App Dev Manager Susan Leighton talks about the highlights of her role and shares info on how to explore opportunities on our team

Would you like the opportunity to learn new technologies, help customers with a successful launch, work across a diverse set of industries, or assist with rolling out modern DevOps processes?  Well, if your focus is on application development, then the role of an Application Development Manager (ADM) in our Developer Support practice might be perfect for you.

Learning…it never ends!  We are valued for being “learn-it-alls” and embracing a growth mindset!  In fact, besides the organic insatiable appetite ADMs have for learning, it’s part of our job responsibilities and commitments– choosing from a large variety of topics each year as part of our technical readiness.  This learning mentality comes from the top of the company, with our CEO Satya reminding us that “we’re aspiring to have a living, learning culture with growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers”.

Helping customers to be successful is at our core.  Our mission is to ”Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”, and we do that by being customer-obsessed.  As an ADM, I’ve had the pleasure of working with customers who challenge me every day with questions that test my knowledge and experience, my ability to learn, my ability to research, and almost paramount, my ability to network amongst the vast expert resources in our consulting, support engineering, and product management teams.  I’ve experienced the excitement of working with customers who have ultimate technology responsibility for our election processes, others who are changing the status quo of some industries, and others who are pushing through their digital transformation – to places where they never anticipated they’d be from a technology perspective. In a nutshell, our jobs require that our customers see us as their knowledgeable advocates and trusted advisors to help them achieve their goals.

As a sampling of the diverse technology topics that come my way, check out this recent list:

• Understanding Azure app service environments
• Configuring Azure security center
• Implementing Power BI for visualizing App Insights data
• Ensuring app resiliency
• Moving to Azure DevOps
• Implementing chat bots
• Getting started with Power BI

Besides all of the above perks and involvement with exciting technology, some of the other features of the ADM role are flexible work arrangements (time and place), managing our own commitments directly with our assigned set of customers, and working with some of the nicest, smartest, most experienced Microsoft colleagues you can imagine.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about the ADM role.  Also, check out our open ADM positions on the Microsoft careers page.  If you can’t find one at the moment, please feel free to send your resume to me directly.  For more details about Developer Support check this out.