Principal Product Manager

Microsoft Copilot is transforming how people take on their most complex work, from in-depth research to getting things done. The Copilot Chat Innovation team is turning breakthrough capabilities into experiences people rely on every day for their most important work, such as long-running tasks that are dependable from first prompt to final outcome and research reports that set the standard for depth and accuracy at work. The team is solving hard product and technical problems across planning, orchestration, multistep reasoning, source discovery and synthesis, report quality, transparency, user control, safety, privacy, latency, and cost.

We are looking for a Principal Product Manager to lead strategic initiatives across Copilot Chat. One of the first areas you will take on is long-running research tasks. You will own how Copilot takes on research, from scoped questions through source discovery, analysis, synthesis, and citations to shareable reports and the actions that follow. This role requires exceptional technical fluency, end-to-end product judgment, and a proven ability to build and ship AI-powered experiences from the ground up. You will set direction across customer scenarios, product experiences, platform capabilities, and AI quality; translate ambiguous customer and technical problems into a durable strategy and execution plan; and align engineering, applied science, design, user research, security, privacy, and partner teams across Microsoft to deliver measurable customer impact. You will also establish and sustain senior cross-organization relationships with teams driving critical parts of these experiences, including the Copilot Chat organization, Work IQ, and Microsoft 365.

Beyond these initiatives, you will shape how the broader Copilot Chat Innovation team operates. You will drive the team's rhythm of business and planning, set priorities and ownership, and run the reviews that keep a fast-moving team aligned. This structure is what lets the team turn bold ideas into innovative, high-quality experiences at scale.

The ideal candidate combines customer obsession with systems thinking and organizational leadership: someone who can move comfortably from long-term product strategy and user scenarios to task-completion and report-quality metrics, experiment design, orchestration tradeoffs, and executive-level decisions. You will operate with high autonomy, lead through ambiguity, and create clarity across organizational boundaries.

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

• Own product strategy, multi-year roadmap, and execution for strategic initiatives in Copilot Chat, starting with long-running research tasks, connecting customer scenarios to platform investments and measurable outcomes across multiple products and organizations.

• Define and ship end-to-end AI experiences from the ground up for new Copilot Chat capabilities, such as how Copilot plans and carries out long-running research, synthesizes sources into structured, source-cited reports, takes action with the user's approval, and keeps users in control, taking capabilities from early concept and technical exploration through experimentation, launch, and scaled operation.

• Translate customer needs, usage and feedback signals, support themes, and competitive insights into a differentiated product strategy and durable platform-level requirements, balancing near-term delivery with long-term architecture and ecosystem leverage.

• Lead the product quality and evaluation strategy for your area, including representative scenario sets, rubrics, offline evaluations, synthetic or controlled test environments, online metrics, experiment design, regression protection, and failure analysis.

• Partner closely with engineering and applied science on technical choices across planning, orchestration, tool use, retrieval and grounding, context management, long-running execution and recovery, latency, cost, and model behavior; make clear tradeoffs and drive decisions.

• Establish success measures spanning task completion, output quality and comprehensiveness, engagement, customer satisfaction, trust, safety, performance, and operational health.

• Drive trustworthy product design through transparency, visible plans and progress, source citations and explanations, user controls to stop or steer work, approval for consequential actions, auditability, privacy, Responsible AI, and enterprise compliance requirements.

• Build and sustain senior cross-company relationships across Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365, Work IQ, agents, platform, design, user research, security, privacy, marketing, and customer-facing teams; align independent roadmaps, resolve high-impact dependencies, and drive shared decisions across organizational boundaries.

• Communicate strategy, quality insights, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations crisply to senior leaders and stakeholders, and shape executive decisions.

• Drive the broader Copilot Chat Innovation team's rhythm of business: lead planning, set priorities and clear ownership, and run the product reviews and operating cadences that help the team ship innovative, high-quality experiences with speed and accountability.

• Model AI-forward product leadership through rapid learning, prototyping, data-informed iteration, direct customer engagement, and active mentorship of product managers; raise the quality bar for strategy, execution, and AI evaluation across the broader team.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience owning a large, complex product scope and delivering end-to-end software products, AI-powered features, or platform capabilities with measurable customer or business impact.
• Technical fluency in building and evaluating AI products, with the ability to work deeply with engineering and applied science partners from early technical exploration through production launch and iteration.
• Experience using data, telemetry, experimentation, product evaluations, or structured quality methods to make product decisions and improve outcomes.
• Demonstrated product judgment across customer scenarios, user journeys, interaction design, prioritization, and platform tradeoffs.
• Experience translating customer feedback and market or competitive signals into clear product requirements and roadmaps.
• Demonstrated ability to build trusted cross-organization relationships, align and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority, and drive strategy and execution through significant ambiguity and interdependent roadmaps.
• Experience driving a product team's rhythm of business, including planning, prioritization, ownership, and review cadences, in ways that measurably improved the team's speed and quality.
• Technical fluency in building AI/ML platforms or products.
• Experience taking a zero-to-one AI capability from customer problem definition and technical exploration through experimentation, launch, and scaled operation; experience with agentic systems, long-running or multistep tasks, orchestration, tool use, research and report generation, search and retrieval, RAG/grounding, or conversational AI is especially relevant.
• Experience shipping enterprise AI experiences with privacy, security, compliance, governance, safety, and Responsible AI requirements.
• Experience with Microsoft 365, Copilot, or enterprise productivity products and the needs of both end users and tenant administrators.
• Solid executive presence and storytelling skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical, product, and organizational issues into clear decisions, commitments, and action.
• A self-directed, resilient, and collaborative working style; curiosity, attention to detail, and a bias toward learning and execution.

#CAP #Copilot

Product Management IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.