Operations Key Account Manager

Partner Lifecycle Enablement and Trusted Advisory 

• Drive partner enablement across end-to-end partner lifecycle processes to reduce friction and improve the ease of doing business with Microsoft. 

• Build trusted relationships and structured engagement rhythms that surface partner priorities, operational pain points, requirements, risks, and emerging needs. 

• Develop a practical understanding of partner business models, capabilities, technical and operational dependencies, and change impacts. 

• Translate complex Microsoft business, product, engineering, policy, security, compliance, and platform changes into clear partner actions and operational implications. 

Voice of Partner and Advocacy 

• Represent the Voice of Partner across Microsoft, using partner evidence and subject-matter expertise to influence requirements, design, prioritization, roadmaps, and launch decisions. 

• Assess, clarify, and prioritize partner requirements, converting partner asks into actionable business requirements, recommendations, or experience improvements. 

• Clearly articulate partner risks and concerns, including tangible business and operational impact, required ownership, and mitigation or risk-acceptance decisions. 

• Connect individual partner experiences to broader patterns and systemic opportunities, and close the feedback loop with partners and internal stakeholders. 

Partner Co-Design and Engineering Collaboration 

• Plan and facilitate co-design engagements with representative partners and engineering teams for changes that meet defined impact, complexity, or risk criteria. 

• Frame clear co-design objectives, partner scenarios, decision questions, constraints, and expected outputs so sessions produce actionable evidence rather than general feedback. 

• Translate partner workflows, technical dependencies, implementation effort, and operational constraints into prioritized requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, or design recommendations for engineering and business owners. 

• Partner with engineering and product owners to identify what can be influenced, what is fixed, and what requires an explicit trade-off, exception, or risk-acceptance decision. 

• Coordinate previews, pilots, sandbox or test-environment validation, and implementation walkthroughs to confirm that guidance, tooling, APIs, support paths, and operational processes are usable before broad release. 

• Document decisions, owners, unresolved issues, and feedback disposition; close the loop with participating partners by explaining what changed, what did not, and why. 

Readiness, Adoption, and Change Management 

• Own the partner change-management and readiness plan for priority launches and key change moments, including the change narrative, impacted partner segments, required partner actions, deliverables, milestones, dependencies, measures of success, risks, communications inputs, and stakeholder updates. 

• Assess change impact and cumulative change burden across partner business models, geographies, roles, technical architectures, operational processes, and overlapping implementation timelines; identify where sequencing, scope, or support must change. 

• Define readiness criteria and evidence for each change, distinguishing confirmed preparedness, at-risk status, not-ready status, and unknown status; use these signals to inform launch, mitigation, escalation, and exception decisions. 

• Escalate blockers early with clear business impact, accountable ownership, and resolution needs; drive mitigation before critical milestones and go-live. 

• Track implementation and adoption through and after go-live, confirm whether required partner actions and intended outcomes were achieved, and transition unresolved issues or sustained support needs to accountable owners. 

Data, Scale, and Continuous Improvement 

• Use preparedness, adoption, operational, business, and qualitative data to identify trends, risks, opportunities, and systemic gaps. 

• Define measurable success criteria and deliver concise, decision-ready executive narratives that include a clear assessment, recommendation, trade-offs, and actions required. 

• Apply a continuous-improvement mindset to standardize services, simplify processes, reduce manual work, and advance automation, AI-enabled insights, and self-service enablement models. 

• Balance high-touch partner engagement with scalable and preventative solutions that address recurring friction across the broader ecosystem. 

Cross-Functional Leadership 

• Demonstrate a One Microsoft approach by working seamlessly across engineering, business planning, product and launch, sales, operations, support, compliance, and enablement teams. 

• Create clarity on accountability, decisions, and next steps; independently convene and align the right stakeholders to solve ambiguous, cross-organizational problems. 

• Influence without direct authority using partner evidence, sound judgment, business impact, and data; confidently recommend a path forward when information is incomplete. 

• Demonstrate thought leadership, strategic thinking, adaptability, and proactive identification of end-to-end opportunities that drive business impact. 

Success in This Role 

• Partners understand the change, know what actions are required, and are prepared to implement and adopt it with greater confidence and less friction. 

• Partner requirements and risks are surfaced early enough to influence design, launch, process, policy, or operational decisions. 

• Readiness plans provide an honest, timely view of progress, dependencies, blockers, ownership, and decisions required. 

• Partner insights are translated into measurable improvements and scalable solutions rather than repeated one-off interventions. 

• Cross-functional teams have clear accountability and shared understanding of partner impact, priorities, and outcomes. 

• Representative partners and engineers have validated critical scenarios, requirements, technical guidance, and implementation paths early enough to influence the solution or make explicit risk decisions. 

• Readiness status is evidence-based, distinguishes known risk from unknown status, and drives timely decisions on sequencing, mitigation, exceptions, and launch confidence. 

• Change-management plans address partner awareness, understanding, capability, implementation, adoption, reinforcement, and closed-loop learning rather than stopping at communications or launch completion. 

• Embody our culture and values

Minimum / Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 4+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, Technology, Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field AND 8+ years of relevant experience, OR equivalent experience. 

• Experience working in global, cross-functional, and highly matrixed environments. 

• Proven record of delivering complex programs, launches, operational changes, or improvement initiatives with competing priorities. 

• Demonstrated experience in partner channel management, partner operations, customer relationship management, customer success, or strategic account engagement. 

• Ability to translate technical, operational, and business requirements into clear plans, recommendations, and executive-ready communications. 

• Strong project and change-management capability, including change-impact assessment, stakeholder and resistance planning, readiness criteria, adoption measurement, navigating ambiguity, resolving conflict, negotiating trade-offs, and developing practical solutions. 

• Strong analytical capability using data, reporting, dashboards, KPIs, and qualitative insight to influence decisions and monitor outcomes. 

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex subjects to global audiences and engage effectively across levels and cultures. 

• Demonstrated impact and influence skills, including cross-boundary collaboration and relationship building with internal and external stakeholders. 

• Experience identifying systemic issues and applying industry practices, standardization, automation, AI, continuous improvement, or self-service solutions to improve scale and sustainability. 

• Understanding of cloud, commerce, digital platforms, partner ecosystems, security, compliance, or lifecycle operations is advantageous. 

• Independent, flexible, proactive, and able to identify strategic opportunities, develop proposals, and gain stakeholder alignment.