Solution Engineering Manager @ Microsoft

This role has people management responsibilities including driving employee growth and development, executing projects, and managing performance. Acts as a representative for technology domain to all C-suite leaders within local market while engaging with and leveraging local Microsoft senior leadership as appropriate. Uses broad knowledge to build credibility with customers and 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 deep knowledge of processes. Leverages in-depth knowledge of resources. Orchestrates team resources and coaches team to maximize impact of customer engagement and drive long-term global strategy through global capacity planning, prioritization, and utilization of resources. Maximizes national/international-level capacity and capabilities and influences future potential partner models by coaching team to grow partner network, identifying gaps, and promoting Microsoft within the Microsoft ecosystem. Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build global strategy. Generates new compete strategies and builds competitive knowledge of team by enabling competitive learning and identifying experts to share knowledge. Coaches and provides support to team and across internal teams to define and execute strategy.

Engaging with customers and guiding them through technical decisions related to the purchase and use of Microsoft technology. Providing expertise and insights to help customers make informed decisions that align with their technology goals.

What will be expected from you as a successful Solution Engineer Manager - AI Business Solutions

Competitive

Analysis: The ability to identify competitors and evaluate their respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of products, services, marketing, and other areas. This includes an ability to gather intelligence and interpret it for the purposes of business decisions.

Driving Insight-Led Conversations

The ability to bring a differentiated, tailored point of view to customer or partner conversations that create a valuable purchase experience for the customer/partner.

Technical Communication

The ability to adapt communications around different technologies, products, and services to the audience's level of understanding.

Technology Industry Knowledge

Knowledge of trends, direction, new products, and changes in the technology as it applies to a particular area of focus, as well as specific knowledge about hardware, software, and services.

Consultative Selling

The ability to understand customer needs through dialogue before recommending products/services.

Strategic Technical Planning

The ability to map the company's products and solutions to customer modernization and digital transformation plans in order to drive business outcomes.

Technical Sales

The ability to explain Microsoft's products and services to customers and identify opportunities for customers to grow their business.

Building Stakeholder Relationships

Building and nurturing strong, long-term relationships with clients and stakeholders to foster trust and enhance customer satisfaction.

Business Relationship Management

The ability to develop and maintain positive working relationships with supervisors, staff, managers, customers, and vendors. This includes expressing empathy and compassion when dealing with the needs and problems of others, being approachable, taking time to address the concerns of coworkers, and treating others with respect and dignity.

Conflict Resolution

The ability to manage conflict, disharmony, and strife among people and situations, while recognizing and addressing sensitivities.

Oral Communication

The ability to make a verbal message understood and to receive/understand messages during in-person or remote (e.g., telephone) interactions.

Trusted Advisor

The ability to build trusted advisor status and deep relationships across stakeholders (e.g., technical decision makers, business decision makers) through an understanding of customer needs and technologies.

Written Communication

The ability to prepare clear, accurate, and understandable written text, and follow the basic rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This may include memos, emails, proposals, reports, and professional or general correspondence.

Demonstrating Microsoft Solution Capabilities

Demonstrating the capabilities of Microsoft solutions effectively to showcase their value to customers. Applying technical architectures to client scenarios, illustrating how Microsoft technology can address their unique challenges, and collaborating with partners in sell-with scenarios to leverage the partner ecosystem.

Readiness for Deployment

Serving as a contact point for technical resources, both within the organization and externally through partners. Proactively supporting readiness of clients for implementation and supporting resolution of blockers or challenges to that readiness in order to ensure that customer needs are met.

Pilots and Proof of Concepts (POCs)

Knowledge of and the ability to deliver Pilots and Proof of Concepts (POCs) to drive customer technical assurance.

Presentations

The ability to create and deliver formal presentations to others. This includes sharing information on a range of topics in a clear, concise, engaging and convincing manner; commanding the audiences attention; developing effective presentation materials (e.g., handouts, visual aids); and handling questions or argumentative positions from the audience.

Product Demonstration

The ability to demonstrate products to potential customers and discuss features and capabilities and address product-related concerns.

Storytelling

The ability to sell and communicate value within and outside the company by sharing stories and historical anecdotes.

Third Party Applications

The ability to compare and contrast application innovation strategies and solutions across the market.

