Partner Development Manager – SME at Microsoft Nigeria

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers.

At Microsoft our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Partner Development Manager – SME

Job Number: 1315628
Location: Lagos
Employment type: Full-Time
Profession: Sales Enablement
Role type: Individual Contributor
Travel: 25-50 %

Overview

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Africa is one of the best places on the planet to bring our mission to life. It is home to 1.3B people and 54 countries.
The talent in Africa reflects a tremendously rich and diverse potential that can truly impact the world over the next few decades. Being the youngest continent in the world with a median age of just 19.5 years, Africa is contributing to +12M youth being added to the global labor force every year. By 2040, half of the world’s young people will live in Africa. Africa’s growth is propelled by being a mobile first continent which is fueling connectivity, innovation, and scalability.
Our aspiration is to transform Africa to a Cloud-first, Digital-first continent enabling a thriving digital economy across Africa while reinventing Microsoft’s digital assets and capabilities to serve the young continent’s transformation needs
The Tehnical Project Manager will be a key role in the Africa Transformation Office and will play a critical role in working with partners in general, and with Startups and ISVs in this specific role to provide deep Azure technical support through solution build in or migration to Azure and first mile customer engagements including Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions (ADS), and Hackathons.
The TPMs build relationships with Startups and ISVs technical and development resources, designing and architecting new solutions based on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and technologies.
They deliver value via a portfolio of service delivery engagements optimized to accelerate their solution builds and first mile customer wins, and stand out as a Technology expert due to deep solutions knowledge. They can go toe-to-toe with Microsoft engineering teams and blackbelts often surfacing product issues, providing feedback and insights that accelerate fixes and updates.
Microsoft welcomes and embraces your individuality! The ideal candidate for the TpM role can come in many forms. This individual is someone who is passionate about technology and one who possesses a strong subset or combination of the requirements listed below.
We also embrace flexible working as a core principle of reinventing productivity, and you will have flexibility to work from different locations, such as your home office, Microsoft offices around the country, or customer sites.

Responsibilities
Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment:

Identifies and evaluates industry trends (customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Adapts business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across territories to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT). Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory.

Architecure Design and Deployment:

Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft’s agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Proposes and develops new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios.
Uncovers, aggregates, and synthesizes data about customer/partner business, complex technical requirements and issues (e.g., involving great length or tenacity to resolve), and various technical strategies being proposed. addresses them with win-win technical architecture(s) and demonstrates and proves the capability and business value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
Applies broad technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge to architecture projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints. shaping and enhancing customers’ requirements.
Leads customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s) to enable a breadth of highly advanced and complex solutions. Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.
Anticipates, identifies, and removes technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) through regular technical reviews and check ins to accelerate architecture implementations. Anticipates and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.
Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Defines customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.

Practice Development:

Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers. drives sales and consumption, as well as IP re-use and best practice sharing. Develops and contributes to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies.

Trusted Advisor:

Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner/MCS architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders (to the extent that the customer/partner will call for consultation without being prompted). Provides direction to TDMs and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Influences partners in technical and architectural areas.
Creates and sustains constructive tension and trust with customers/partners by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more and encouraging them to consider alternative architectures and approaches.
Leads the adoption of Microsoft architecture technologies based on analysis/differentiation of Microsoft and competitor products to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s).

Thought Leadership:

Leads virtual teams around technologies and customer/partner challenges by sharing ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape. Acts as a mentor to multiple peers and leads initiatives to improve processes and drive efficiency.
Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with internal team. Acts a mentor to junior colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. Demonstrates deep industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences.

Customer Usage:

Leads architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization across multiple applications for the customer, resulting in production deployment application and increased customer business value. Leads initiatives to ensure that the customer’s environment and applications are well-architected.

Compliance:

Personally, commit to generate and protect Microsoft trust by modeling integrity every day and contributing to ethical sales and sustainable growth

Qualifications

Bachelor’s Degree desired (Sales, Marketing, Business Operations) / MBA preferred
5 – 10+ years of experience in core sales experience, partner channel development, business development, alliance management in the technology industry
Executive presence and ability to influence business leaders through business value propositions
Experience with technology platforms and developing new product and business solutions
Working knowledge of cloud business models & how apps/services are brought to market
Strong experience of managing virtual teams across functions and geographies:
Inclusive and collaborative – driving teamwork and cross-team alignment
Strong partner relationship management and solution development skills
Strong communication and presentation skills with a high degree of comfort
Challenger mentality leveraging internal and/or external resources, conflict resolution, and follow through.