Overview
Oversees team on proactively acting as an advocate for and the voice of the customer/partner leveraging relevant insights. Supports and coaches team on innovating methods for proactively identifying and/or translating customer/partner problems into solutions. Mobilizes resources within the customer success unit (CSU) and across Microsoft to solve issues. Oversees team on anticipating, identifying, escalating, and mitigating blockers using appropriate tools. Holds team accountable for delivering solutions in line with company methodologies to prepare highly complex and/or impactful customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets. Drives team on proactively identifying, anticipating, and setting the foundation with the customer/partner for new cross-solution opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion at scale. Holds team accountable for driving operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record. Leads team on leveraging market insights and demand signals to partner with leadership in identifying relevant areas. Leads team on leading the direction that internal virtual team members and stakeholders take. Leads team on proactively identifying and anticipating gaps that drive changes and improvements to scale across customers. In addition, this role has people management responsibilities including driving employee growth and development, executing projects, and managing performance.
Responsibilities
Business Impact
Holds team accountable for driving operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking). Drives team on orchestrating, collaborating, and influencing across Microsoft and customer/partner teams and leadership through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase customer/partner satisfaction. Holds team accountable for anticipating and managing business and technical risks, adapting methodology and applying governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures. Oversees continuous prioritization among competing demands in their work and identify where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.
Drives team on proactively identifying, anticipating, and setting the foundation with the customer/partner for new cross-solution opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Defines the need for change management to ensure team members develop thorough understanding of customer's business and operations to advise on potential solutions. Drives team on acting as a role model for strategically consulting with, actively listening to and respectfully challenging customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements. Oversees team on driving the identification, anticipation, and evaluation of industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathering of customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and mapping of both existing and novel architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Holds teams accountable for capturing opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities.
Oversees team on anticipating, identifying, escalating, and mitigating blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption for highly complex and/or impactful customers/scenarios. Holds team accountable for proactively applying expert business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and to quickly resolve identified constraints and blockers expected to have the most impact, leveraging scalable and/or repeatable fixes whenever feasible.. Is accountable for mitigation of senior TDM-level escalations, defining and implementing recommendations to resolve issues.
Holds team accountable for delivering solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., product offerings such as value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare highly complex and/or impactful customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets. Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices and/or involving the change management team, proactively helps the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage. Oversees team on guiding highly complex and/or impactful customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities. Provides expert guidance across teams on articulating the value of Unified and supports sellers, leading direct-to-customer engagements, and partnering with account teams to build consumption plans aligned with appropriate services. Holds teams accountable for providing feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.
Customer Centricity
Supports and coaches team on innovating methods for proactively identifying and/or translating customer/partner problems into solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, creating or improving an existing business model, and explaining why and/or how they meet customer/partner outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals (e.g., via proof of concept, minimally viable product [MVP], rapid prototype) relative to competitive offerings. Holds team accountable for influencing, empowering, and driving the customer/partner and its leadership to set their technical strategy and accelerate their adoption and use of Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions. Oversees team on building, fostering, and maintaining relationships with, and influencing technical decision makers (TDMs) up to the C-suite level, and liaising between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Leads and elevates interactions as needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements and influence decision making across BDMs, TDMs, CIO and CISO teams, appropriately engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper expertise is required.
Mobilizes resources within the customer success unit (CSU) and across Microsoft to solve issues. Drives team on acting as a role model for focusing on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Leads team on leveraging deep understanding of customer goals to advocate for and lead the definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Oversees team on anticipating and addressing customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, including leading customer confidence calls and creating and executing strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.
Oversees team on proactively acting as an advocate for and the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories, and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams, and internal communities across their organization, leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems to influence teams to translate these insights into new or improved offerings for other customers/partners. Leads team on driving the identification of patterns across customers/partners/territories/industries and leveraging them with relevant industry perspective to develop strategic and actionable insights. Leads team on presenting compelling business cases and recommended architectures to program managers and leadership to advocate for and influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate.
People Management
Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring. Model: Live our culture. Embody our values. Practice our leadership principles. Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes. Enable success across boundaries. Help the team adapt and learn. Care: Attract and retain great people. Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations. Invest in the growth of others.
Technical Leadership
Leads team on leveraging market insights and demand signals to partner with leadership in identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling and/or accreditations based on demand. Drives team on role modeling technical readiness, both depth-aligned to solution area priorities and breadth-aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU)/corporate initiatives (e.g., security, resilience, AI), and influencing across teams to drive their own technical readiness. Oversees team on acting as a mentor, leading readiness and upskilling activities in the team/organization by educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices. Leads and drives a culture of learning and coaching in both the internal technical community and the broader organization alongside managers towards business objectives.
Leads team on proactively identifying and anticipating gaps through delivery, communicating those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connecting gaps and patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, IP (both existing and new), technologies, and/or processes/practices that enable solutions to scale across customers. Oversees team on leading the development of and modifications to Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies. Leads team on providing thought leadership and innovation to customers/partners and internal communities at the worldwide level.
Leads team on leading the direction that internal virtual team members (brought together around technologies and customer/partner challenges) and stakeholders take with customers/partners by sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input across boundaries, using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape, and actively pursuing opportunities that grow impact and capabilities of the broader organization. Guides team on serving as an industry-leading expert and driving recognition for Microsoft solutions by initiating and driving presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite) Oversees team on driving collaborative efforts for contributing to and/or developing intellectual property (IP) and proactively identifying patterns where no IP exists (e.g., CoPilot and AI scenarios) to help build scalable and repeatable models. Initiates and drives external technical and non-technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, webcasts, blogs, hackathons) that elevate the Microsoft brand, sharing learnings across internal teams and leading their team to do the same. Coaches team on building an external influencer network, supporting Microsoft’s strategy and represents Microsoft's technology vision at events
• Other: Embody our culture and values
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 10+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
5+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.
Other Requirements
• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role's job duties.
Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 15+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 12+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
8+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
8+ years experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions.
Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
8+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.
3+ years Azure Cloud and AI Platform experience
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.
Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.
#MCAPSA
Cloud Solution Architecture M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $155,800 - $277,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $202,400 - $303,600 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