Required/minimum qualifications

Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business or related field AND 4+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR 7+ years technical pre-sales or technical consulting experience OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

8+ years technical pre-sales, technical consulting, or technology delivery, or related experience OR equivalent experience.
6+ years experience with cloud and hybrid, or on premises infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, industry standards, and/or technology management.
3+ years people management experience (including leading virtual teams).

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. 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.

Build Strategy

Builds competitive knowledge of team by enabling competitive learning and identifying experts to share knowledge. Enables team to share compete knowledge with internal teams and communities, influence compete strategies, and highlight Microsoft advantages during architecture and capability discussions. Acts as a subject matter expert on a particular competitive discipline(s).

Maintains communications with internal partners (e.g., Account Technology Unit [ATU], Customer Service Unit [CSU] manager, SSM) on highest potential customers to pre-align technical resources to customer and customer cases based on account planning and priorities, with the flexibility to realign to minimize orchestration and enable proactive engagements as needed.

Works with local marketing and account teams to shape strategic win and customer success plans and tailor to audience for the local markets using knowledge of Microsoft offerings, their context in the competitive landscape, and broader market trends. Ensures team is equipped to execute compete strategy, collaborating with cross-functional groups as needed. Where applicable, oversees team(s) in the building of consumption plans with moderately complex requirements in coordination with Partner and Industry Solutions Delivery teams after customer sign-off.

Education

Ensures team members participate in tech communities and drives feedback to improve overall team member experience and effectiveness at subsidiary level.

Acts as a technical thought leader by sharing best practices (e.g., architectures, materials) and regularly delivering content at Microsoft events (e.g., TechReady). Provides insight into how to identify opportunities to increase solutions/portfolio understanding.

Enables and empowers team to develop technical expertise and provide technical insights to internal teams. Acts as a role model by increasing own technical knowledge and serving as a respected technology leader to team. Provides insight onto Corporate, business and product groups, sales strategy, and business reviews for impact.

Leverage Partner Ecosystem

Supports partner technical capacity by monitoring and analyzing resources through interactions, communicating with managers, and identifying new partnership opportunities to build subsidiary strategy.

Maximizes area-level capacity and capabilities 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.

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.

Scale Customer Engagements

Proactively identifies and engages with key customer technical decision makers and influencers 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.

Enables and empowers team to influence customer decisions and ensure technical wins by streamlining processes and managing the flow of wins, leveraging deep knowledge of processes (e.g., Managed Service Provider [MSP], Managed Certified Professional [MCP]), tools, and programs (e.g., FastTrack, End Customer Investment Funds [ECIFs]). 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 [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites, Value Based Delivery [VBD], Customer Success Unit [CSU]) and owns resolution of technical and non-technical blockers by engaging other teams (e.g., engineering, Account Team Unit [ATU], Specialist Team Unit [STU]) 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.

Uses knowledge of customer context, and deep technical, domain, and industry knowledge to build credibility with customers.

Ensures consistency and quality through capturing, sharing, and adherence of standards and best practices in customer engagements by implementing cross-functional initiatives to different channels across a subsidiary to drive consistency in technical approach and ensure customer technical experience across teams.

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, and utilization of resources. Proactively plans team resources and influences future blueprints. Qualifies and prioritizes opportunities, and holds team accountable for maximizing selling time to achieve scorecard objectives and subsidiary strategy.

Solution Design and Proof

Applies advanced sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales) and coaches team in guiding customers through digital transformation solutions and using innovation to challenge solutions against changing technology (e.g., Power Apps).

Identifies new technical and business trends and needs, and identifies ideas that can be transformed into solutions that benefit customers/partners, serving as the voice of the customer (VOC) to Microsoft. Ensures input is utilized and solutions for the customer are established at the area level.

Coaches team and oversees demonstrations (e.g., architectural design sessions, and proof of concept [POC] sessions, pilots, hackathons) of solutions based on multiple products 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.

Promotes adaptation and extension of architecture patterns to accommodate complex customer requirements and drive integration solutions for industry flavor.

Coaches team to envision new and innovative solutions that use Microsoft technology to meet customer needs. Supports team in coordinating with stakeholders to develop solutions for complex sales scenarios. Ensures team capability to execute on those solutions.

Solution Engineering Manager

Microsoft

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