Program Director - Telecommunications, Media, and Technology

Be part of a culture that celebrates excellence and drives innovation where success is a shared journey. As a Program Director for the Telco, Media, and Technology Industry, you will help customers reimagine the future of work while partnering with them to drive frontier transformation. In this role, you join the Industry Solutions Delivery team in Microsoft Frontier Company, where you will represent Microsoft to customer leadership and shape their transformation agenda and turn ambitious ideas into measurable outcomes. You work with senior stakeholders to align on vision, orchestrate delivery across complex workstreams, and ensure each engagement moves customers closer to their strategic goals.

The Program Director – Telecommunications, Media, and Technology plays a critical part in analyzing customer feedback and acting as the voice of the customer, working closely with senior and executive stakeholders to ensure resolution of complex delivery challenges. You will lead the initiation and execution of highly complex projects by securing and coordinating delivery resources, managing detailed work breakdown structures, and driving alignment with customer plans. This role also includes overseeing partner contracting processes, contributing to resource selection and onboarding, and guiding the development of comprehensive project management plans. You will manage key project metrics, risks, and financials while ensuring the timely and high-quality delivery of some of Microsoft’s most impactful projects. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute across domains and geographies, sharing knowledge and influencing industry practices. 

At Microsoft, our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth‑mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress, people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end project planning and execution with urgency to accelerate customer time to value, balancing scope, resources, schedule, quality, and security to deliver predictable outcomes for high-visibility engagements.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and AI-assisted development in project execution to responsibly scale output, accelerate delivery, and improve outcomes for customers.
• Navigate ambiguous business challenges, make decisions that drive execution, and apply sound judgment to solve problems.
• Harvest existing intellectual property (IP) for reuse, drive incremental improvements to delivery assets, and share learnings with peers.

Account Delivery Management

• Supports strategic relationships with key stakeholders in the customer portfolio, often as part of a steering committee, to ensure service delivery is on track and major issues are being anticipated, identified, and managed. Supports new customer opportunities in partnership with Sales with highly significant or global impacts for Microsoft. Communicates current view of delivery to customer executives on regular cadence, as appropriate.
• Manages the direction of solution deliveries and influences others to secure resources to deliver on customer contracts. Ensures delivery for customers across the delivery lifecycle including envisioning, solution development, delivery planning, cloud consumption and usage, delivery management. Leads or participates in steering committee meetings with strategic customers to discuss progress toward delivery success.
• Contributes to consumption activities and the setting of strategic direction for consumption based on identification of broad patterns of consumption gaps, and drives consumption for complex customers (e.g., tier 1) by identifying blockers to consumption goals and enabling customers, through internal teams, to get the full value of their purchases. Holds accountability for project delivery forecast.
• Collaborates with Sales to support contract setup, signature, compliance, and execution from deal approvals to invoicing and closure. Manages areas of fiscal responsibility within project portfolio, staying within budget while driving engagement profitability and risk management.

Business Growth

• Looks for or creates opportunities to maximize timely cloud consumption through current deliveries. Identifies new opportunities with customers and facilitates follow up conversations with customers on Consumption both strategically and operational, and to accelerate delivery or prevent delivery delays.
• Demonstrates accountability for the financial health of a project or program (e.g., revenue attainment, accurate forecasting, cost management, and utilization, skills, and capacity planning). Identifies opportunities to accelerate and drive consumption and delivery. Owns and drives backlog risk management. Drives incremental business on top of existing projects and programs through next step proposals, conducts customer discussions related to next stage proposal (NSP) and other opportunities. Engages in the pursuit cycle to ensure deals are structured appropriately. Supports and contributes to rhythm of business (ROB) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) forecasting.

Closure

• Contributes across areas, regions, and/or world-wide levels to share knowledge, support others (e.g., Ready), and impact industry. Drives development and delivery of readiness programs (e.g., workshops, conferences).
• Drives timely project closure by ensuring completion of project sign off tasks (e.g., system closeout updates, deletion of customer data, Deliverable Acceptance Form). Drives incremental process improvement by reflecting on and broadly sharing lessons learned (e.g., leading transformative projects, sharing stories with executives, developing case studies). Creates and suggests improvements to intellectual property (IP), provides feedback to managers on team member performance, and conducts closeout interviews with team members.

Contracting

• Oversees process for customer and partner resources (e.g., contractors, vendors) by providing input in partner briefings, partner candidate interviews, and identification and acclimation of partner resources to the team. Oversees negotiation and structuring of fixed-fee subcontractor contracts. Oversees customer contract Amendments, Delivery Acceptance, Proof of Delivery, and Invoicing.

Initiation

• Drives project initiation for projects of extremely high complexity (e.g., high profile, visible worldwide impact, extremely high impact, market making) by driving commitment of delivery resources, assigning resources across workstreams, and creating complex work breakdown structures (WBSs) with delivery team.
• Balances needs across projects in challenging situations (e.g., scarce technical resources) and collaborates with other groups (e.g., Independent Software Vendors, Global Delivery Center) on integrated planning and organization of onshore/offshore projects.

Intellectual Property (IP)

• Leads others in the use of intellectual property (IP) by providing recommendations for improvement including submitting new IP, contributing to complex IP, and driving standardization across IP ( e.g., statements of work [SOWs], work breakdown structures [WBS] by enforcing use of processes and artifacts with team members. Structures projects considering IP reuse from the beginning.

