Senior Finance Manager - WW Gaming Retail Partner & Investment Insights

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At Xbox, we aspire to empower the world’s 3 billion gamers to play the games they want, with the people they want, anywhere they want. Gaming, the largest and fastest growing category in media & entertainment, represents an important growth opportunity for Microsoft. We are leading with innovation, as highlighted by bringing the Game Pass subscription to PC, bringing Xbox to new devices with Cloud Gaming, and our recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard King creating exciting new possibilities for players.

WW Gaming Retail Sales (GRS) Partner and Investment Insights Senior Finance Manager role is to create insights to assist the business to understand Costs to serve across key partners within the GRS business and drive gross margin expansion, therefore maximize return on investments. It includes but not limited to consulting with business leaders on implications of results of partner investment allocations, return on investments allocations across regions and at worldwide level. Provide guidance to achieve gross margin expansion.

Finance at Microsoft interfaces across a broad intersection of business partners including Engineering, Marketing, Category Management, Sales, Data Science, Investments, Pricing/Deals and Supply Chain teams. The Gaming Retail Finance Team comprises of teams covering aspects of Sales, Revenue, Investments, Compete and Gross Margin for our various products & services.

The successful candidate will bring a combination of finance and business acumen, leadership, and influencing skills to this space to drive superior financial results in close alignment with our business partners. Our team is collaborative, supportive, and fun. We work hard on exciting things and strive for a team culture that values diverse perspectives and individuals.

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Accounting, Finance, Economics, Data Science, or related field AND post-graduate financial analysis, accounting, controllership, or finance work experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Office presence of minimum 3 days per week.

Preferred Qualifications

• Consumer industry experience.
• FP&A & Finance Business Partnering experience in a matrixed organization.
• Mastery of complex analytics & modelling and ability to distill critical insights & decision points.
• Strong process management– able to synthesize & simplify multiple deliverables into concise logical workflows.

• Partner profitability insights: Drive insights on partner profitability and costs to serve at both regional and worldwide gaming retail sales all up level. Consolidate WW partner costs to serve actuals vs budget/forecast on quarterly basis from regional financial Planning and analysis leads and sharing the insights with regional and worldwide Gaming Retail Sales leadership team to ensure we allocate investments to the right partners, ensuring gross margin expansion.
• Investment Optimization: Develop and implement investment frameworks to ensure investments are managed in line with strategy, ROI, partner commitments and are coordinated to optimize strategic outcomes. Bring agility and thought leadership on how we can rebalance / expand investment in response to market and business opportunities.
• Distribution channel strategy: Contribute to WW distribution channel strategy working closely with regional sales leads and at worldwide level with GRS leadership. Generate investment insights on return on investment for marketing development funds and gross margin/contribution margin by partner and for operating expenses. Contribute to account level go to market strategy for Gaming Retail Sales Organization (GRS), Delivers results through tracking performance, partner profitability matrix, reporting accuracy, and partnering with business leaders to ensure execution of plans and accountability for results.
• Performance management: Conceptualizes and designs new approaches and metrics to how relevant financial data is collected and evaluated to impact future outcomes and decisions. Shares business insights and advances solutions and action plans to drive business and commercial leader goals and short-term accountabilities.
• Growth and transformation through AI automation: Applies understanding of the broader Microsoft context to offer solutions to ensure organizational objectives are met. Collaborates on improvements through automation. Understands the interconnections between data, information, and results and translates this into forward-looking narratives. Machine learning model for WW GRS by Line of Business to facilitate forecast discussion and outlook submissions.
• Business partnering: Develops and leverages relationships with business partners to bolster sales, and to understand and manage business risk. Drives the right tone from executive leadership and ensures strict adherence and understanding of Microsoft policies on risk and compliance.
• Community: Active member of the WW Consumer Controller and WW Gaming Finance community. Partner with Regional / WW peers to innovate, share insights & address common opportunities.
• Protect: Drives the right tone from executive leadership and ensures strict adherence and understanding of Microsoft policies on risk and compliance. Influences leadership to ensure compliance is a top priority and modeled throughout the organization. Drives a compliant culture through actions and decisions to instill trust. Advocates, educates, and promotes best practices and new developments. Encourages asking questions and identifying risks to compliance. Champions Microsoft privacy, security, and ethical standards. Advances key compliance initiatives.
• Embody our culture and values.