Principal Partner Ecosystem Strategy Lead

Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions-Core (MCAPS) accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.

The Strategy & Transformation team identifies emerging opportunities and drives programmatic transformation across MCAPS Core, our customers, partners, and account teams. We design and test new programs, operating models, and customer experiences, then we scale what works 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 operates across complex organizational, commercial, technical, and go-to-market boundaries where the opportunity is often emerging, ownership is distributed, and the path forward is not yet defined.

This leader will independently interpret signals from partners, customers, field teams, business performance, and market dynamics to identify systemic barriers or untapped opportunities that could materially affect partner-led growth. They will determine which opportunities warrant investment, develop the strategic hypothesis and business case, and work across Microsoft organizations to validate the opportunity through analysis, customer and partner evidence, and focused pilots.

For opportunities that prove material, this leader will establish the strategy and intervention, mobilize the right cross-functional teams to test it, define measures of success, and ultimately transition 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 across complex problems 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. 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.

Identify and Prioritize Growth Opportunities

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 identify opportunities that may not be visible within any single organization.

Distinguish between isolated operational friction and systemic constraints that materially affect growth.

Develop clear hypotheses about the business opportunity, affected behavior, potential intervention, and expected impact.