Head of Growth and Strategy

The Head of Growth and Strategy is responsible for helping shape and accelerate the next phase of growth across Microsoft Australia and New Zealand.

Sitting within the Office of the ANZ President, the role will bring together customer growth, market strategy and business transformation. It will identify where ANZ has the greatest opportunity to grow, translate those opportunities into a focused set of strategic priorities, and mobilise the organisation to execute against them.

This is not a strategy role that stops at defining the plan. The Head of Growth and Strategy will be accountable for turning strategy into action, working across the ANZ leadership team, customer organisations, industries and functions to remove barriers, accelerate priority growth opportunities and ensure our transformation agenda delivers measurable customer and business outcomes.

The role will also bring a strong outside-in perspective into the Office of the President, ensuring our choices are informed by changing customer needs, competitive dynamics, market trends and the opportunities created by AI.

Drive the ANZ Customer Growth Agenda

• Define the ANZ customer growth agenda, identifying the customers, industries, markets and opportunities where focused intervention can create disproportionate growth.
• Use customer and market insight to identify emerging opportunities and structural barriers to growth.
• Work with segment and industry leaders to translate growth opportunities into specific customer strategies and execution plans.
• Establish a systematic approach to accelerating priority customers and opportunities, ensuring the right leadership attention, resources and capabilities are brought together.
• Partner with sales, technical, partner, marketing and operational teams to remove obstacles that prevent customers from moving from experimentation to scaled transformation.
• Bring the Office of the President to bear on the most important customer growth opportunities where executive sponsorship can materially change the outcome.

Own Strategy and Strategic Choices

• Lead the development and ongoing stewardship of the ANZ strategy, ensuring there is a clear connection between market opportunity, customer priorities, investment choices and execution.
• Bring an outside-in perspective through customer, competitor, partner, industry and macroeconomic insight.
• Work with the ANZ Senior Leadership Team to identify the small number of strategic choices and growth plays where ANZ will differentiate and lead.
• Translate those choices into clear priorities, investment decisions, ownership and measurable outcomes.
• Provide the agreed strategic choices and priority growth plays as the formal starting input to the annual planning process led by Business and Sales Operations.
• Maintain a clear strategic narrative that connects our ambition for ANZ with what needs to change in the business to deliver it.

Lead the ANZ Transformation Plan

• Own the integrated ANZ transformation roadmap required to deliver the growth strategy.
• Translate strategic priorities into a small number of enterprise-wide transformation initiatives with clear executive sponsorship, each with a named SLT owner accountable for delivery, and with milestones and measures tracked within the ANZ rhythm of business.
• Drive transformation across organisational boundaries, bringing together teams that do not directly report to the role.
• Identify structural, process, capability and operating-model barriers to growth and mobilise the organisation to address them.
• Leverage internal AI use cases across our own ways of working and use our experience to strengthen the transformation conversations we have with customers.
• Assess whether the transformation portfolio is producing the intended customer and market outcomes, and escalate to the President with recommended corrective action where it is not
• Bring evidence-based stop, start and accelerate recommendations on the growth and transformation portfolio to the President and SLT for decision.

Create a Strategy-to-Execution Growth Engine

• Own the front end of the strategy-to-execution chain (insight → opportunity → strategic choice → investment case), and agree with Business and Sales Operations a clear hand-off into the operating plan.
• Connect customer insight, market intelligence and business performance to leadership decision-making.
• Define outcome measures for the President-sponsored growth plays, agreed with Business and Sales Operations and incorporated into the ANZ scorecard as the single source of performance truth
• Identify cross-segment or cross-industry opportunities that individual teams may not see when operating independently.
• Work closely with Finance, Sales Excellence & Operations, Marketing and the field to ensure resources follow the areas of greatest strategic opportunity.

Strengthen Executive Customer Engagement

• Work with the ANZ President and leadership team to identify where executive engagement can unlock strategic customer relationships and transformation opportunities.
• Help shape the President's engagement with priority customers, partners and market influencers around the strategic growth agenda.
• Ensure insights from executive customer conversations feed directly back into the ANZ strategy and transformation plan.
• Support strategic customer and partner engagements where a whole-of-Microsoft perspective or cross-business intervention is required.
• Build a deeper understanding of the issues occupying CEOs and boards across Australia and New Zealand and translate these into opportunities for Microsoft to create greater customer value.

 Advise and Mobilise the ANZ Leadership Team

• Act as a strategic adviser to the ANZ President on growth, market opportunity, customer priorities and transformation.
• Lead through influence across a highly matrixed organisation, creating alignment around the priorities that matter most.
• Challenge constructively where activities or investments are not aligned with the strategy.
• Build coalitions across ANZ, Asia and corporate teams to accelerate outcomes that cannot be delivered locally alone.
• Help build greater strategic, commercial and transformation capability across the broader leadership community.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role should ultimately be visible in the market and with our customers, not simply in the quality of the strategy.

The Head of Growth and Strategy will have succeeded when:

• ANZ has a clear and differentiated growth strategy understood and owned by the leadership team.
• The organisation is focused on a smaller number of high-impact customer and market opportunities.
• Priority customers are progressing faster from technology adoption to enterprise-scale transformation.
• Strategic priorities have clear ownership, investment, milestones and measurable outcomes.
• The transformation portfolio is demonstrably removing barriers to customer growth.
• Customer and market insight is routinely influencing our strategic and investment choices.
• The Office of the ANZ President is acting as an accelerator of growth rather than an additional layer of governance.

The successful candidate will bring:

• Significant senior leadership experience across strategy, growth, business transformation, consulting, commercial leadership or enterprise technology.
• A demonstrated record of translating strategy into measurable customer and commercial outcomes.
• Strong understanding of enterprise customer transformation and the factors that enable organisations to adopt and scale technology successfully.
• Commercial and financial acumen, with the ability to connect market opportunity with investment and execution choices.
• Experience leading complex transformation across organisational boundaries and influencing senior leaders without relying on direct authority.
• Strong analytical capability and the ability to turn complex market and business information into clear choices and action.
• Deep executive presence and credibility with senior customers, partners and internal stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to create simple, compelling strategic narratives.
• Strong understanding of the Australian and New Zealand market and the economic, technology and industry forces shaping customer investment.
• Strong AI and technology fluency, particularly an understanding of how AI is changing customer business models, organisational transformation and competitive advantage.

Leadership Attributes

The Head of Growth and Strategy will be:

• Customer obsessed: starts with the customer problem and works backwards.
• Commercially minded: connects strategy to growth, investment and measurable outcomes.
• Strategic and practical: equally comfortable defining where we should play and working through what needs to happen on Monday morning.
• Outside-in: actively tests internal assumptions against customers, competitors and the market.
• A systems thinker: sees connections across customers, industries, technologies and organisational boundaries.
• Execution oriented: has the persistence to drive change through to measurable outcomes.
• Influential without authority: able to mobilise senior leaders and teams around shared priorities.
• Constructively challenging: willing to surface uncomfortable facts and challenge established ways of working.
• Low ego, high judgement: focused on enterprise outcomes rather than ownership or credit.
• A catalyst for change: creates clarity, generates energy and turns ambition into action.

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.