Director of Product Strategy, Commerce

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

1d•$130,900 - $272,300•Hybrid

About The Position

Microsoft Commerce is making significant investments in Consumer, Merchant, Partner, and Payments, navigating a market transformed by agentic commerce and competition over governing protocols and payer models. This role is for a Director of Product Strategy, Commerce who will be responsible for the analytical and narrative foundation of Commerce strategy. This individual will analyze the agentic-commerce landscape and Microsoft's position within it, quantify opportunities, define strategic bets, and validate business models. The role serves as an individual contributor, amplifying the VP's impact by setting new strategic directions for pillar teams. The position requires holding the complete Commerce picture, making defensible decisions on what to bet on, who pays and why, the potential prize size, and crafting a compelling narrative for review. The ideal candidate will possess a first-principles approach to business models and market opportunities, bring structure to high-stakes product decisions, and translate complex analysis into a clear, defensible narrative. Impact is driven by the quality of thought and clarity of decision, not team size. The role encompasses strategy across the entire Commerce portfolio, including market and competitive strategy, monetization and business model design, opportunity sizing and forecasting, decision frameworks for major bets, cross-thread synthesis for a unified strategy, and narrative development for senior stakeholder communication.

Requirements

Master's Degree in Business Administration or related field AND 4+ years marketing, strategy, business planning, consulting, banking, finance, economics, and/or partner organization experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Liberal Arts, Computer Science, or related field AND 6+ years marketing, strategy, business planning, consulting, banking, finance, economics, and/or partner organization experience OR equivalent experience.
10+ years in product strategy, corporate strategy, strategy consulting, investing (PE / VC / banking), or a strategy-heavy product leadership role, with depth on platform or marketplace businesses.
Business-model & monetization judgment: a demonstrated record of reasoning from first principles about who pays and why, and designing monetization that works.
Opportunity sizing & forecasting: can build a credible market or monetization model from the ground up and defend every assumption.
Decision frameworks: a track record of bringing structure to large, ambiguous product or investment decisions.
Commerce domain depth: genuine fluency in the economics of retail, marketplaces, and payments — productive on day one.
Narrative synthesis: turns dense analysis into one clear, defensible story that moves a senior room.
Excellent communication and executive-influence skills.
Direct experience in agentic commerce, digital payments, or commerce platforms, and familiarity with the emerging commerce-protocol landscape.
Fluency in AI / LLM product economics and how they reshape unit costs and monetization.
Experience shaping investment or funding cases that cleared a senior bar.

Nice To Haves

Master's Degree in Business Administration or related field AND 8+ years marketing, strategy, business planning, consulting, banking, finance, economics, and/or partner organization experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance, Economics, Liberal Arts, Computer Science, or related field AND 12+ years marketing, strategy, business planning, consulting, banking, finance, economics, and/or partner organization experience OR equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Own a current, first-principles POV on the agentic-commerce market, the protocol landscape (for example ACP, UCP, AP2, MCP), and where Microsoft’s advantage is real.
Design and pressure-test monetization: the payer model across Consumer, Merchant, and Partner, the methods, and the sequencing.
Build the opportunity models and forecasts that let the org rank bets and defend investment asks with numbers, including ARR- and ROI-based justification.
Bring repeatable decision frameworks to major product bets so the reasoning is structured and legible.
Synthesize the Consumer, Merchant, Partner, and Payments threads into one coherent strategy and surface where they conflict.
Turn the analysis into the strategy spine — the MMM narrative, FY strategy papers, and investment cases — and prep the VP with a sharp POV and the two or three things that would change it.
Operate as a peer to senior leaders: form a POV, defend it, and change it on evidence.