Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. We are looking for individuals that will help us to achieve our mission.

 The Industry Solutions group provides professional services that help Microsoft customers around the world get the best outcomes from their investments in the latest Microsoft cloud technologies. We focus on empowering customers on their digital journey, from envisioning new possibilities to delivering solutions that result in targeted business outcomes and a great customer experience.

 The Industry Solutions Retail and Consumer Goods Service Line’s mission is to scale our ability to sell, solution, and deliver at pace for customers.  We help to accelerate the digital transformation of traditional bricks and mortar retailers to become cutting-edge omnichannel businesses. We also help to accelerate the digital transformation of consumer goods companies from the traditional wholesale model to a true multi-channel DTC business. The key areas that we focus on for retailers are Know Your Customer, Empower Your Employees, Build Resilient Supply Chains, and the opportunity to Reimagine Retail. The key areas that we focus on for consumer goods are Know Your Customer, Connect Your Enterprise, Deliver Sustainable and Operational Excellence, and the opportunity to Accelerate Innovation.

The Industry Solutions Retail and Consumer Goods Service Line is looking for highly motivated and passionate individuals with deep retail and consumer good industry expertise to identify, lead, and manage a set of complex industry focused solution opportunities. This will require forming anchoring relationships through customer engagement with both internal and external partners. This role will support the Microsoft sales team pursuits, scoping proposals, and ensuring successful delivery on groundbreaking engagements. The mission is to work with Microsoft’s largest enterprise clients to help them accelerate towards their business goals, take advantage of Digital Business Transformation, improve the business value from their Microsoft technology investments, and unleash innovation for their organization, their employees, and customers. This role is critical to both sales and delivery. In sales driving the discovery, ideation, and business solution architecture with laser focus on customer business outcomes and value from deploying Microsoft platforms and solutions. In delivery, maintaining the business decision maker relationship and ensuring the expected business outcomes and associated business values are achieved.

Responsibilities

Thought Leadership

Anticipate industry trends (overall retail / consumer goods industry, subsegments, and/or information technology [IT]).

Provide thought leadership by sharing deep industry insight that drives critical decisions that positively impact Microsoft, customers/partners, and the broader industry.

Leverages insights to influence customer’s digital strategy with focus on new business models, transformation plans, and solutions to achieve business outcomes. .

Serve as an industry-leading expert that drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences and/or by publishing white papers around key industry topics.

Lead the direction that internal team members and stakeholders may take with customers/partners by sharing ideas, providing industry insight, and guiding strategy to approach.

Initiate and drive internal and/or external industry community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons).

Act as a mentor to early in career colleagues by educating them on industry and business concepts, while sharing recommended practices.

Trusted Advisor

Act as an industry advisor to external customer and partner stakeholders.

Lead and/or support development of 3 Horizon roadmaps and underlying business value estimates that enable customer Digital Transformation

Develop network of external relationships with senior-level decision makers at high-impact customers/partners to build influence in addressing problems/blockers/new ideas. Leverages the network and industry experience to connect customers/partners with ideas, people, and resources to support their success.

Use evidence-based arguments that articulate complex concepts in a simple manner to respectfully challenge Microsoft and customers/partners when a decision or course of action may not produce optimal results. Leverages strategic expertise to encourage alternative approaches, where applicable.

Serve as the digital transformation conscience to challenge the status quo and unrealistic expectations.

Proactively lead to resolve conflicts and seeks resolution to balance the overall outcome.

Practice Development

Generate new and/or improve intellectual property

Drive re-use of intellectual property and recommend repeatable practices for both pre-sales and delivery.

Anticipate and address organization- and industry-wide gaps, patterns, and needs that drive necessary change.

Identify solutions that should be implemented with consideration for scale across customers and provide feedback to product group/engineering.

Understanding Customer/Partner Digital and Technical Environments

Gather customer/partner insights from a broad range of stakeholders, as well as the primary business sponsor to shape and form both the definition and ongoing execution of engagements or projects.

Work with customer/partner stakeholders (e.g., Business, Operations, IT, Security, and/or Development) to socialize both the business solution and the project approach to identify concerns and gain alignment. Share overall customer feedback with the project team and the broader account team to make the necessary adjustments using a mechanism such as updating the solution approach and project costs in presales and change requests in delivery.

Utilize broad patterns of feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights to present a compelling business case to program managers that influences product roadmaps and decision making. Contributes to Microsoft-centric operations and cadences to align with customer feedback.

Uses evidence-based approach to represent the customer/partner as an advocate to share insights with Microsoft Product Engineering teams and the business with a view to improving Microsoft technologies, products, services, and offerings such that they can better meet customer/partner needs across geographies.

Architecture Design and Deployment

Lead the collaboration with the customer/partner business stakeholders and account team to gather customer requirements, identify operational pain points, and business KPIs.

Lead collaboration with the Account Team and/or Bid Team to understand the business solution/problem and to drive agreement based on the customer’s priorities, requirements/constraints, approach, principles, concepts, and expectations.

Lead the adoption of Microsoft solutions based on insight from prior/current customer/partner projects, understanding of competitor solutions, and understanding of how customer business value can be driven through Microsoft's offerings. Differentiates Microsoft's solutions in complex and/or high-risk customer/partner conversations to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s).

Anticipate scenarios that could slow or impede pre-sales or delivery outcomes to minimize risk.

Contribute to the architecture description document, architecture decisions log, and the requirements/constraints traceability matrix to ensure the rationale for the business solution's architecture is known and understood.

Contribute to complex cost-based and technology-based discussions that explain the architecture in terms of its build, deployment, and ongoing operational use to determine customer appetite for the business solution. Uses a business-value approach that values return on investment (ROI) and customer costs-savings over technical ease of execution.

Collaborate with the technical team to build and document a realistically costed, highly advanced/complex solution approach with traceability of requirements, constraints, decisions, and tradeoffs that balances risk, technical credibility, and technical innovation to meet customer need, predominantly based on existing solution offerings and/or reference architecture.

Work with the business sponsor and customer/partner stakeholders to gather, ratify, and help enhance requirements and understand constraints.

Manage and resolve any unnecessary complexities or ambiguities in the requirements and constraints, while documenting assumptions and implications, where it cannot be resolved.

Collaborate with the Project Manager to jointly drive project governance of the design, build, and deployment into use of proof of concepts (POCs) and pilots by using enterprise architecture processes and ensuring quality control through peer review.

During the delivery phase, serve as a Product Manager by leading such initiatives as product road mapping, storyboarding, business value estimation, as well as building themes, epics and user stories within an agile framework.

Lead and orchestrate the broader Microsoft team to address blockers and work with account/project team to resolve issues. Report significant problems to Microsoft management and resolve complex escalations, when needed.

Stay current on Microsoft solutions and services to communicate Microsoft's mission, strategy, and capabilities. Provides guidance to others.

Qualifications

Minimum Bachelor's Degree in Business Management or Finance OR Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field. MBA is a plus.

Minimum 10+ years’ experience in retail or consumer goods industry business leadership, operations, or consulting

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.