Principal Partner Ecosystem Strategy Lead

Microsoft•,

4d•$130,900 - $303,600

About The Position

Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions-Core (MCAPS) accelerates customer outcomes and business growth by bringing product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners together around a common customer mission. The Strategy & Transformation team identifies emerging opportunities and drives programmatic transformation across MCAPS Core, customers, partners, and account teams, testing and scaling programs, operating models, and customer experiences to deliver AI-first transformation, customer growth, and measurable commercial impact. The Principal Partner Ecosystem Strategy Lead is a senior strategy role responsible for identifying and advancing high-impact growth opportunities across Microsoft's partner and ISV ecosystem. The role works across complex organizational, commercial, technical, and go-to-market boundaries, often where opportunities are emerging, ownership is distributed, and the path forward is undefined. The leader independently interprets partner, customer, field, business-performance, and market signals to identify systemic barriers and untapped opportunities, determine where investment is warranted, and develop strategic hypotheses and business cases. The role validates opportunities through analysis, customer and partner evidence, and focused pilots. For material opportunities, the leader establishes the strategy and intervention, mobilizes cross-functional teams, defines success measures, and transitions proven motions or mechanisms to the appropriate long-term business owner. This is not a traditional partner-management or program-management role; it requires strategic judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to create clarity and momentum without relying on formal authority or established playbooks. Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Its employees work with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate toward shared goals. The company emphasizes respect, integrity, accountability, and an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Business, Operations, Finance, Engineering, or a related field and 8+ years of experience in program management, process management, or process improvement, or equivalent experience.
Operates independently with limited direction and can turn an ambiguous signal into a structured strategic investigation.
Demonstrates judgment about priorities and where to invest organizational energy.
Moves fluidly among strategy, business models, commercial considerations, customer scenarios, technology, and organizational design.
Understands partner and ISV business models and how partners create customer and platform value.
Engages credibly with product, engineering, sales, finance, commercial, partner, and executive stakeholders.
Identifies underlying business constraints beneath a collection of symptoms.
Can design a lightweight test or pilot rather than defaulting to a large program.
Drives work through people and organizations they do not manage.
Challenges assumptions while building coalitions to move ideas forward.
Measures success through business impact and behavior change, not activity.
Willingly recommends not pursuing an initiative when evidence does not support further investment.
Can build something important and deliberately hand it to someone else to run.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree in Business, Operations, Finance, Engineering, or a related field and 12+ years of experience in program management, process management, or process improvement, or equivalent experience.
Bachelor's degree in Business, Operations, Finance, Engineering, or a related field and 15+ years of experience in program management, process management, or process improvement, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Interpret partner, customer, field, market, and business signals to identify systemic barriers and emerging opportunities for partner-led growth.
Connect signals across commercial models, incentives, customer engagement, technical investment, Marketplace, field execution, and partner strategy to surface opportunities that may not be visible within a single organization.
Distinguish isolated operational friction from systemic constraints that materially affect growth.
Develop hypotheses about the business opportunity, affected behavior, potential intervention, and expected impact.
Recommend which opportunities to advance, assign to existing business owners, or not pursue further.
Lead discovery and validation of ambiguous, cross-organizational opportunities before significant investment is made.
Develop evidence, business cases, success measures, and decision criteria to determine whether opportunities should advance.
Partner with product management and business, technical, commercial, and field teams to design focused pilots and experiments.
Establish go/no-go criteria and use evidence to refine, scale, redirect, or stop initiatives.
Maintain strategic ownership of opportunities while drawing on functional experts and execution teams.
Translate validated opportunities into repeatable growth motions, operating mechanisms, commercial approaches, or changes to existing business processes.
Identify organizational seams, incentives, ownership models, or existing mechanisms that inhibit partner-led growth and determine high-leverage interventions.
Design interventions to operate through existing Microsoft organizations rather than create unnecessary parallel structures.
Develop ownership, measurement, governance, and transition models for successful initiatives.
Build coalitions across business groups, sales, engineering, commercial, finance, Marketplace, partner, and customer organizations.
Navigate problems where multiple organizations own parts of the issue but none owns the end-to-end opportunity.
Influence senior stakeholders through evidence, strategic clarity, and business impact rather than positional authority.
Build alignment to move an ambiguous opportunity to a bounded test and an organizational decision.
Define conditions that must be met before an incubated initiative is ready to scale.
Establish measurable evidence that an intervention changes partner, customer, seller, or business outcomes.
Identify the appropriate long-term business owner and build mechanisms for a successful transition.
Ensure successful work is embedded in durable business processes rather than remaining dependent on the strategy team.