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Job Details
Posted date: Jan 26, 2026
There have been 360 jobs posted with the title of Principal Product Manager all time at Microsoft.There have been 360 Principal Product Manager jobs posted in the last month.
Category: Product Management
Location: WA, Redmond
Estimated salary: $247,100
Range: $163,000 - $331,200
Employment type: Full-Time
Work location type: 3 days / week in-office
Role: Individual Contributor
Description
OverviewAs a Principal Product Manager for Employee Experience, you will define the strategy, vision, and roadmap for AI-powered products and platforms that transform how employees interact with HR and workplace services. This role spans the full product lifecycle—from discovery to launch and iteration—delivering personalized, seamless experiences across the employee journey.
You’ll collaborate with engineering, data science, research, design, and go-to-market teams to build scalable, responsible AI solutions that delight users and drive measurable business impact. Success requires deep HR domain expertise, strong product leadership, technical fluency in AI/ML, and the ability to create clarity and momentum in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
This position is based at the Redmond campus with 3 days per week work in the office, and 2 days per week work from home. Relocation support is available.
Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We innovate with a growth mindset, collaborate to realize shared goals, and uphold values of respect, integrity, and accountability to foster an inclusive culture where everyone thrives.
Responsibilities
Analysis of Customer and Market Signals
Demonstrates and builds experiences across multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries. Leads process defining problems and incubating solutions for company-wide initiatives. Coaches and mentors internal team to develop problem statements and forms hypotheses of new multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries to address crucial customer needs and/or market opportunities; identifies dependencies of other feature areas. Uses AI for trend analysis and sentiment evaluation to generate hypotheses, understand problems, and predict customer preferences, developing and leading complex experiments and A/B tests to improve model performance and inform feature development. Establishes clarity of patterns of root problem and how it relates with previously seen trends across customers, determines the customers/sectors impacted, and uses research evidence to influence feature prioritization. Ensures and drives product-market fit and alignment between the customer, the market, internal stakeholders, senior leadership, and the goals and strategy of Microsoft. Collaborates with others (e.g., Software Engineering [SWE], Hardware Engineering [HWE], Product Marketing, Design, Security Subject Matter Experts) to ensure that they can satisfy customer and security requirements. Validates the market size and opportunity to determine products or features of greatest value, and collaborates with other teams (e.g., Finance) to build the Long-Range Plan (LRP). Defines and optimizes AI-driven solution options across multiple feature areas across divisional boundaries (e.g., product, service), incorporating insights into refinement and experimentation processes. Partners senior colleagues across the organization (e.g., SWE, HWE) in refinement sessions to synthesize hypothesis results into solutions tied with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) progress. Resolves large or complex alignment issues, contributes to portfolio level solutions, and drives cross-functional clarity with senior leadership.
Leverages AI to identify customers’ unmet or unknown needs for complex situations, influencing stakeholders and other team members while bringing them along, gaining buy in, and market opportunities for enhancements or development and new products/services of multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries via quantitative (e.g., usage, telemetry) and qualitative analyses (e.g., customer usage, various listening systems, feedback channels of market and industry trends), analyzes security and ethical compliance, looks for patterns in the data across a portfolio, and scopes the impact and prioritization of a problem. Brings together internal and external customer groups around a specific scenario and engages in direct 1:1 (e.g., visits, interviews) or many (e.g., social media, events) customer engagements to solicit feedback and understand their experiences with Microsoft’s products and services using industry-accepted methods (e.g., Moneyball). Acts as a subject matter expert and provides guidance to others performing market or user research through AI in collaboration with the User Research team, conducting competitive analyses, and examining market and industry trends, as well as industry-specific requirements or regulations. Shares insights with senior internal/external stakeholders and internal team to ensure cross-team alignment. Drives contract negotiations and partnership across the organization and company-wide alignment. Assesses acquisition targets to enhance the migration offering. Shares insights with internal team and ensures cross-team alignment on creating products that are easy to adopt and provide a positive experience for customers.
Go To Market
Acts as a subject matter expert and collects and includes different views when collaborating with Product Marketing, Business Planning, and Engineering to identify product release criteria (including security requirements such as Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) compliance), customer acquisition, usage, retention, and monetization strategies. May help scale Product Marketing teams by providing strategic guidance to build marketing and roll-out plans and/or content such as product overviews, blogs, and landing pages for individual features or smaller products that ladder up to marketing plans for an overall product solution area. Drives long-term vision and strategy for taking the multiple feature areas across divisional boundaries from private preview to public preview and then to general availability. Orchestrates the creation and/or automation of customer support plans (e.g., frequently asked questions [FAQs], scripts), HyperCase, change management, and communication plans.
Executes major opportunities to evangelize the supported feature areas worked on, including AI-driven solutions, with internal and external stakeholders, partners, analysts, and customers in the industry via presentations, blog posts, social media, and other forums. Leads presentations at Executive Briefing Centers (EBCs) and large industry/company events. Acts as a primary interface and collaborates with Product Marketing to educate on the product, leveraging AI to develop content and to contribute to product messaging.
