Principal Product Manager

Microsoft•Apply•Published 4 hours ago•First seen 3 hours ago

Overview

The Engineering Workforce Strategy and Operations team is seeking a Principal Product Manager — a deeply technical product leader operating at the intersection of product management and technical product management — to help shape and drive the product for RAMP (Resource Allocation Management Platform) , Microsoft’s internal, AI-powered workforce resource management and planning platform that is rapidly becoming the foundation for how engineering organizations understand resources at scale. Working in close partnership with platform leadership and engineering you keep the product tightly connected to the people who rely on it — L1 executive offices, business managers, and finance partners — translating their needs into what the team builds and ensuring their feedback drives continuous improvement.

This is a rare opportunity to shape a platform at the center of Microsoft’s transformation toward AI-driven business operations. As the system of record for workforce planning across core engineering divisions — including E+D, Microsoft Security, T&R, Microsoft AI, and Core AI Platform — RAMP sits at the intersection of Engineering, HR, and Finance, powering decisions that directly impact how teams are built, funded, and executed. As the platform scales, this role helps steer RAMP from traditional reporting to agentic, intelligent, predictive, and increasingly autonomous planning — enabling real-time visibility, forward-looking insights, and streamlined decision-making across thousands of users and complex organizational structures.

As a Principal Product Manager, you are a senior product leader on the platform team. You help define the multi-year product strategy and set a high bar for how the team builds. You are well connected into AI roadmaps of teams across the company, and able to assess and understand how it should shape RAMP’s roadmap and expectations of our internal customers. This is a highly technical product role: you are fluent in system architecture, data platforms, and AI/agentic patterns, and you are as comfortable in an architecture review as you are in an executive business review. You are a systems thinker who sees how data, AI, and workflows come together, and you are experienced in transforming teams to build products in agile ways, with pace and urgency.

This position is based in Redmond, Washington and requires the employee be in the office a minimum of 3 days per week.

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

Product Strategy & Roadmap: Help shape and drive the product strategy and roadmap for RAMP’s AI-driven platform. Articulate how new capabilities (e.g., predictive headcount forecasting, agentic workflow automation, AI-powered data insights, and increasingly autonomous planning) solve real business problems and create durable value for users across divisions. Maintain and prioritize a roadmap that balances near-term delivery with long-term platform bets, keeping it aligned with Microsoft’s broader “AI-first” business operations strategy and grounded in real customer needs.
Technical Strategy & Architecture Partnership: Operate as the technical counterpart to the engineering team, jointly owning the platform’s technical direction. Partner on architecture, service boundaries, data models, and build-vs-buy decisions, making explicit trade-offs between speed and scale, customization and standardization. Translate ambitious product direction into a durable, extensible architecture; author technical specifications and shape the engineering approach with enough depth to be a credible peer in design and architecture reviews. Ensure the platform can evolve as new AI capabilities, data sources, and business needs emerge.
AI, Agentic & Data Integration: Champion the intelligent use of data and AI within the product. Ensure RAMP continues to leverage Microsoft’s latest technologies (e.g., Power Platform, Dataverse, Fabric, and modern AI/agent frameworks) for a robust, scalable foundation. Define the strategy for embedding predictive models, anomaly detection, intelligent workflows, and increasingly autonomous, agentic capabilities — working hand in hand with data engineering, analytics, and applied AI teams. Establish patterns for data governance, lineage, and quality that keep the platform trusted at scale.
User Experience, Voice of the Customer & Adoption: Keep the platform user-centric for business managers, chiefs of staff, and finance — for tasks like updating targets, submitting PCN/headcount requests, or retrieving reports. Institutionalize continuous discovery (user interviews, telemetry, and pilots for new divisions) and act as a voice of the customer: aggregate and synthesize feedback across onboarded orgs and relay it to engineering to prioritize enhancements and validate features against real needs. Partner with customer success and program management to accelerate adoption — promoting new capabilities (e.g., PCN automation, headcount dashboards, AI agents), reducing reliance on parallel spreadsheets and offline reporting, and supporting a champion/power-user community as the user base grows.
Operational Excellence: Ensure RAMP meets the highest standards of reliability, security, and privacy, given it handles sensitive workforce data. Proactively partner with IT and Security on compliance, access controls for HR data, and privacy reviews for AI components. Set the bar for platform performance, data integrity, and auditability so users trust the tool’s accuracy and availability, and maintain a disciplined balance across new capability, quality, and technical-debt reduction.
Metrics & Impact Measurement: Establish the product and customer-success metrics that define success — user engagement and satisfaction, adoption maturity, reduction in manual processes and errors, approval cycle time, decision speed, and data quality. Continuously analyze usage data and customer feedback to assess the impact of launched features, present findings to senior stakeholders, and use data to celebrate wins, course-correct on design, and inform roadmap decisions.
Leadership & Influence: Serve as a senior product voice within the RAMP team and a trusted partner across the company. Help set product-management practices and operating rhythms for the team, and influence technical and business direction across multiple organizations through trust and expertise rather than direct authority. Communicate direction, status, and trade-offs clearly to audiences ranging from engineers in stand-ups to executive sponsors in business reviews. Mentor and develop product managers on the team, and embody Microsoft’s leadership principles by fostering a culture of collaboration, customer obsession, and continuous improvement.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Engineering, HR, Finance, and partner teams to turn the roadmap into reality. Gather requirements from business managers, HR partners, and Finance stakeholders to deeply understand workforce-planning pain points, translate them into clear feature specifications and technical requirements, and partner with engineers and analysts through development cycles to build, refine, and de-risk delivery.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
- OR equivalent experience.
1+ year(s) people management 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 Qualification:

