Product Design Director, Advertiser Experiences

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

2d • $165,600 - $370,800

About The Position

Microsoft AI Monetization is a customer-first organization building the next generation of AI-powered products that help customers achieve their business goals. Our Design, Research & Content team is a creative community on a mission to create holistic experiences for advertisers, publishers, sellers, and consumers. We bring deep user understanding together with business acumen, product craft, and responsible AI to shape the future of advertising and monetization. We are a small, friendly, diverse, and fast-moving creative team that supports one another to do the best work of our lives. We prioritize quality, simplicity, meaningful innovation, polish, and evidence-based decision making. We ship regularly, so your work will have real and immediate impact for customers and for the business.

Advertising is entering a new era. Advertisers increasingly expect products that move beyond manual setup, dashboard interpretation, and fragmented workflow management. They need experiences where they can express business goals, understand options, guide AI systems, supervise automation, approve meaningful actions, and see clear evidence of impact.

We are seeking a Product Design Director to lead the Advertiser design team through this transition. This leader will shape the future of advertiser experiences across campaign creation, onboarding, optimization, reporting, recommendations, planning, and growth workflows. The role requires a leader who can make complex advertising products feel simple, trustworthy, and powerful while helping the organization adopt a more AI-native way of designing and shipping.

This is not only a product design leadership role. It is also an operating-model leadership role. You will shepherd work underway on a new way of working where designers use AI-assisted exploration, code-forward prototyping, evaluation, and design agents to increase the breadth, speed, and quality of design work while keeping human judgment, craft, ethics, and accountability at the center.

Requirements

• Master's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, User Experience, Interaction Design, or related field AND 7+ years experience working in product or service design OR Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, User Experience, Interaction Design, or related field AND 9+ years experience working in product or service design OR equivalent experience (e.g., demonstrated experience working in product or service design or using design thinking to solve problems).
• 5+ years people management experience.

Nice To Haves

• A portfolio that demonstrates strong product thinking, interaction design, visual design, customer empathy, systems thinking, and impact through shipped products.
• Experience setting experience vision, leading design strategy, and influencing product direction across multiple teams or product areas.
• Strong visual and interaction design craft, with the ability to make complex systems feel clear, elegant, and coherent.
• Demonstrated ability to use research, experimentation, analytics, customer signal, and business context to guide design decisions.
• Experience collaborating deeply with product management, engineering, research, and data partners from early product strategy through implementation.
• Experience designing advertising, marketing, commerce, analytics, workflow, enterprise, or marketplace products.
• Experience with AI-powered, agentic, recommendation, automation, or decision-support experiences.
• Fluency in patterns for delegation, supervision, transparency, approvals, error recovery, rollback, auditability, and human-in-the-loop control.
• Experience using AI-assisted design, natural-language-to-code workflows, rapid prototyping, or code-forward exploration as part of product development.
• Experience designing for trust, safety, security, privacy, accessibility, and inclusive design in complex product ecosystems.
• Excellent communication, storytelling, and executive presentation skills, with the ability to energize teams and advocate for ideas with clarity and humility.
• Experience with Figma and modern design collaboration tools; familiarity with prototyping, front-end technologies, or design-system implementation is a plus.
• Experience building team culture, operating models, critique practices, and design-quality mechanisms that help people do their best work.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow Advertiser design team, creating clarity, generating energy, and delivering high-quality results across complex product areas.
• Define the experience vision for advertiser products, translating customer needs, business goals, and product strategy into clear design principles, roadmaps, narratives, and measurable outcomes.
• Design the future of advertiser workflows for an agentic era: goal expression, guided setup, recommendations, automation, supervision, approvals, transparency, confidence, recovery, and ongoing optimization.
• Make complex advertising tasks feel simple and trustworthy across customer segments, including enterprise advertisers, agencies, small and medium businesses, brand marketers, and performance marketers.
• Pioneer an AI-native design operating model that uses AI-assisted exploration, natural-language-to-code prototyping, design agents, synthesis tools, and evaluation loops to accelerate learning and improve quality.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration with product management, engineering, research, data science, business planning, marketing, sales, and support from early strategy through implementation and launch.
• Build a prototype-first design culture where interactive artifacts are used to evaluate ideas, align stakeholders, test assumptions, and improve product decisions before teams commit to build.
• Use research, customer feedback, product data, experimentation, and business signal to identify opportunities, prioritize work, and adjust direction when evidence shows a better path.
• Create experience coherence across advertiser surfaces, connecting campaign creation, account health, optimization, reporting, recommendations, planning, and support into a more unified customer journey.
• Champion responsible AI patterns that make automation legible, controllable, inspectable, reversible, and respectful of customer intent.
• Partner with design systems and engineering leaders to ensure advertiser experiences use reusable patterns, accessible components, clear content models, and scalable product architecture.
• Raise the bar for craft through critique, storytelling, design reviews, inclusive design practices, accessibility standards, and a high-quality portfolio of shipped work.

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director