Job Description
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. In Windows Consumer, we play a critical role in shaping how customers experience the PC ecosystem across retail, partner, digital, and commercial-through-consumer channels.
The Director, Windows Performance & Analytics will lead the end-to-end performance, insights, and operating rhythm for the Windows Consumer business. This role will be accountable for establishing a trusted, consistent view of business performance, translating data into clear strategic narratives, and enabling senior leaders to make timely decisions on growth priorities, competitive response, investment allocation, and execution focus.
This is a senior individual contributor role requiring strong business ownership, analytical depth, executive communication, and cross-functional leadership. The successful candidate will operate across regional and worldwide stakeholders, partner closely with Finance, Sales, Category, Marketing, Operations, and Business Planning teams, and serve as a key orchestrator of Windows Consumer performance management.
The role requires someone who can move seamlessly between strategy and operations: defining the performance model, driving RoB discipline, identifying risks and opportunities early, and converting signals into actions that improve business outcomes.
Responsibilities
1. Windows Consumer Performance Model, Insights & Governance
- Own the Windows Consumer performance model, defining the key metrics, leading indicators, dashboards, and reporting standards required to manage the business with consistency and accountability.
- Establish and govern one trusted source of truth for Windows Consumer performance across scorecards, dashboards, market views, partner signals, and investment tracking.
- Analyse performance across first-party, third-party, partner, market, and competitive data sources to identify drivers of growth, share movement, risks, and emerging opportunities.
- Translate complex data into clear, decision-ready insights that inform business planning, GTM execution, investment prioritisation, and corrective actions.
- Drive adoption of standard dashboards and performance views so that regional, market, and leadership teams operate from a common understanding of business health and key drivers.
- Identify performance gaps, underlying causes, and actionable recommendations, ensuring insights lead to clear ownership, interventions, and measurable outcomes.
2. Operating Rhythm & RoB Leadership
- Lead the Windows Consumer rhythm of business across performance reviews, scorecard reviews, forecast discussions, investment reviews, and executive updates.
- Embed a consistent operating discipline across markets and teams, ensuring business reviews are grounded in facts, clear metrics, accountable actions, and timely follow-through.
- Partner with key JCA stakeholders to surface risks, opportunities, and decisions required from senior leadership.
- Drive a JCA cadence of reporting and reviews to ensure performance trends, execution gaps, and competitive dynamics are understood and acted upon.
- Create clarity across stakeholders by connecting strategy, targets, investment, execution plans, and business outcomes into one integrated operating view.
- Strengthen the quality of business reviews by moving discussions beyond status reporting toward insight-led decision making and action.
3. Chief Business Storyteller
- Serve as the chief business storyteller for Windows Consumer performance, translating data signals into compelling executive narratives.
- Develop concise, insight-led communications for senior leaders, connecting performance outcomes to business drivers, market dynamics, partner execution, competitive pressure, and required actions.
- Prepare executive-ready business updates, performance narratives, issue briefs, and decision memos that enable clear alignment and faster decision making.
- Partner across Category, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Worldwide teams to ensure the business story is consistent, accurate, and grounded in a shared view of performance.
- Build narratives that communicate not only what happened, but why it happened, what it means for the business, and what actions are required.
- Influence senior stakeholders through clarity of insight, structured recommendations, and strong business judgement.
4. Targets, Forecasting & Investment Governance
- Partner with Finance, Sales, Category, and Business Planning teams to cascade Windows Consumer targets and ensure alignment across markets, partners, programs, and scorecards.
- Govern investment performance end-to-end, connecting funding decisions to business priorities, ROI expectations, execution progress, and measurable impact.
- Lead performance reviews that assess whether investments are delivering expected outcomes and recommend reallocations where required.
- Surface help-needed signals early, including target gaps, budget constraints, market headwinds, partner execution risks, and competitive threats.
- Support fiscal planning, forecasting, and business reviews by ensuring leaders have a clear view of performance trajectory, investment effectiveness, and trade-off decisions.
- Establish mechanisms to improve accountability for targets, investments, and execution commitments across stakeholders.
5. Cross-Functional Strategy & Stakeholder Leadership
- Act as a senior liaison across regional, market, and worldwide teams, ensuring Windows Consumer priorities are clearly understood and reflected in planning, execution, and investment decisions.
- Partner with Category, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Sales Excellence, Business Operations, and Worldwide teams to align on business priorities, performance expectations, and execution plans.
- Influence cross-functional teams without direct authority, creating alignment across complex stakeholder groups and driving decisions through data, insight, and business judgement.
- Champion regional and market perspectives in worldwide discussions, ensuring local realities, competitive dynamics, and partner signals inform broader Windows Consumer strategy.
- Build scalable performance and insights practices that improve organisational capability and help teams make better, faster decisions.
Qualifications
QUALIFICATIONS
Required/minimum qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, Economics, Public Relations, Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years category management, product management, marketing strategy, business planning, product planning, or related work experience OR equivalent experience.
Additional or preferred qualifications
- 10+ years experience managing and expanding a category and attaining sales and profitability targets within a complex (e.g., multinational or matrixed) organization OR equivalent experience.
- Proven ability to translate financial share and volume models into prioritized growth plans, TAM gap analyses, and committed sales priorities.
- Strong competitive intelligence muscle — ability to synthesize moves from Apple, Google, and adjacent platforms into a clear, actionable point of view.
- Track record orchestrating annual planning across Sales, Marketing, Business Planning, and Finance — influencing senior executives and large cross-functional organizations without direct authority.
- Fluency with developed and emerging market dynamics, channel structures (Retail, OEM, online), and partner ecosystems (OEM, silicon, retail).
- Comfort operating in a high-stakes competitive consumer PC market with clear share defense and growth targets.
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.