Product/Service Definition
Serves as an expert in translating technical AI concepts into business value, engaging with executives and customers to build consensus and support for AI-first product strategies. Influences and drives engagement with cross-functional internal partners, external partners, including early adopting customers, senior leadership, and other key stakeholders to gather input and garner support for product/service vision, strategy, and roadmap for multiple features across divisional boundaries. Provides deep thought leadership and is sought out to address questions and challenges from group managers and other leaders. Contributes to, defines, and unites others around the product vision. Leverages AI-driven workflows to collaborate with cross-functional teams and secure buy-in from senior leadership for product vision and strategy for multiple feature areas across divisional boundaries. Advocates for priorities and resources needed to deliver desired outcomes for multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries. Leads senior leadership to new product vision and strategies.
Defines and evangelizes others around business impact, success criteria, and performance metrics (e.g., Objectives and Key Results [OKRs], Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] such as engagement, usage, acquisition, retention, user love/net promoter score (NPS), revenue, profitability, and in-project features) and fundamentals (e.g., quality, privacy, security, compliance, accessibility, cost of goods sold [COGS]) of multiple features areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries, including success/performance metrics that represent the security posture of products or features (e.g. percent of information being logged that is required for security investigations). Sets and defines success metrics for AI related features and products (e.g., precision/recall, relevance scores). Works with internal partner teams (e.g., SWE and HWE) to identify needed data and ensure needed telemetry is developed and obtains it responsibly and compliantly; reports and explicates reasons for outcomes and drives decision making thereafter. Deeply understands the COGS of multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries and the KPIs that will help improve profitability. Performs advanced insights analyses (e.g., customer acquisition, customer retention). Defines analytic processes and drives them across Microsoft. Determines the value of the multiple feature areas to business growth, aligns success criteria, and measures success. Ensures the ultimate goal is aligned for portfolios.
Serves as an expert in identifying AI-informed, long-term investment opportunities, evaluating tradeoffs, and prioritizing investments in consultation across multiple cross organizational partners for multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries. Guides others to determine the features or experiences to prioritize in the roadmap that will support achievement of success criteria and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Works across multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across multiple product areas and divisional boundaries. Defines or influences the success criteria, long-term vision, and strategy for the feature areas based on a deep understanding of customer needs, market and user research, the competitive landscape, and Microsoft’s business goals and strategy. Writes the product framing memo or strategy documents, including AI-driven solutions, to address unmet or unknown customer needs and scope out opportunities across multiple feature areas and reviews with senior leaders. Distills the vision and strategy into a product roadmap, emphasizing AI as a core differentiator to address customer needs and market opportunities. Creates user stories and epics to convey the big picture. Leverages a deep understanding of the product architecture to design integrated scenarios. Utilizes AI to generate synthetic feedback to simulate user feedback and refine product vision memos, user stories, and scenarios, aiding in testing positioning, messaging, and feature value before launch. Collaborates with others (e.g., Business Planning, Finance, Support, Customers, Product Marketing) to identify the potential customer base. Integrates AI-first thinking into product strategy. Communicates product strategy to internal and external customers and builds consensus through multiple methods (e.g., conference presentations, collaboration with partner organizations).
Product/Service Development
Owns and strategically drives the roadmap for the multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) they own across divisional boundaries. Prioritizes the backlog and aligns with internal partners (e.g. SWE and HWE) on tradeoffs for the multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) they own, partners with Product Marketing on the strategic communication of the roadmap, and ensures dependencies are strategically managed and accounted for. Takes in new inputs and adapts accordingly. Builds and deploys AI-based systems and frameworks to enable the team to scale for a product area. Influences and leads difficult strategic tradeoffs with senior peers and senior management, and navigates the team through these decisions. Strategically drives direction between customer needs and product development on the roadmap to address a series of complex problems over time. Ensures strategic alignment between the roadmap for the multiple features (e.g., product, service) across divisional boundaries and long-term Objective and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Recommends and drives features that utilize AI and ensure they meet quality, security, and ethical standards.
Collaborates with partner team to build golden configurations and leads scenario walkthroughs and thought exercises to identify problems, system friction, and needed contingencies in advance of early customer adoption for multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across organizational boundaries. Provides test demonstrations to leadership team around product/service areas. Shares feature previews or roadmap with customers to drive engagement and to gather feedback and customer telemetry in conjunction with others (e.g., Business Development, Sales, End Consumers, User Research). Collaborates with internal partners (e.g., SWE, HWE, and Scientists) to synthesize, prioritize, and address feedback to continuously refine AI-driven product strategies and roadmaps. Ensures that products or features related to security incorporate up-to-date Threat Model design into newest versions and that these products or features are reviewed by the internal Threat Model/Security teams. Leverages data and AI tools to analyze and translate user behavior or feedback, working with data scientists or engineering to develop and implement AI-driven improvements (e.g., training and fine-tuning models, rules).
