Principal Product Manager

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

1d•$142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft is seeking a Principal Product Manager to lead strategy, roadmap, and end-to-end execution for the platform underlying Work IQ MCP (Model Context Protocol) and its provider ecosystem, with an emphasis on retrieval and federated MCP servers. The role will shape how agents discover and retrieve evidence across indexed content and live sources, and how providers bring capabilities into Work IQ while supporting domain fidelity, security, reliability, and performance. This is a deeply technical, cross-organizational individual contributor role. The Principal Product Manager will work autonomously through ambiguity across evolving product areas, balancing long-term strategy with hands-on execution from delivery through adoption and continuous improvement. The role translates complex product, architecture, customer, and ecosystem needs into clear decisions and executable plans, and leads through influence across organizational boundaries while coordinating work and maintaining accountability for product outcomes. The role also works directly with customers, developers, partners, and consuming teams to understand scenarios and turn feedback into platform improvements that benefit multiple consumers.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree and 8+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development, or equivalent experience.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree and 12+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development, or equivalent experience.
Experience leading technical platform, API, search, data, developer, SaaS, or PaaS products from product definition through delivery, production adoption, and continuous improvement.
Experience leading through influence across organizational boundaries, coordinating work and dependencies across teams while maintaining accountability for end-to-end product outcomes.
Experience operating autonomously through ambiguity across evolving product areas and translating complex customer, technical, and business needs into product decisions, prioritized roadmaps, and executable requirements.
Experience engaging directly with customers, developers, or partners to understand scenarios and translate feedback into scalable product improvements.
Experience making product decisions involving APIs, distributed systems, identity and authorization, service reliability, or comparable technical platform considerations.
Experience defining or evaluating search, retrieval, data, or information-access experiences and making tradeoffs involving quality, coverage, freshness, latency, reliability, or cost.
Experience using telemetry, customer insights, experiments, evaluations, or other qualitative and quantitative evidence to guide product decisions and measure outcomes.
Experience or familiarity with enterprise search, retrieval or retrieval-augmented generation, AI/LLM-based agents, MCP or similar integration protocols, federated data access, developer platforms, or provider ecosystems. Direct MCP or AI-agent product experience is preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the strategy and prioritized roadmap for Work IQ’s shared platform and provider ecosystem, translating customer, developer, and business needs into scalable capabilities and investment priorities.
Drive execution through delivery, adoption, and continuous improvement.
Define product requirements and success measures for retrieval relevance, source coverage, freshness, citations, provenance, and structured evidence for consuming agents.
Partner with engineering and applied science to define how indexed retrieval and live federated sources work together, including source selection, result normalization, ranking, latency, reliability, and partial-failure experiences.
Establish requirements for source references, discovery, and integration patterns that let agents move reliably from retrieved evidence to authorized fetches or actions.
Define provider onboarding, capability and schema discovery, compatibility expectations, lifecycle management, and readiness requirements.
Partner with engineering, security, and governance teams to define requirements for identity, authorization, tenant policy, auditability, observability, reliability, and controlled rollout.
Delegate and coordinate work across provider, consumer, product, and engineering teams outside the direct reporting structure; navigate competing requirements and dependencies, drive follow-through, and maintain end-to-end accountability for outcomes.
Engage directly with customers, developers, and partners to understand scenarios, evaluate product and integration experiences, answer product questions, gather feedback, and turn recurring insights into scalable improvements.
Use telemetry, evaluations, customer insights, and production evidence to improve retrieval quality, adoption, reliability, performance, and cost.