Senior Business Program Manager – Sales Incentives Operations

Job Description

Senior Business Program Manager – Sales Design & Incentives | Microsoft

The Tone:
This is a full-time role at Microsoft, with locations across the U.S. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This role is crucial within the Sales Design & Incentives team, which is responsible for the design, implementation, and operations of sales and incentive plans across Microsoft. As a Senior Business Program Manager, you will govern how deal-based exceptions are managed, ensuring fair, consistent, and principle-driven outcomes for over 40,000 employees.

The TL;DR
• Role: Senior
• Type: Full-time
• Location: U.S. National
• Pay: $116900–$203600 yearly
• Team: Operations & Regional Delivery (ORD) team, part of Sales Design & Incentives (SDI)
• Mission: Owns the end-to-end management and governance of deal-based exceptions for sales incentive plans, ensuring consistency and adherence to guiding principles.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Exception Rhythm Ownership: Own the end-to-end operating rhythm across Revenue Based Incentives (RBI) Plans and Incentive Programs, from intake and classification to routing, tracking, and closure.
• Escalation Committee Management: Decide when to activate the Deal-Based Escalation Committee (DBEC) as the Exception Review Board, set its cadence, and present only material or precedent-setting cases to SDI Leadership Team.
• RBI Exception Partnership: Partner closely with Americas and EMEA Time-Zone Leads on quota/revenue (RBI) escalations, ensuring consistent classification, logging, and adherence to guiding principles.
• Incentive Program Ownership: Directly own Incentive Programs exceptions end-to-end, resolving cases independently or by engaging SDI Subject Matter Experts.
• Process Improvement & Prevention: Use the exceptions log to identify root causes, feeding upstream process improvements, business-rule revisions, and embedding early detection into program design reviews.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Finance, Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Economics, or a related field.
• Experience: 7+ years’ experience in compensation, business management and operations, finance and analytics, human resources and people analytics, marketing, or sales strategy; additionally, 3+ years of project or program leadership/management experience.
• Skills: Executive presence with experience influencing and partnering with stakeholders, proven success navigating ambiguity and resolving unstructured problems, and experience communicating incentive compensation updates and plan changes clearly.
• Bonus: Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree or Master’s Degree in Finance, Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field; 5+ years of experience working in a large or highly matrixed organization, preferably in the technology industry; prior experience with incentive compensation processes, including quota setting and related upstream inputs.