We’re looking for a Principal Product Manager for a new incubation in the Azure Open-Source Incubations team. We’re part of the CTO’s office and we’re responsible for identifying new product ideas, incubating those ideas, and if they’re successful, handing those incubated ideas off to Azure’s service teams. We work closely with the open-source community as part of our endeavor.

Innovation is trusted work, and, if we’re pushing ourselves to explore new ideas, we’ll find that most of our projects will fail. We’ve created a psychologically safe environment for experimentation and incubation. When we find good ideas, we double down on those ideas, building out the idea into a fully functional product.

We work primarily in the cloud native and distributed computing areas, though other areas are open for investigation as well. Our primary customers are software developers building applications in the cloud or on the edge. Our most recent successful project was Dapr (https://dapr.io/). Dapr was incubated in partnership with the open source community and is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project.

You will be responsible for incubating an early-stage project focusing on making it easy for developers to build applications that respond to changes in streams of data. That data stream could come from a change data capture feed, an IOT stream, or any other stream of data.

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.

• Anticipates customers’ unmet or unknown needs and market opportunities for enhancements or development and new products/services of multiple feature areas.
• Acts as a subject matter expert in performing market or user research in collaboration with the User Research team, conducting competitive analyses, and examining market and industry trends, as well as industry-specific requirements or regulations.
• Leads the process of defining problems and incubating solutions for a team or organization.
• Establishes clarity of patterns of root problem and how it relates with previously seen trends across customers, determines the customers/sectors impacted, foresees future opportunities, and uses research evidence to influence feature prioritization
• Responsibilities include incubating and managing projects from conception through to productization.
• Partners with Software Engineering (SWE), Hardware Engineering (HWE), and senior colleagues on other teams in refinement sessions to synthesize hypothesis results into solutions tied with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) progress.
• Collaborates with partner teams to lead scenario walkthroughs and thought exercises to identify problems, system friction, and needed contingencies in advance of early customer adoption for multiple feature areas (e.g., product, service) across organizational boundaries.