Microsoft has a tremendous opportunity to exceed customer expectations and drive greater customer loyalty and trust, which leads to greater satisfaction, retention, and growth. The CEnS organization is looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success to help us build a future where customers come to us, not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, and also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience that is rooted in our commitment to delivering on customer outcomes.
Responsibilities
Are looking for a new job experience with an unorthodox team? Are you interested in mapping uncharted territory within the emerging strategy, service design, and research industry? If so, look no further than the CX Center of Excellence team! We are looking for a passionate Principal UX Research Manager to join us and lead envisioning future state experiences that empower our team to transform and elevate our customer’s experience. You will have the opportunity to shape the direction Microsoft’s customer experiences and significantly impact the customer experience across all products and services.
How are we different from other research and design teams?
• We are strategic more than tactical and work primarily on large scale end-to-end experiences. This means we have more interaction with executives.
• We do not work on any one product, we have many focus areas around cloud, support, and employee experiences.
• We operate within a horizontal team format, where we lead with influence to cultivate key partnerships across organizations within Microsoft.
• The majority of our work is with enterprise (B2B) experiences, less consumer.
We could be the right team for you if you are looking for the opportunity to:
• Contribute to diverse team perspectives to create an inclusive and collaborative environment for all, enabling collaboration across disciplines, stakeholders, and product groups
• Support a multi-disciplinary team and lead research for multiple experiences and segments
• Foster a culture of thought leadership, supporting the team and differences and shepherding customer-centricity at our core
• Lead with enthusiasm and influence to continually elevate your team
• Lead with authenticity, empathy, and growth mindset — we are truly better together
Celebrate creative freedom; finding new ways to elevate the customer experience and generate energy with stakeholders through dynamic storytelling and visually appealing artifacts
• Create clarity amidst ambiguous and complex customer challenges
People Management
• Drive people management responsibilities for individual team members and across the team by modeling, caring, and coaching
• Build and support the team to improve key metrics for customers world-wide with high-quality NorthStar experiences
• Define team objectives and outcomes; enable success across boundaries; help the team adapt and learn.
• Attract and retain great people; know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; invest in the growth of others
• Develop a positive and healthy work environment that fosters inclusivity and a growth mindset
• Inspire others and leverage empathy to build and grow multi-disciplinary talent within the team
• Monitor and hold stakeholder teams accountable to recommendations and scoping
• Represent your team in executive & product reviews
• Create guidelines, best practices, and repeatable research patterns that are leveraged by your peers across Microsoft
• Serve in a player/coach capacity to both empower your team to drive measurable impact on the customer experience, while also providing thought leadership for critical experience engagements
• Create clarity amidst ambiguity, with an impeccable ability to break down complex problems into consumable stories.
Core Area – You will lead a team of customer experience researchers and designers that are understanding and reimagining priority end to end experiences for Microsoft customers and partners by:
• Envisioning and designing future state “NorthStar” experiences based on their workshops and iterative customer research.
• Leading customer research to produce research plans, analysis for personas, customer journeys maps and information architecture frameworks.
• Identifying user insights, needs, and suggesting opportunities that span experiences, businesses, and technologies.
• Synthesizing multiple sources of complex data to form aggregate insights enabling idea finding, problem definition, and opportunity finding.
• Driving collaboration across teams and ensuring that the right people with the right knowledge and expertise are involved.
• Utilizing your expertise to delve into problems, collaborate with subject matter experts internally, and work extensively with customers to find critical moments of truth that transform the customer experience.
Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications
• A minimum of a BA/BS degree in Psychology, Human Factors, Sociology, Anthropology, HCI, Interaction Design, Communication Design, Market Research, or related field AND 6+ years in user experience research, design research, product research, service design OR related experience in research OR a MA/MS degree in Psychology, Human Factors, Sociology, Anthropology, HCI, Interaction Design, Communication Design, Market Research, or related field AND 4+ years in user experience research, design research, product research, service design OR related experience in research OR 9+ years in user experience research, design research, product research, service design OR related experience in research
• 3+ years in people management experience
• 5+ years designing, planning, and facilitating live and virtual Design Thinking workshops