Leads the definition of the feature set and partners with Design teams to connect multiple design factors (e.g., visual design, user experience [UX], application programming interfaces [APIs], hardware design) to desired functionality and product vision. Drives strategic initiatives to develop user stories and scenarios that integrate AI outputs and align with user expectations and needs. Facilitates high-level efforts to generate proof-of-concept designs through the use of Generative AI to explore wider design spaces for unique and wide-ranging applications. Oversees the ongoing advancement of minimally-viable-products (MVPs), and leads the innovation and refinement of product concepts, leveraging cutting-edge AI prototyping tools and auto-generated workflows for long-term impact. Influences collaboration with data science teams to establish sophisticated model objectives, transform training data, and evaluate metrics, ensuring strategic alignment with highly complex product strategies and goals. Iterates multiple designs with design partners in other teams. Iterates multiple designs with design partners in other teams (e.g. Design, SWE and HWE) to drive the product vision. Leverages preexisting design patterns and technical knowledge to inform current design iterations and establish a unified design approach. Explores and advocates for ways that preexisting and current designs within product areas can have a broader impact for multiple parties (e.g., Microsoft, external/internal customers). Anticipates, reviews, and helps resolve interoperability challenges between different components or layers in the stack (e.g., UX and API layer differences). Develops strategy for designs in the related areas. Facilitates senior-level reviews (e.g., UX, system designs, data designs) with customers (e.g., regulators, engineers, policy makers, business-decision makers) to determine usability and ensure accessibility criteria and updated designs meet customer goals. Identifies requirements that can proactively mitigate risks, such as advanced threat detection and response mechanisms. Incorporates security factors into design, such as logging posture (e.g., what needs to be logged for security investigations), permissions minimization (e.g., least level of permissions required to use product or feature), and having security enabled by default (e.g., resilient against prevalent threats and vulnerabilities without requiring additional configuration by the end user).
Product/Service Performance
Builds trust with a targeted selection of customers across sectors. Orchestrates and automates a line of communication with complex and advanced customers to capture feedback and insights through the product development lifecycle. Ensures the vision is aligned with customer goals. Oversees customer communities and customer engagement programs. Responds to real-time customer feedback in online portals, leveraging AI-driven workflows to improve efficiency. Understands and drives improvements in the support process, including both forums and communities. Utilizes customer personas as a framework and AI-based research to understand customers and communicate effectively.
Identifies features to deprecate based on AI-driven analytics. Develops, articulates, and presents reasoning and tradeoffs involved in deprecations. Leads the deprecation process. Works with Public Relations/Product Marketing on messaging to customers. Communicates change accurately. Leads vision for customer transition.
Serves as an expert to partners (e.g., Data Science, SWE, HWE, User Research) to collect performance metrics (e.g., key performance indicators [KPIs] such as engagement, usage, acquisition, revenue, and in-project features), monitor model deployment and report on progress (e.g., business reviews), and derive deep insights and drives productive courses of action across teams to improve product/feature development, iteration, AI integration, and implementation. Leverages customer listening systems, telemetry, engagements (e.g., interviews, surveys), etc., to develop insights on product performance and customer needs. Shares insights with internal partners (e.g., SWE and HWE). Leverages technical knowledge on API, infrastructure, and/or AI modeling to form hypotheses to crucial technical needs, performs experiments, iterates, and tests to drive improvement/adoption in specific performance metrics that have broad impact on Microsoft and industry wide. Sets and defines success metrics for AI related features and products (e.g., precision/recall, relevance scores).
Additional Responsibilities:
Product Vision & Roadmap: Define and own multi-quarter roadmap; prioritize based on user impact, technical feasibility, and business outcomes.
Success Metrics: Establish OKRs and KPIs; track and report business impact.
End-to-End Execution: Lead product development from requirements to launch and iteration; make evidence-based decisions.
Translate AI to Value: Partner with ML researchers and engineers to turn foundation models, LLMs, and pipelines into customer value.
Experimentation & Analytics: Design A/B tests, telemetry, and analytics; validate hypotheses through data.
Cross-Functional Alignment: Drive alignment across engineering, design, research, legal, and security; communicate effectively at all levels.
Responsible AI: Embed fairness, transparency, privacy, and security into product design and launch criteria.
Customer Engagement: Gather feedback from customers and field teams; advocate for user needs throughout development.
Operational Excellence: Maintain backlog health, release planning, and issue resolution.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree AND 10+ years experience in product/service/program management or software developmentOR equivalent experience.Preferred Qualifications
10+ years of product management or comparable experience, including 4–6+ years building AI/ML or data products at scale.8+ years experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn). 8+ years experience disrupting a market for a product, feature, or experience (e.g., competitive disruption, taking the place of an established competing product). 6+ years experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product market fit, and launch, internal tool/framework). Demonstrated ability to own strategy/roadmap and deliver end-to-end product experiences with clear outcomes. Technical fluency in the ML lifecycle (data, training, evaluation, deployment), model limitations, and tradeoffs; able to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions. Analytical skills; proficiency with experimentation, metrics definition, and interpreting qualitative/quantitative signals. Effective communication and stakeholder management; proven experience influencing across functions and levels. Experienced leveraging AI agent infrastructure to deliver individual and team business aligned value. Background in AI evaluations, data collection pipelines, or ML infrastructure at scale. Experienced leading AI first enterprise-wide transformations in corporate functions.
Product Management IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
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