Product Leadership Experience: 10+ years of product management — or a combination of product management and technical product management — experience in tech, including a proven track record of helping shape platform strategy and delivering large-scale, enterprise-grade products in complex, cross-functional environments. Experience defining and standing up a new product or platform (0→1 and 1→N) is strongly preferred.
Deep Technical Depth: Strong technical foundation across system architecture, data platforms, and distributed systems — enough to partner as a true peer to principal engineers, contribute to architecture and design reviews, and make sound technical trade-offs. Hands-on fluency with data and analytics tooling (e.g., Power BI, SQL/databases, Fabric, Dataverse) and with modern AI/agent frameworks and APIs.
AI & Agentic Product Expertise: Demonstrated experience shaping AI-driven and increasingly autonomous, agentic capabilities in enterprise products — such as forecasting, intelligent automation, and data-driven insights — and establishing the data governance and quality foundations that make them trustworthy.
Internal / Operational Platforms: Experience building or scaling internal business platforms or operational systems that serve the enterprise.
Customer-Centered Execution: Demonstrated experience driving adoption of a platform or product — gathering and synthesizing voice-of-customer feedback, partnering on onboarding and enablement, and translating customer and business challenges into clear product requirements.
Cross-Organizational Influence: Proven ability to align engineers, designers, and business stakeholders around a common goal, and to influence technical and product direction across multiple teams and organizations without direct authority.
Executive Communication: Exceptional communicator who moves fluidly from deep technical discussion to executive storytelling. Capable of articulating complex ideas simply for diverse audiences (engineers, HR partners, executives), and adept at using data and narrative to drive consensus and inspire confidence in the product direction.
Bias for Action & Agility: Self-starter who thrives with autonomy, ambiguity, and greenfield problems. Sets pace and urgency, transforms how teams build toward agile, fast-paced delivery, and drives projects to completion while balancing multiple priorities.
Growth Mindset & Innovation: Passionate about learning and applying new technologies (AI, automation, agentic systems) to solve business problems. Embraces failures as learning opportunities and stays current on industry trends in product management and enterprise AI to continually bring fresh ideas to the platform.
Data & BI Platforms: Depth with data platforms, analytics systems, or BI tools, including Fabric, Power BI, and Dataverse.
Workforce & Financial Planning: Understanding of workforce planning, headcount systems, or financial planning processes.
Sensitive Data Environments: Experience operating in highly sensitive data environments (privacy- and compliance-heavy systems).
Technical Partnership: Experience operating as, or in close partnership with platform engineering teams.
Customer Success & Change Management: Experience designing or running adoption and customer-success motions (onboarding frameworks, adoption maturity models, health scoring, feedback loops), or with change-management methodologies such as Prosci/ADKAR.

Product Management M5 - 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.