Principal Product Manager
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 23, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 14, 2026. Microsoft scores B on the Alion truth index.
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. This is a broad, matrixed charter spanning our search quality team, the Outlook and Teams product teams, and our relevance, applied science, and platform partners.
You will define what great search means across these surfaces, establish how we measure it, and hold the bar across a large stakeholder group. You will be accountable for the outcome: moving user sentiment, search success, and engagement in a market where expectations are set by the best search experiences our customers use every day.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
Responsibilities
Benchmark and improve quality against key competitors
- 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.
Identify top opportunities to improve sentiment and engagement
- Use feedback, satisfaction comments, query patterns, and support signals to identify a few high-confidence bets.
Drive prioritization, tradeoffs, and strategic clarity
- 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.
Lead across the organization
- 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.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
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.
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.