Title:  Principal Inbound Solutions Manager

Job Summary

NetApp continually invests in transforming our products and services into solutions for our customers, working closely with our key strategic alliance and ISV partners. Designed to deliver customer business value and outcomes rather than just technology, we build holistic solutions – or “whole products” – and associated GTM approaches, solving our customers’ most pressing challenges, simplifying their journeys, while radically expanding our routes to market.

As Principal Inbound Solutions Manager, you will play a unique role that sits at the nexus of strategy and execution for the Field Advocacy and Solutions Technology group. You will be responsible for bringing together a broad set of resources from across NetApp and both Alliance and ISV partners to deliver innovation that realizes the potential of our product and services portfolios. You will focus on a number of our strategic growth areas, including Modern Workloads, Virtualization, and Enterprise Applications, across on-premises, hosted environments, and the Cloud, and both interlocked with and supporting our AI strategy.

Your leadership capabilities will be put to the test as you simplify complex customer problems into actionable requirements, establish realistic execution plans, and corral a coalition of resources towards meaningful and demonstrable progress, iterating quickly while you build and show value. You will lead by example, influencing teams with diverse goals toward a common goal.

If you are customer-obsessed, possess a strong bias for action, are reresults-drivenand love to create clarity out of chaos, then this role is for you!

Key Responsibilities

• Work hand-in-hand with Solutions Management and Alliance/ISV leadership to identify and agree on priorities
• Develop and lead execution plans that demonstrate real-world implementation of our Solutions and Alliance/ISV strategies, orchestrating a comprehensive solutions program that expands on our capabilities by adding those of our development partners
• Build tight alignment with our product groups and their strategies and roadmaps, maximizing our effectiveness at harnessing our portfolio to assure the targeted customer outcomes, and drive features and capabilities into NetApp’s entire product portfolio based on requirements from strategic alliance partners and ISVs
• Continuously interface with key Alliance partners (both technical and business functions), services, customers/prospects, sales, channel partners, and ISVs as required for the successful execution of your programs
• Drive cross-functional collaboration and serve as the integrator, helping to connect teams that may otherwise remain siloed, especially across our Product, Field, Marketing, Partner, and Alliance/ISV organizations, building consensus on target customer problems and the solution approaches to solve them
• Work closely with selected Business Solutions Areas, determine the strategy, and develop the roadmap(s) that focus on solving key customer challenges while maximizing NetApp’s market opportunity and differentiation
• Ensure that solutions are built for and to expand our routes to market, simplifying the customer sales and deployment experiences through our Field, Partners, Service Providers, and more
• Help expand NetApp’s solutions businesses into new market adjacencies where the right combinations of market opportunities, differentiated capabilities, and GTM exists or can be built
• Be deeply knowledgeable – and credibly address – key personas that we need to target to grow our business
• Shift from strategy to tactical execution comfortably, and as needed
• Be laser-focused on the needs of current and future customers
• Use data and metrics to maximize the decision-making process quality

Job Requirements

• A demonstrated passion for how solutions can help solve our customers’ most pressing challenges, and enhance the value of underlying products, services, and business models
• Deep fascination with the customer segments and the markets – both on-premises and in the cloud – that NetApp operates in
• Working knowledge of NetApp’s products and services is a plus, as well as the competitive landscape
• Significant experience in storage and data management technologies and principles, including data replication, migration/movement, protection, and governance
• Broad background in compute and network domains
• A strong technical foundation, with a background in technical pre-sales and services, is a significant advantage
• Comfortable bridging the worlds of product management, program management,  partnership management, services development and delivery, support, and sales and channel
• High level of integrity and excellent business judgment and leadership abilities
• Proven track record of driving results by influencing and directing cross-functional teams with people at different levels and across disparate groups
• Critical thinking and analytical/problem-solving skills; the ability to combine and balance quantitative and qualitative analyses with a proven understanding of strategy, interpersonal, and technical competencies
• Comfort with ambiguity and proven ability to create clarity
• Excellent written & verbal communication skills

Education and Experience

• Bachelor of Arts or Science Degree is required, or equivalent experience, with an Engineering qualification being advantageous
• A post-graduate degree in Business or Public Administration would be preferable
• 8+ years of product management, with some portion of that time focused on solutions; experience with managed services, outsourcing, or similar from a provider point of view is a distinct advantage
• 3+ years working with virtualization, with experience of multiple hypervisor vendors, hybrid cloud, and service provider environments being beneficial
• 3+ years working with containers and modern database infrastructure, with experience building applications and platforms in the public cloud, with service provider experience an additional advantage
• 3+ years of working with one or more Hyperscalers, focused on partnering to deliver both cloud-first solutions and bridging on-premises environments via hybrid capabilities
• 10+ years in the storage and/or data management industry, on the vendor side
• Knowledge of key vendors such as Broadcom/VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, SUSE, and Nutanix is critical, alongside experience with Cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud
• Experience with Enterprise database platforms such as Microsoft SQL, SAP HANA, and Oracle Database
• Exposure to critical technologies such as Kubernetes, Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, NoSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, and Cassandra