Are you interested in helping product leaders and incubation teams become more successful through customer obsessed product development practices?  Are you entrepreneurial and motivated to help create and manage how we support, nurture and fund new product ideas for company growth?  Our team is chartered to run critical a critical company program that focus in these two areas to drive higher user satisfaction with our products as well as new growth opportunities.

We are looking for an experienced engineering manager with strong entrepreneurial skills, leadership and technical product acumen to help extend these programs through coaching with others at all levels of the company for critical incubation practices.  This role requires creativity, outside-the-box thinking, along with a hunger for learning and highly adaptive people skills as we work with a wide-range of people and roles.  It is an individual contributor role today but with the growth of this program may lead to management opportunities in the future.

In this role, successful candidates will be coaching leaders and teams for new product incubations in translating market needs to agile, incubation engineering practices. This includes helping leaders and teams define and execute how they understand user needs, market-test their product ideas, create meaningful metrics and measurement for their minimum-viable-product (MVP), and prepare and execute their product roadmap to include highly iterative inputs from users.  This program is on the leading edge of piloting new ways to help leaders and teams create, validate, build, and continuously improve products users love.  Your strong balance of analytical and engineering skills, along with collaboration and influence skills with decision makers, team members and other supporting organizations will be key to success.

Responsibilities

Help the incubation team move from a hypothesis about the largest market opportunity through all the stages of concept, prototype, market experiments and testing, to release planning and ultimately launching and growing to scale

Managing the program management processes for helping the team translate their user research and findings into clear a clear customer/user journey and define product feature requirements.

Manage building out a partnership strategy and opportunity map that helps the team understand who and how to partner with for product, program, new user, or partnership reach for their product.  Executing those relationships will be critical to success.

Organize and help them drive innovation sprints tailored to the team’s incubation stage and goals, teaching how to do this while all are learning.

Broker the right overlay services across available resources such as engaging incubation colleagues for user research, design, market research, storytelling, strategy, engineering and business operations.

Partner with subject matter experts and other technical advisors as needed to support the incubation market tests and product development of incubation teams.

Provide program management advice as the incubation team needs to define, build and measure market tests.

Remain laser focused on helping their team achieve product-market fit through constant, rapid, and cheap experimentation, user validation, and obsession with driving customer value.

Identify service gaps and pilot new offerings to better support the incubation teams in developing their product and business.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

BS in computer science/math/related field or equivalent qualifications

10+ years of experience working with software development lifecycle

Experience launching new products: product/service lifecycle delivery including defining customer requirements, managing sprint cycles/scrum techniques, market testing and experimentation, defining metrics and measurement, and supporting users on various new product initiatives

Preferred Qualifications

Experience driving execution across a variety of products/services, particularly in founding/early-stage development.

Experience in defining, developing and managing business development relationships and/or partnerships that help build or extend product offerings and taking new product or services to market together.

Familiarity with use of and/or sourcing expertise from within the company to help their new products team regarding cloud services, engineering tools and techniques, business intelligence tools, AI and new technologies.

Self-motivated and confidence working at a senior executive level and across a matrixed organization and relationships where influencing decisions is critical.

Strong project management, customer engagement, and working with engineering team skills

Experience managing and coaching others regarding working with engineering teams on product scope, schedule, engineering costing, customer insights, risks, product market testing, measurement/telemetry

Demonstrably clear leadership skills and experience working with diverse teams and leaders

Understanding of business concepts and engineering value in startup/incubation product development

Exceptional executive level communication (verbal and written) and engagement skills

Ability to work in a flexible, fast-paced environment and often where the candidate will be developing next steps in the program and product roadmap

Self-managing leader who takes initiative and demonstrates a high desire for learning

Advanced experience with applications and services (internal or external) to help teams accelerate project development cycles, market experimentation, metrics/measurement and customer impact.

The ideal candidate possesses the following:

Experience in applying startup, agile, or lean product development practices with up-to-date knowledge of industry engineering practices

Exceptional problem identification or problem resolution skills

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.