ethnic origin, family duties, gender orientation or expression, marital status, nationality, parental status, personal or social status, political affiliation, race, religion and beliefs, sex/gender, sexual orientation or expression, skin color, veteran status (including protected veterans), or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. If you have a need that requires accommodation, please let us know by contacting [email protected].

Marsh is committed to hybrid work, which includes the flexibility of working remotely and the collaboration, connections and professional development benefits of working together in the office. All Marsh colleagues are expected to be in their local office or working onsite with clients at least three days per week. Office-based teams will identify at least one “anchor day” per week on which their full team will be together in person.

The applicable base salary range for this role is $115,200 to $230,400.

The base pay offered will be determined on factors such as experience, skills, training, location, certifications, education, and any applicable minimum wage requirements. Decisions will be determined on a case-by-case basis. In addition to the base salary, this position may be eligible for performance-based incentives.

We are excited to offer a competitive total rewards package which includes health and welfare benefits, tuition assistance, 401K savings and other retirement programs as well as employee assistance programs.