Senior Director, Telecom & Media Strategy and Value

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.

Microsoft Frontier Co brings together strategy, industry expertise, engineering, and customer engagement to help organizations translate the possibilities of AI into durable business outcomes. Within Frontier Co, the Telecom and Media Engineering Studio develops industry points of view, repeatable solution patterns, and executes on customer engagements that connect Microsoft’s broader strategy, product portfolio, and technical capabilities to the priorities of telecom and media leaders.

As the Senior Director, Telecom & Media Strategy and Value, you will develop and maintain an independent, grounded view of industry strategy. You will continuously test Microsoft’s strategic hypotheses against market evidence, industry economics, competitive behavior, and real customer engagements. Your work will help the studio distinguish durable shifts from short-term signals, identify where AI is changing operating models, and translate those insights into opportunities for Microsoft and its customers. This role owns the integrity, calibration, and translation of the industry strategy into offers, solutions and commercial models.

This role also plays a key function in shaping customer engagements and contracting for Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) motions. You will work across industry advisors, engineering, strategic sales, finance, legal, and commercial teams to structure engagements that reflect strategic intent, define measurable business benefits, and advance outcome-based commercial delivery models. This role shapes engagements towards increasingly repeatability aligned with offers and solutions, and outcome framework for customer engagements and contracts.

Develop the industry strategic point of view

Build and maintain an evidence-based perspective on the strategic direction of the telecom and media industries, focused on identifying areas where AI has the potential to deliver outsized value when operationalized at-scale, extracting industry patterns and helping prioritize an offer catalog to capture the value for both Microsoft and customers.

Frame explicit strategic hypotheses about how AI will change operational economics and sources of differentiation for telecom and media customers, yielding both revenue growth and operating efficiency across both core and back office business functions, leading / lagging metrics, and indicators of effective outcomes and change.

Establish a continuous calibration system

Create a continuous, repeatable calibration function that combines qualitative judgment with quantitative evidence. Define the signals, sources, metrics, benchmarks, and review cadence needed to evaluate whether the strategic hypotheses remain valid. Surface where evidence confirms, weakens, or disproves the current thesis.

Track and synthesize AI-driven changes in cost structures and revenue models, competitive positioning, capital allocation, technology adoption, partner dynamics, and customer buying behavior.

Develop benchmarks and scorecards that make the studio’s point of view measurable, including leading and lagging indicators, economic baselines, competitive comparisons, adoption signals, and realized customer outcomes.

Use customer evidence to test and improve strategy

Use client user stories, discovery findings, engagement data, and implementation experience as primary evidence for validating and refining industry hypotheses.

Partner with industry advisors, account teams, product teams, and FDE teams to convert customer signals into reusable insights, strategic patterns, and technology accelerators.

Ensure insights move in both directions: from Microsoft strategy and product capabilities into customer conversations, and from customer engagement evidence back into studio strategy, product feedback, solution patterns, and portfolio decisions.

Shape Frontier and FDE engagements and contracts

Help shape priority customer engagements before contracting so that the business problem, strategic hypothesis, intended outcome, delivery model, and measures of value are coherent and mutually reinforcing.

Work with sales, finance, legal, commercial, engineering, and delivery stakeholders to translate engagement strategy into scopes, milestones, governance, commercial constructs, acceptance criteria, and business-outcome measures.

Advance the transition from effort- or activity-based engagements toward outcome-based contracts with specific, measurable, attributable, and time-bound business benefits, while appropriately addressing dependencies, baselines, customer responsibilities, risk allocation, and the practical limits of attribution.

Develop reusable contracting patterns, value frameworks, and measurement approaches that can scale across the Telecom and Media industry while retaining the flexibility required for individual customer contexts.

Provide an independent challenge function during engagement design and commercial review, identifying when a proposed engagement is disconnected from strategy, lacks measurable value, embeds weak assumptions, or creates incentives that do not support the desired customer outcome.

Influence decisions and build shared understanding

Synthesize complex and sometimes conflicting evidence into clear, decision-ready narratives for senior leaders, customers, engineering teams, and commercial stakeholders.

Lead strategic reviews and working sessions that make assumptions explicit, distinguish facts from hypotheses, clarify tradeoffs, and drive decisions and follow-through across organizational boundaries.

Share best practices, build stakeholder and customer buy-in, and establish a rhythm of business that keeps strategy, engagement execution, commercial decisions, and learning loops connected.

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 8+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements

• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role’s job duties.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Master's Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 12+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement OR Bachelor's Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field AND 15+ years experience in program management, process management, or process improvement OR equivalent experience.
• Deep knowledge of the Telecom and Media industry, including industry economics, operating models, competitive dynamics, technology trends, and evolving customer priorities.
• Proven ability to develop and articulate industry strategy, translating market signals, economic trends, competitive behavior, and customer evidence into clear strategic insights and actionable recommendations.
• Demonstrated success shaping complex customer engagements, including defining business problems, desired outcomes, value frameworks, and measurable success criteria.
• Strong understanding of AI-driven business transformation, including how AI can influence operating models, cost structures, revenue opportunities, customer experiences, and sources of competitive differentiation.
• Track record of translating strategy into commercial and execution models, including scopes, milestones, governance approaches, value measurement, and outcome-based constructs.
• Expertise in business value and outcome measurement, with the ability to establish baselines, benchmarks, leading and lagging indicators, and measurable business benefits.
• Ability to synthesize complex and sometimes conflicting information into clear, decision-ready recommendations for senior executives, customers, engineering teams, and commercial stakeholders.
• Strong cross-functional leadership and influencing skills, with demonstrated ability to work across sales, engineering, finance, legal, commercial, product, and industry teams without direct authority.
• Proven ability to challenge assumptions constructively, identify gaps in strategy or value propositions, and use evidence to refine strategic direction and investment decisions.
• Executive-level communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to lead strategic discussions, customer engagements, and working sessions that clarify tradeoffs and drive decisions.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments, balancing long-term strategic thinking with the practical requirements of customer engagements and execution.
• Business judgment and analytical rigor, with the ability to distinguish durable market shifts from short-term signals and translate insights into scalable opportunities for Microsoft and its customers.

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Business Program Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $277,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $165,600 - $303,600 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.