Aishani Gupta
Aishani Gupta

It's easy to define an organizational strategy in terms of performance goals, vision statements, and product roadmaps — but turning these concepts into actionable steps is not so simple. Most high-level strategies remain abstract and are never translated into practical workflows, and as a result, teams suffer from miscommunication, misaligned expectations, and inconsistent executions.

Aishani Gupta, a director at management consulting firm Thoughtium, believes the solution is in how that strategy is built and experienced. Rather than treating vision like a top-down directive, she sees it as a living, breathing process that must be co-created with the people responsible for bringing it to life.

That's what she works to achieve at Thoughtium, where she helps organizations translate their broad strategic visions into clear, actionable frameworks. She works closely with company leaders to establish realistic goals, shape how work gets done, and equip teams with the tools and behaviors needed to carry strategy forward.

How Aishani Learned to Place People at the Center of Strategy

Aishani began adopting a people-first approach early in her career. After joining Indian coworking network 91Springboard as an associate during its early startup phase, Aishani became responsible for driving consistency across multiple locations — which meant collaborating on hiring protocols, designing training modules, managing partnerships, and setting company-wide performance benchmarks. Her contributions helped lay the foundation for scalable operations as the company expanded from a single hub to multiple locations across the country.

During her MBA at Babson College, Aishani started consulting across different public-private initiatives and saw firsthand how people's lived experiences shaped strategy. In one project, she worked with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs and the Toyota Mobility Foundation to help older adults overcome the social isolation they faced following the COVID-19 pandemic. She engaged with local healthcare providers and community groups to surface the unique challenges this population faced (like their increased reliance on remote medical care) and co-develop solutions tailored to their needs. Her findings were used by the city's Age Strong program and were later published by Aishani and her professor.

Beyond its broader impact, this experience showed Aishani the true value of listening closely to people — their habits, constraints, and expectations — and leading with empathy for lasting impact. It proved how the most effective strategies begin with a deep understanding of the people they're meant to serve.

Since then, Aishani has applied this mindset to her work with commercial teams, where she focuses on building strategies that are not only practical but tailored to the teams responsible for bringing them to life.

Thoughtium
Thoughtium

Putting Strategy in Motion at Thoughtium

In 2022, Aishani joined management consulting firm Thoughtium as a senior consultant and has since risen to the position of director. There, she helps organizations align their leadership teams, empower employees with the skills and behaviors needed to drive change, and incorporate broader strategic priorities into day-to-day workflows.

In one key project, she helped unify a 400-person customer experience team for a large life sciences organization, which was laden with inconsistent service workflows and no shared CX playbook.

Rather than impose a top-down solution, Aishani led a series of collaborative sessions with employees at all levels (from frontline agents to senior leaders) to identify specific challenges and needs across the organization. Building on this foundational knowledge, she created a unified CX standard that was grounded in how teams already worked with customers, making it easier to integrate into daily workflows. To ensure smooth adoption, she developed an interactive, audiovisual strategy playbook that featured clear messaging around brand principles, scenario-based guidance, and examples of customer interactions.

The result was a stronger foundation for the customer experience and a better alignment around shared performance metrics — ultimately improving both employee engagement and customer outcomes.

In another major project, Aishani partnered with a SaaS company that was struggling to prepare mid-level managers for leadership roles. As the company rapidly expanded, many sales and commercial managers were stepping into leadership for the first time with no structured approach to build the skills and mindset required for the shift.

To close this gap, Aishani worked closely with senior leaders to co-develop a program that helped participants define their leadership style, think more strategically, learn to deliver effective feedback, and manage larger cross-functional teams. It combined in-person and virtual sessions with hands-on toolkits and peer discussions, giving participants a practical, firsthand understanding of the challenges that come with leading larger teams.

This project eventually became a flagship initiative for the company, giving new leaders the confidence and skills to thrive in their expanded roles.

Making Strategy More Than Just a Framework

Whether co-creating a customer experience playbook with a life sciences organization or equipping emerging commercial leaders at a global SaaS company, Aishani Gupta has helped organizations reimagine their bold, high-level strategies as intimate, lived experiences — ensuring that the vision shows up in daily work, not just in boardroom slides.

In doing so, she's showing that strategy can be more than just a buzzword. It can (and should) be something that equips leaders to navigate ambiguity, rally teams around shared direction, and sustain momentum through complexity.