Principal Product Manager - CTJ - Poly

About the role

Microsoft Specialty Clouds is seeking a Principal Product Manager to join our AI product team. You’ll bridge deep product expertise with the realities customers face when deploying mission-critical solutions across regulated and air-gapped cloud environments. This role involves shaping how Microsoft responds to high-visibility customer needs, clarifying ambiguous requirements, and coordinating engineering and product leaders to accelerate outcomes. You will thrive if you enjoy solving hard problems, influencing across organizational boundaries, and representing Microsoft with clarity, confidence, and credibility in front of demanding partners.

This role leads strategic customer engagements where technical requirements are complex, stakes are high, and rapid clarity is critical. You will translate customer needs, market signals, and technical AI capabilities into measurable business outcomes. The AI product team partners deeply with engineering, compliance, marketing, business development, security, partners, customers, and senior leadership to deliver Microsoft's AI platform in highly regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Anticipate and analyze customer needs across multiple feature areas, using qualitative feedback and telemetry to identify patterns, uncover unmet requirements, and shape actionable problem statements for high-visibility engagements.
• Lead cross-customer and cross-team engagement sessions to collect insights, validate understanding, and ensure technical and business requirements are interpreted correctly for complex, regulated, or air-gapped cloud scenarios.
• Act as a subject matter expert in competitive and market analysis, bringing informed perspectives into customer escalations, scenario design, and tradeoff decisions that influence Microsoft’s direction in sensitive government and industry environments.
• Draft and refine product framing and strategy documents that translate ambiguous customer asks into clear scenarios, user stories, integrated workflows, and roadmap proposals spanning multiple product areas.
• Own roadmap definition for your feature areas, prioritizing backlogs, identifying dependencies, negotiating tradeoffs with engineering partners, and adapting plans as new customer inputs emerge.
• Define and track success and performance metrics for strategic customer engagements, partnering with engineering and data science teams to establish responsible telemetry, analyze outcomes, and drive data-grounded decisions.
• Drive scenarios from private preview through public preview to general availability, partnering with Product Marketing and cross-functional teams to define release criteria, customer-ready narratives, and change management plans.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development OR equivalent experience.
• Active U.S. Government Top Secret Clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) based on a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) with Polygraph.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements pre-offer and post-hire. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance may result in employment action up to and including termination.
• Verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Citizenship will be verified via a valid passport or other approved documents, or verified U.S. government clearance.
• Must pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years of experience in product/service/program management or software development OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience taking a product, feature, or experience to market (e.g., design, addressing product-market fit, and launch), preferably in AI, machine learning, or a related technology domain.
• 6+ years of experience improving product metrics for a product, feature, or experience in a market (e.g., growing customer base, expanding customer usage, avoiding customer churn).
• Strong understanding of generative AI, emerging models, and application patterns.

Pay

The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. A different range applies to specific work locations, including the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, where the base pay range is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.