Product Design Manager

Overview

We are a team of UX professionals spanning Product Design, UX Research, Content Design, Technical Writers, and UX Engineering. Together with our PM and Engineering partners, we create product experiences that are trusted, human-centered, and easy to use—enabling our users to manage, protect, and secure their digital environments with peace of mind. 

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

Our team consists of talented and diverse individuals with interesting backgrounds and passions. It’s an environment where creativity and innovation thrive, teamwork is highly valued and where you can solve hard problems through collaboration with a wide range of peers and partners.   

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Principal Product Design Manager to lead UX for Microsoft’s XDR, SIEM, and Security Copilot experiences across the Defender product suite. In this pivotal role, you will shape the design strategy for mission-critical security tools that empower practitioners—from SOC analysts to CISOs—to protect their organizations with confidence.

You will guide a talented team of designers, fostering a culture of innovation, inclusion, and excellence. Partnering closely with engineering, product, and research, you’ll drive an AI-first approach to design, delivering intuitive, scalable solutions that help customers detect, investigate, and respond to threats across their digital estate.

This role demands a leader who thrives in complexity, champions customer empathy, and brings deep expertise in enterprise product design. Your work will directly support Microsoft’s mission to make the world a safer place—by protecting users, organizations, and the broader ecosystem from evolving cybersecurity threats.

Responsibilities

• Deliver world-class design solutions from initial concept through finished product 
• Provide insightful perspectives and ideas that will help shape the direction of company-wide investments in the security space.
• Advocate for your design solutions by putting them in context of business, user goals, and ecosystem considerations.
• Incorporate system and framework thinking and pattern-matching into solutions to reinforce integrity of design system and product cohesion 
• Contribute to the visual systems and visual language for a product.
• Work closely and constructively with product management, content designers, user researchers, engineers and other designers to iterate and deliver design artifacts and solutions.
• Create wireframes, journey maps, prototypes and detailed mockups to iterate on product scenarios. 
• Seek out and incorporate the feedback of the design team to refine your designs and align to larger product patterns.
• Clearly communicate your work to peers and leadership.
• Work alongside leadership team members to create compelling narratives for a specific product or feature and develop product architectures and systems.
• Contribute to evaluating and prioritizing work.
• Ship world-class applications that delight technical roles with an emphasis on AI, craft, quality, trust, and positive user and societal impact.
• Own multiple product areas, identify new opportunities and generate innovative through deep customer understanding, ensuring the experience vision is driven by user needs and manage launches and iterations.
• Find your own path to get things done despite roadblocks to get your work into the hands of users quickly and iteratively.
• Cross-functional and cross-divisional communication and dependency management, scoping and scheduling, and seeing through implementation by collaborating with engineering through the finish line.
• Thrive in a complex, design-driven, product development cycle. Measure success with data and research.
• Embody our culture and values
• Travel: 10%
  
  

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 8+ years experience working in product or service design
• OR Master's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 6+ years experience working in product or service design
• OR equivalent experience (e.g., experience using design thinking to solve problems).
• 6+ years experience in a variety of design tools (especially Figma) and processes such as journey mapping and design sprints/workshops
• 8+ years hands-on experience creating detailed wireframes (both low and high fidelity), polished design prototypes and other design artifacts in a fast-paced, cutting-edge technology environment
• Comfortable with ambiguity, design tradeoffs and shifting priorities.
• Creative and holistic problem solver with a sharp eye for details.
• Creating and applying established design principles and interaction patterns. Experience using design components and pattern libraries.
• Experience with Security domain.
• Demonstrated breadth across interaction design, information architecture, usability
• Excellent interpersonal communication and visual storytelling skills 
• Able to scope and estimate efforts accurately and prioritize workload independently 
  

Preferred, Not Required

• Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 10+ years experience working in product or service design
• OR Master's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 8+ years experience working in product or service design
• OR equivalent experience (e.g., experience using design thinking to solve problems).
• Awareness of inclusive design and how it supports Microsoft’s mission.
• Familiar with agile or lean methodologies.
• Experience designing user experiences for cloud software and services and/or IT professionals.
• Experience, understanding, and knowledge of Artificial Intelligence.
• Experience with OpenAI/ChatGPT.
• Understanding of Large Language Model (LLM).
  
  

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.