I run programme operations for a healthcare education company — which in practice means I sit between strategy and delivery, and spend most of my time on whichever is the current bottleneck. Institutional partnerships, production pipelines, vendor networks, feature requirements for the product team: different surfaces of the same underlying job, which is making sure ambitious plans survive contact with the people who have to run them.
I don't find the distinction between "strategy" and "operations" people very useful. The strategic thinking I trust most comes from people close enough to execution to know where a plan disagrees with reality; the operational work I respect most comes from people who understand why the plan exists in the first place.
The mechanics of how organisations actually get things done — negotiation as an information problem, process design as a form of interface design, and how much of "leadership" is really just being willing to own the boring, under-specified parts of a project before anyone assigns them to you.
Toward roles with more direct ownership over the strategy-to-execution line — fewer handoffs between deciding and doing.
Click a role for what it actually involved.