Overview:

If you’re passionate about how technology can improve people’s lives, like exploring new ideas and product possibilities, and lead with a growth mindset, we want to hear from you!

The Microsoft AI Design & Research team is a creative community of designers, researchers, prototypers, and writers on a mission to create and deliver holistic, AI-powered customer experiences across apps and the web. Between Copilot, Edge, Bing, MSN, and apps, we’re creating end-to-end experiences for assistance, shopping, search, ads, news, sports, and gaming. Our diverse team works collaboratively and moves fast to build useful, usable, and delightful experiences for billions of customers worldwide. Learn more about our team here.

We are seeking a Research Operations (Res Ops) program manager for our team to help our UX Researchers do the most impactful work possible. For this role we’re looking for someone who can help our team improve our research processes, manage our relationships with vendors, navigate the contracting process, and bring more velocity and happiness to the team. Someone who is un-blockable and finds creative new approaches when obstacles come up. Someone who always puts people and the team first, no matter how challenging things get. Someone who is energized by making everyone around them better.

If this sounds like you, please apply!

Responsibilities:

• Engage, partner, and collaborate with research team members, leadership, and key stakeholders to proactively identify opportunities to leverage programming and AI automation to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and the impact of research insights for our team.
• Communicate operational goals and strategy. Design and launch programs that reduce process friction and enhance researcher impact and satisfaction.
• Define, measure and manage strategic initiatives that improve team efficiency and impact, establishing operational systems and outcomes.
• Contribute to overall research operations infrastructure, updating processes and tools and initiating improvements where needed.
• Proactively manage expectations: define clear program roadmaps, provide frequent program updates, identify and communicate risks and adjustments, and ensure commitments are delivered.
• Support knowledge management by helping centralize, document, and maintain internal processes and resources, tracking of research deliverables and capacity, etc.
• Drive year over year tooling and supplier management contracts, management, administration and pricing and forecasting to ensure we have the best platforms and tools to conduct user research. Management of budget, expenses, and compliance with financial policies.
• Cross-functional coordination, partnering with finance, legal, procurement to keep UXR running smoothly.
• Coordination with Creative Ops team, including Design Operations and Business Management to keep entire productive and customer-focused.

Qualifications:

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree AND 4+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience

• 2+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Extensive knowledge of UX research methods.

• 5+ years relevant domain experience within technology sector.

• Excellent collaboration skills across disciplines

• PM, Data Science, Engineering, and Product Design. Enthusiasm to partner on key goals and evolve the program based on feedback.

• Superb communication skills to convey complex ideas and insights across cross-disciplinary audiences, along with strong presentation, project management and process management skills.

• Experience leading horizontal initiatives and scaling Res Ops impact spanning across multiple cross-disciplinary teams.

• Understanding of trends in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Passion for learning new technologies and understanding the needs of users across a wide range of technical abilities.

• Deep understanding of user research tools like Qualtrics, Dscout, and User Testing and experience with new AI-first research tools.

• Experience with business applications and enterprise product research.

• Experience scaling research through enablement.

• Experience leveraging data to inform decisions and drive change.

• Track record of operating independently and taking initiative, embracing ambiguity, demonstrating creativity, being detail-oriented, and delivering results in an organized manner.

• Budgeting, forecasting and ability to analyze data and performance to support decision-making.

• Extensive experience coordinating across departments (Finance, HR, Ops, etc) and vendor management, contracts, and procurement.

Technical Program Management IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

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

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.