Co-Innovation Technical Lead

Digital transformation – on the agenda of virtually every enterprise worldwide- is about reimagining and bringing together people, data, and processes to create value for customers and maintain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world. The Customer Engagement Team (CET) leads from the front, focused on building new to the world innovation through strategic engagement with the most impactful potential partners and customers.

The Co-Innovation Technical Lead is for a director-level position for a thought leader focusing on one of our most critical meeting series with the CEOs of our most Strategic and Innovative Accounts. Managing the work effort from Customer/Partner selection through Co-Innovation and seeing that through to the customer’s goals being realized is one of the most rewarding opportunities in the company. These are high-impact, multi-horizon, joint innovations intended to create lighthouse examples in Microsoft’s focused industries and case studies of where we can help ideate and accelerate v-next and beyond.

Our philosophy is rooted in human-centered design and iterative research and testing cycles. This role requires someone who can identify, coordinate, and in some cases deliver on every aspect of a user experience—from the concepting and information architecture, to interaction design and rapid prototyping, to visual interface design.

Partnering with our Co-Innovation Directors, this person will actively collaborate across Product Marketing, Engineering, R&D, Industry, Sales, and partners to develop prototypes and MVPs that light up the innovation topics for leadership and ensure the areas of focus are brought to life at an accelerated pace, helping the customer and Microsoft come together to envision the art of what’s possible.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for executing within the existing Co-Innovation process with a lens toward potential areas to rethink and reshape.
• Engaging directly with C-level LOB and IT stakeholders to understand key business outcomes, synthesizing and showcasing a combined business, experiential and technical vision using Microsoft’s cutting-edge technology.
• Creating custom hi-fidelity content and demos that envision the art of what’s possible based on customer defined business outcomes.
• Demonstrating executive presence through interactions with senior Executives, including CEOs, both within Microsoft and our Strategic 500 accounts.
• Defining with key stakeholders the right execution and progression path post Co-Innovation to accelerate delivery and scale of customer and Microsoft desired outcomes.
• Driving learnings and content from these high touch executive briefings back out into the field for further scale.
• Ability to lead work across multiple customers and program stages simultaneously, from Ideation to Envisioning to Co-Creation and through Execution and Delivery.

Qualifications

• 10+ years related experience working with engineering, field teams and directly with customers.
• 3+ years of experience working with machine learning libraries and real-world data science problems.
• 3+ years of experience in UX, Journey Mapping, Storyboarding, and/or Experience Design via Power Platform, InDesign, Figma, Illustrator, etc.
• 3+ years in program management and execution.
• Deep understanding of Microsoft Cloud (Azure, D365, M365, etc.) functionality and applications, and the ability to link customer business objectives with cloud technologies.
• Innovation, Product Development and/or Design Thinking credentials and experience.
• Demonstrate ability to multi-task across various customers and projects simultaneously.
• Demonstrate ability to lead teams creating content and/or create content themselves.
• Build strong relationships and influence Senior Leadership, within Microsoft and Customer organizations.
• Experience building and leading programs that require cross-org collaboration and support from senior leadership.
• Advanced written and oral communication skills; ability to facilitate conversations and present ideas to senior audiences.

Location: Remote, anywhere in the United States.
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. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. 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.
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