Director of Business Strategy

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization, an organization within CE&S, is leading the effort to enable customer success on the Microsoft Cloud by harnessing leading, AI-powered capabilities and human expertise to deliver innovation solutions that accelerate business value, drive operational excellence and nurture long term loyalty.

The Global AI Business Solutions Customer Success team is looking for an experienced Director of Business Strategy to lead our Dynamics 365 Sales and D365 Service strategy. In this role you will own the post-sale customer engagement strategy that will help customers maximize the value they get from D365 while helping them chart the course from SaaS to AI.  This role will partner closely across the AI Business Solutions Customer Success Team, working with the field leaders, operations, technical strategy and other teams to drive success. It will also work with key internal partner organizations including the Specialist Sales Team (STU), Finance Leads, Data Science, Marketing, and Engineering.  

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.

Business Strategy

• Conducts market-based research on industry across TAM growth, customer demand and competitive trends. Align closely with tech strategy, finance and marketing teams on key customer trends to inform Go To Market.  
• Partner with peer and field teams to ensure strategy execution excellence.  
• Learn from field leader feedback on current model friction that could be addressed through changes.

Problem Solving & Insight & Judgement

• Synthesizes findings from research into Go to Market plan and other strategic projects. Think through short, medium and long term implications of strategy and partner closely across business strategy, tech strategy and internal partner teams to make the plan a reality.
• Provide prioritization for key changes and investment needed to drive growth. 

Communication

• Communicates and advocates strategy and insights to senior business leaders (e.g., Senior Directors, GM-level, CVP) and conveys viewpoints through simple and consistent frameworks.
• Use executive presence to drive influence for broader decisions that have implications on strategy.
• Communicate changes clearly to stakeholders and field teams.  Delivers learnings, recommendations, and implications to senior executives to facilitate ongoing feedback loop. 

Business Management

• Show command of the delivery business and the other levers we use to drive usage. Understand key levers for growth, how they relate to the data and be able to prioritize which levers to pull to drive highest ROI.
• Understand the license renewals system for AI Business Process, the mechanisms to identify risk.
• Develop and execute plans to mitigate risk to drive up renewal revenue.  
• Lead discussions on performance monthly, taking data, field feedback and partner feedback and synthesize into a simple story for executives to understand through forums such as the Monthly Business Review. 

Team Development

• Mentors colleagues in target areas, providing project-specific feedback as appropriate.
• Supports recruiting and onboarding efforts for Strategy team members by conducting interviews and training.
• Contributes to team culture and takes a leadership role in an aspect of team success (e.g., social activities, onboarding).

Culture

• Help shape and sustain a world class team culture, serving as a role model for the organization’s values and ways of working.