Cloud Solution Architect Manager

Overview The AI Business Solutions (ABS) Cloud Solution Architect Manager leads a high-performing team of Cloud Solution Architects responsible for helping State, Local Government & Education institutions realize measurable business value from their investments in Microsoft technologies.

The role combines strategic leadership, technical depth, customer success, operational excellence, and talent development to accelerate customer transformation through AI, Copilot, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and related Microsoft solutions via our Microsoft Unified Services contracts.

As a people leader, the CSA Manager drives customer outcomes through empowerment, accountability, coaching, and collaboration while fostering a culture of innovation, growth mindset, continuous learning, and customer obsession. The position plays a critical role in enabling customer adoption, usage growth, technical readiness, and business impact across a diverse customer portfolio.

Responsibilities

Business Impact

• Coaches team on operating according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking). Leads team on orchestrating and collaborating across Microsoft and customer/partner teams through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase customer/partner satisfaction. Oversees team on anticipating and managing business and technical risks, adapting methodology and applying governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures. Leads team to continuously prioritize among competing demands in their work and identify where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.
• Drives team on anticipating, identifying, escalating, and mitigating blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption for complex customers/scenarios. Coaches team on proactively applying broad business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.
• Leads team on delivering solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., product offerings such as value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare complex customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets. Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices and/or involving the change management team, proactively helps the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage. Coaches team on guiding complex customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities. Provides guidance to team on articulating the value of Unified and supports sellers, partnering with account teams to build consumption plans aligned with appropriate services. Leads efforts to provide feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.
• Drives team on proactively identifying and anticipating new cross-solution opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation. Executes change management to ensure team members develop thorough understanding of customer's business and operations to advise on potential solutions. Coaches team on strategically consulting with, actively listening to and respectfully challenging customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements. Leads team on identifying, anticipating, and evaluating industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathering customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and mapping both existing and novel architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Leads teams to capture opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model.

Customer Centricity

• Coaches team to focusing on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Drives team on realization of customer/partner conditions of success by leveraging an understanding customer goals. Leads team on anticipating, addressing, and leading customer confidence calls to resolve customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, and creating and executing strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.
• Supports and coaches team on proactively identifying and/or translating customer/partner problems into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, creating or improving an existing business model, and explaining why and/or how they meet customer/partner outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals (e.g., via proof of concept, minimally viable product [MVP], rapid prototype) relative to competitive offerings. Leads team on proactively helping the customer/partner accelerate their adoption and use of Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions. Coaches team on building relationships with, and providing direction to C-suite level technical decision makers (TDMs) up to the C-suite level, and building the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Leads and elevates interactions needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Office (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements across BDMs, TDMs, CIO and CISO teams, appropriately engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper expertise is required.
• Leads team on proactively acting as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories, and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams and internal communities, leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems. Coaches team on identifying and aggregating patterns across customers/partners/territories/industries and leveraging them with relevant industry perspective to develop strategic and actionable insights. Guides team on presenting business cases to program managers to advocate for and influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate.\

Partner Specialization

• Concentrates on the identification and prioritization of opportunities that resonate with the organization's strategic revenue goals. Directs and elevates the support provided by partner and sales teams to deliver decisive, influential guidance for specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.
• Actively orchestrates initiatives. Leverages an expansive knowledge of the partner portfolio in their respective solution areas to select and champion the most qualified partners to fulfill complex customer project or needs. Collaborates with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) business stakeholders and Partner Technology Specialist (PT