Principal Product Manager
Microsoft · Posted Sep 17
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
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About the role
Our team builds and owns the quality of some of the most widely used AI and search experiences in Microsoft 365 — Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and enterprise search across Outlook, Teams, OneDrive/SharePoint and Copilot Search — serving billions of queries every month. In-app search is a strategic surface used daily by hundreds of millions of people to find the messages, files, and context their work depends on. As a Principal Product Manager, you will drive cross-organization efforts to make our enterprise search experience across Teams and Outlook best in class, defining what great search means, establishing how we measure it, and holding the bar across a large stakeholder group.
What you will do
- Own the quality bar for Outlook and Teams search: define benchmarks, run controlled comparisons, and turn gaps into prioritized investments.
- Set targets for search success, click-through, no-result rates, and satisfaction, and drive sustained improvement.
- Use feedback, satisfaction comments, query patterns, and support signals to identify a few high-confidence bets.
- Own the cross-surface backlog, prioritizing by user impact, competitive gap, cost, and capacity with clear rationale.
- Resolve tradeoffs—recall versus precision, latency versus quality, and short-term fixes versus platform investment—and document decisions.
- Clarify partner-team ownership: who leads, consults, and executes jointly.
- Lead joint planning and leadership reviews across shipped, in-flight, at-risk work, and overall trajectory.
- Guide and unblock product managers across teams, raising the bar on product craft and data-informed decisions.
- Represent the area to executives, owning the framing, content, and discussion.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 10+ years of product management experience, including significant experience owning a large, matrixed product area end to end.
- Demonstrated impact on a large-scale search, relevance, ranking, or information retrieval product.
- Deep data fluency — able to interrogate telemetry and evaluation data directly, not only consume dashboards, and to distinguish real signal from noise.
- Proven ability to define measurement systems, both offline evaluations and online metrics, and drive an organization to a quality goal against them.
- Strong judgement under ambiguity, with the confidence to make consequential calls on incomplete information and be accountable for them.
- Exceptional written and verbal storytelling, connecting the why to the what for both an engineering specification and an executive review.
- Track record of influencing across organizational boundaries without authority in a highly matrixed environment.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with semantic retrieval, ranking models, query understanding, or model-based evaluation.
- Experience building and shipping generative AI product experiences at scale.
- Experience with competitive benchmarking in productivity or collaboration software.
- Experience mentoring product managers or leading through others.
Benefits and support
- 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, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational technology company that develops, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products, services, and hardware devices. Best known for its Windows operating systems, Microsoft 365 productivity suite, and Xbox gaming consoles, the company has expanded heavily into enterprise cloud computing via Azure and advanced artificial intelligence solutions. As one of the world's most valuable public enterprises, it empowers individuals and businesses globally through innovative digital transformation.
- Industry
- Software
- Company size
- 228,000+ employees
- Founded
- April 4, 1975
- Location
- Redmond, Washington, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Vice Chair and President
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