Monitoring and Controlling

• Manages stakeholder communications with Chief Executive-level executives on project health, issues, and financial performance for large, complex deals throughout entire project lifecycle, tailoring communications to the audience, anticipating stakeholder requirements and adapting the plan accordingly. Establishes formal rhythms to ensure tracking and maintenance of customer deliverables and collect and report status with all important stakeholders. Produces executive summaries and presents to executive audiences.
• Orchestrates and oversees a broad range of project metrics on the largest, most complex projects with extremely high visibility (e.g., Vice President-level, global impact) through others. Proactively ensures adherence to key performance indicators (KPIs) and provides strategic direction to drive success and adapts to high-impact changes throughout project lifecycle.
• Ensures timely completion and quality of deliverables (e.g., documents) and tracking of agreed upon metrics across the largest, most complex, and critical projects by applying quality management techniques for collecting data (e.g., benchmarking, interviews), monitoring output and implementing corrective action while proactively ensuring time and resources needed to mitigate quality risks. Manages Conditions of Satisfaction (COSs) to create required deliverables. Contributes across projects to provide peer guidance where needed.
• Discusses and confirms customer change control at kickoff, anticipates changes and proactively addresses by probing to ensure change can happen smoothly early in the process. Tests process before initiating formal change.
• Oversees and proactively manages risks and issues within and projects of extremely high complexity, leveraging previous experience and subject matter expertise to evaluate trends in risks and optimize mitigation strategies across projects for high-impact risk scenarios using qualitative analyses (e.g., probability, impact, urgency) mitigation plan for high impact/probability risks. Leads critical recoveries and engages in resolving escalations across other critical projects and ensures tools are updated. Manages issue closure as a high priority and utilizes contingency planning to proactively respond when risks become issues. 
• Manages finances for high-impact projects with large, complex scopes and budgets by balancing funding and resources across workstreams, performing deep analyses, and leveraging success expectations experience and expertise. Proactively aims to reduce success expectations and improve delivery margin without impact to quality or customer experience and understands impact of decisions on the broader business (e.g., profits and losses [P&L], accrual-based accounting).

Planning

• Oversees and provides input into the development of detailed project management plan to drive predictable delivery for the largest, most complex, and critical projects, leveraging deep expertise and experience and to drive scope, resources, and Microsoft project schedule in alignment and collaboration with customer plan. Drives overall strategy for project delivery and trains Microsoft and customer teams to proactively manage change as needed. Ensures use of baselining, resource load balancing, and application of work effort, dependency management, contingency planning, and utilization of software (e.g., Timeline). 
• Establishes clear expectations and accountabilities (e.g., reconfirm scope, Responsible-Accountable-Consulted-Informed matrix) with all project team members (e.g., consultants) and stakeholders, as well as other Consulting Project Managers, for teams of high complexity by leading internal and external kick-off meetings (e.g., sales to delivery handoff, formal kick-off meetings) and may act as a lead project manager. Proactively engages broad set of internal and external stakeholders, including those who are impacted by project scope/outcome, but not directly involved (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit, India Global Delivery, customer stakeholders) and engages subject matter experts in holistic planning activities, including team validation.

Presales

• Leads pre-sales process for extremely high-impact projects by articulating the business value proposition associated with the project/change, evaluating associated complexities and risks to ensure feasibility of commercial offer, and reviewing work of peers for quality. Participates in review of proposed scope and assists in developing Statement of Work (SOW), Work Breakdown Structures (WBSs), estimates, preliminary risk assessments, etc.

Relationship Development

• Adheres to project compliance standards (e.g., confidentiality, privacy) and requirements of the contract and accommodates customer compliance standards, including managing compliance-related complexities (e.g., high sensitivity to confidentiality). Champions compliance by driving knowledge sharing across geographies to build compliance capability of others. 
• Engages senior internal and external stakeholders (e.g., Chief Executive-level executives) as a peer with deep subject matter expertise. Prevents and manages complex escalations through strategic and targeted communications with Chief Executive-level executives and delivers difficult messages as needed. Leverages brokering skills to assist other project managers in strategic communications. Collaborates with internal teams to manage overall customer relationships and plan mitigation strategies as needed.
• Drives customer satisfaction by representing Microsoft to senior customer stakeholders (e.g., Chief Executive-level, analyzing customer feedback, and leveraging trusted relationships with senior and executive leaders to act as the voice of the customer and ensure resolution of challenged deliveries. Manages expectations with a high level of political sensitivity by anticipating customer reactions, interpreting small signals, and taking proactive steps accordingly. Oversees the creation of Success Expectations and customer and partner experience (CPE).

 Other

• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in related field AND 7+ years experience in project management OR equivalent experience. 

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 10+ years direct industry experience in telecommunications, media, or hyperscaler/ISV environments.
• Bachelors Degree in related field AND 15+ years experience in project management OR equivalent experience.
• Project Management Professional (PMP) and Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification.
• 8+ years financial management experience.
• Agile certification, Scrum Master, Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), or Professional Scrum Master One (PSM1) certification.
• 2+ years technical program management and hypervelocity engineering experience.
• Experience in creating and managing intellectual property (IP).
• Experience in creating publications.

Consulting Project Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $140,500 - $268,800 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 $175,900 - $288,000 per year.