Digital Cloud Solution Architect Manager

Do you love working with customers to achieve their business outcomes? Do you possess superior leadership, communications, and consultative capabilities?  Microsoft is seeking managers with a deep interest in cutting-edge technology to join the Digital CSA team as a Digital CSA Manager (CSA) team lead. In this role, you will manage a team of highly talented and skilled CSAs, driving the day-to-day execution to exceed business performance targets and coaching team members. The Digital CSA team consists of highly capable salespeople that drive Microsoft wins on the latest cloud and modern development technologies.  

In Small, Medium, and Corporate (SMC) and Digital Sales, we are building out the global Digital Cloud Solution Architect team. The goal is to create an organization to deliver at a global scale across Microsoft Customer and Partner solutions group and assist our customers to digitally transform their business to drive superior outcomes leveraging Azure and our partner ecosystem. You will digitally collaborate with your colleagues in the region to achieve our objectives while embracing our culture of diversity, wellbeing, sustainability, and learning. If you love customers and digital solutions, join us and see the value we create for customers, partners, and each other. 

The team’s focus is on Azure as the most comprehensive, innovative, and flexible cloud platform today. Microsoft is seeking talented professionals to drive cloud adoption within the most important companies in the market.  

As a Digital Cloud Solution Architecture Manager, you will lead a team of CSAs (Cloud Solution Architects) that cover the western half of the U.S., to deliver on the promise of Azure and assist customers in achieving their digital transformation goals.  

This opportunity will allow you to develop some of the following: 

• Leadership and coaching skills of the CSAs to deliver a successful customer transformation aligned to business needs. 

• Enhance cross-team collaboration skills by supporting the sales team’s quota retirement. 

• Enhance communications skills managing a geographically dispersed organization.  

Your primary responsibilities will be to engage with customers as the central point of contact for driving adoption and consumption of workloads across our latest cloud technologies.  This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.  

 
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. 

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.

Sales Customer Engagements

• Identifies and engages with customer technical decision makers and influencers proactively while engaging sales team. Coaches and enables team to identify and proactively engage with key customer technical decision makers and influencers to help unblock technical obstacles.
• Uses broad industry, technical, cross-solution, and professional knowledge, leadership skills, as well as trends from other customer engagement to build credibility with customers individually or at scale. Is sought after for expertise.
• Enables and empowers team to influence customer decisions and ensure technical wins by streamlining processes and managing the flow of wins, leveraging broad knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider, co-sell Partners), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds). Aligns goals across solution areas and facilitates cross-selling with various workloads (e.g., Apps, Data and Infrastructure).
• Leverages knowledge of resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center, demo sites, virtual sites) and independently facilitates resolution of technical and non-technical blockers by engaging other teams (e.g., engineering, Account Team Unit, Specialist Team Unit) and conveying impact. Anticipates and addresses future potential blockers based on needs. Identifies patterns of blockers within area of expertise and drives resolution through local and global escalation. Ensures that non-technical issues are routed and removed by appropriate party.
• Ensures consistency and quality through sharing, evolving or developing standards and best practices (e.g., Managed Service Provider, Managed Certified Professional) in customer engagements by implementing cross-functional initiatives to different channels across a subsidiary. Models and promotes proactiveness in customer engagement, enabling team to take initiatives on the agenda and drive progress.
• Orchestrates team resources and coaches team to maximize impact of customer engagements and drive mid- to long-term strategy through cross-workload capacity planning, prioritization, capabilities assessment, and utilization of resources. Proactively plans team resources and influences future blueprints. Holds team accountable for maximizing selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and subsidiary strategy.

Scale Through Partners

• Maximizes area-level capacity and capabilities of scaling through partners by coaching team to grow partner network, identifying gaps and promoting Microsoft within the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., account teams). Raises escalations or alleviates blockers through collaboration with manager-level counterparts in cross-functional groups.
• Builds and applies competitive knowledge of team by enabling competitive learning and identifying experts to share knowledge and drive change. Enables team to share compete knowledge with internal teams and communities, influence compete strategies, and highlight Microsoft advantages during architecture and capability discussions.
• Coaches team and oversees demonstrations (e.g., Architectural Design Sessions, Proof of Concept sessions, pilots, hackathons) of solutions and position solutions against competitors. Ensures demonstrations enable customers to identify and resolve technical issues with clear criteria and next steps that guarantee deployment of Microsoft technology. Guides team on Microsoft standards on demonstrations to provide feedback to partners. Identifies patterns and trends to provide feedback to improve demonstrations.
• Designs the approach of promoting product usage. Oversees and guides team to analyze, develop, and implement approach or action plans to promote customer usage of key/prioritized Microsoft solutions/products that support customer’s business outcomes.

Architecture Design and Deployment

• Applies technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge across multiple, large architecture projects to meet strategic and tactical business and Information Technology requirements and resolve identified technical and organizational constraints. Guides team to shape and enhance customers' requirements. Coaches team on right use of Pilots and Proof of Concepts and moving customer from pilots to productive deployments.
• Sets expectations for team(s) around methodology and governance, and ensures that team identifies, communicates, and/or minimizes business and/or technical risks, defines customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.

Driving Customer Success

• Coaches team(s) to build customer timelines and utilizes them to build industry/team plans. Aligns multiple engagement plans and leverages corporate resources dedicated to awareness improvement of high potentials (e.g., Skills Learning platform).
• Supports the Voice of the Customer through escalation, acceleration, and additional emphasis of feedback, blockers, insights, resources, etc. (e.g., OneList) items as needed. Looks across multiple customers for opportunities to consolidate and prioritize items across the business.
• Builds on their network and industry experience to connect customers with ideas, people, and resources to new support customer opportunities. Cultivates the strategic image of Microsoft as a valued business partner that serves a wide range of customers/partners by aligning the vision for Microsoft cloud technologies with future industry needs. Creates a vision with business solution scenarios and partners/services that helps the customer meet their business goals and achieve their long-term corporate vision. Participates in Microsoft-centric operations and cadences to align with customers as needed. Acts as a go-to resource for customer success.
• Contributes to and holds team accountable to rhythm of business. Challenges team to identify opportunities for optimization. Represents high potential and sub-area initiatives (e.g. acceleration plans, scorecard).Drives One Microsoft mindset. Maintains communications with partners on highest potential customers to align technical resources to customer and customer cases based on account planning and priorities.

Technical Leadership

• Enables and empowers team to develop technical expertise and provide technical insights to internal teams. Acts as a role model for continuous learning and development and anticipates future needs for capabilities based on industry/market trends.
• Fosters community sharing of stories and leveraging of pre-existing resources by encouraging and empowering the team to share learnings and by establishing a cadence (e.g. internal technical brainstorming calls, presenting latest challenges in staff meetings) to calibrate on challenges and trends that impact the team across the subsidiary level.
• Contributes content and expertise, and ensures team members participate in tech communities and drives feedback to improve overall team member experience and effectiveness. Fosters and enables technical leadership opportunities by supporting the development of Digital Sales.
• Ensures customer cloud platform enablement by ensuring coverage of entire customer portfolio, ensuring customer proficiency, and orchestrating across multiple function to ensure basic operational foundations in place. Engages in stakeholder management across accounts to orchestrate cross-fertilization for various aspects of cloud enablement and accelerate platform enablement. Shares insights and blockers with broader team. Ensures customers have training plans developed by Could Solutions Architects. Reviews training plans and provides feedback to Could Solutions Architects as necessary.

Other

• Embody our and