The top-brass over at Microsoft aren’t happy to rest on their laurels when it comes to the Xbox brand; they’ve managed to turn around the fortunes of the console over the last 12 month and have sold over 10 million units as of January 2015.
So it should come as no surprise that the Redmond based firm is looking to expand their Xbox brand into other areas, as mentioned in a recent job posting over on the official Microsoft careers website.
The latest job listing mentions that the Xbox gaming and entertainment business is going to be used to be enhanced and extended into other areas of the MDG (Microsoft Device Group.)
The Large Screen Devices Process and Release team is looking for a driven and highly accomplished Process Program Manager. Be a part of a pivotal change at Microsoft where we are going to build on the process successes of the XBOX gaming and entertainment business to enhance and extend them to other development groups within MDG.
This is a fun opportunity to work with development teams on large-scale projects with world-class software developers, hardware engineers and marketing teams that has a product impact on tens or even hundreds of millions of end users. We are looking for an energetic, technical candidate with a strong customer focus for the role of program manager in Devices Process Management team.
You will be working with an entrepreneurial team as a project manager where you will drive initiatives and provide supporting process and tools structures. You may also participate in milestone management reviews at the key stages of product development and delivery and proactively evaluate progress and intervene to remove barriers to process adoption success & deliver on defined success metrics.
Key activities are including the following:
Work with product, design, analytics, engineering and operations teams to understand and capture requirements and expectations for critical projects across the division; establish and validate goals and success factors to serve as metrics.
Build and drive specifications and overall project schedules in collaboration with key stakeholders across different groups; manage ongoing process projects from conception through construction, release, analysis, and iteration.
Track status of impacting projects in the organization, and provide visibility to management in a constructive and consistent manner. Introduce credible methods to improve clarity and effectiveness.
Track schedule and scope variances and provide feedback/recommendation to stakeholders and management to resolve project prioritization, resource contention and other project issues
Leverage business process expertise to rapidly and effectively define, develop, test and deploy tools and processes to the benefit of product delivery teams across the division
Design and deliver artifacts of significant impact to the ingestion, adoption and execution of process improvement tools and processes
Facilitate Key Learning sessions or Post-Mortems with the Product teams to assure that
practices continually evolve in ways that strengthen our product deliveries.
Successful candidates will have:
A solid understanding of commercial hardware development processes and a strong focus on detail
A minimum of 5 years of project management; demonstrated project management skills and ability to juggle multiple projects at once
Outstanding organization skills and agility; outstanding ability to partner across teams
Strong passion for customers, Engineering Excellence and business partner satisfaction
Solid technical, process and design problem solving; the ability to understand requirements, emerging issues and opportunities
Clear and effective written and verbal communication and strong interpersonal skills; know how to provide edits with impact without creating friction
Proven experience of working through the full product cycle from initial design to final release
Comfortable working with a high degree of autonomy in a fast-paced, responsive environment; must have ability to exercise sound judgment and decision-making
2 years working with the user experience; you should be able to instantly infer a good user experience from a painful, or pointless one.
4-year degree in engineering, computer science, closely related discipline or equivalent experience
Six Sigma GB or BB is preferred
Could Microsoft be gearing up to compete with Sony’s PlayStation Now? It’s certainly possible and would be a great benefit to all gamers as the increased competition will force both parties to bring their best efforts to the table.
Microsoft already has the Smartglass, so what could be next?
Would you like to see the Xbox brand break through past the television and smartphone? Would you be interested a PS Now style service on the Xbox One/Xbox 360? Let us know down in the comments section below.
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