Business Analyst II

Because this position requires regular on-site work at our Creative Studios in Westlake, Ohio, we will focus on candidates who currently reside in Northeast Ohio. Remote work and relocation assistance are NOT available for this role. The Business Analyst II partners with business stakeholders and technology teams to understand business objectives, analyze problems and opportunities, and translate business needs into clear, actionable requirements and solution recommendations. The role applies strong business acumen, analytical thinking, and knowledge of processes, data, and technology to improve efficiency and deliver measurable business value. Working independently on small to medium initiatives and defined workstreams of larger efforts, the Business Analyst II leads requirements and process analysis; supports solution design, testing, implementation, and change adoption; and uses modern analytics, automation, and approved AI-enabled tools responsibly to improve the quality and speed of delivery. ESSENTIAL DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES: *Builds strong stakeholder relationships and applies business acumen to understand strategy, operating models, processes, customers, financial drivers, risks, and performance measures; evaluates requests and solution options based on feasibility, tradeoffs, and business value. *Elicits, analyzes, validates, prioritizes, and documents business, functional, non-functional, and data requirements using appropriate techniques; produces clear, testable, traceable artifacts such as user stories, acceptance criteria, use cases, process flows, and decision rules. *Facilitates alignment among business and technical stakeholders by clarifying scope, assumptions, dependencies, constraints, risks, priorities, and expected outcomes, and translates business needs into viable solution direction. *Analyzes current-state processes and root causes to identify bottlenecks, handoffs, rework, controls, and waste; designs future-state improvements through simplification, standardization, automation, reuse, or technology enablement and helps define measures of realized value. *Identifies and analyzes business data needs, definitions, sources, quality considerations, reporting, and analytics requirements; uses data to support decisions and validate problems, requirements, and outcomes. *Uses modern collaboration, requirements, process-modeling, analytics, automation, and approved AI-enabled tools to accelerate research, synthesis, documentation, analysis, and test development; validates AI-generated outputs and follows company requirements for privacy, security, intellectual property, accuracy, and responsible AI use. *Partners with product, project, architecture, development, data, vendor, and other delivery teams to estimate analysis effort, assess impacts, manage dependencies, and support solution design and delivery. *Plans and supports functional, system, integration, regression, and user acceptance testing, including test scenarios/scripts, expected results, requirements traceability, defect analysis, and resolution support. *Supports implementation readiness, organizational change, training/documentation, adoption, and post-implementation validation as appropriate; investigates business or production issues and helps define sustainable corrective actions. *Independently leads analysis for small to medium initiatives and defined workstreams of larger initiatives. *Manages multiple priorities across several initiatives, engages team members and escalates material risks and decisions appropriately. *Works effectively across Agile, iterative, predictive/waterfall, and hybrid delivery approaches, adapting analysis practices to th