OverviewMinecraft is one of the world's most enduring entertainment franchises, spanning game experiences, creator ecosystems, live services, consumer products, transmedia, and community moments that reach players around the globe. The Minecraft team is looking for a Principal Product Manager to shape product strategy, roadmap clarity, and cross-studio execution for franchise-wide initiatives that require tight alignment across Minecraft Online, game teams, publishing, franchise, and partner organizations.
In this role, you will translate ambiguous, multi-team opportunities into clear product strategy, customer outcomes, investment priorities, roadmap plans, success metrics, and launch-ready decisions.
You will partner across Microsoft Gaming Experiences (MGE), Franchise, Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing, Business Development, Licensing, Legal, Operations, Analytics, and studio leadership to ensure high-priority initiatives are customer-centered, strategically sequenced, measurable, and delivered with clarity. The ideal candidate is an experienced product leader who brings structured thinking to complex work, anticipates trade-offs, drives decision-making, and helps teams align from early strategy through execution, launch readiness, and post-launch learning.
Responsibilities1.
Product Operating Model & Portfolio Clarity- Maintain product operating rhythms, portfolio views, decision forums, roadmap artifacts, status updates, and escalation paths across Minecraft Online (MCO) that help distributed teams make crisp decisions and execute predictably.
- Drive alignment across multiple initiatives at different stages of maturity, from early opportunity framing and intake through prioritization, greenlight, delivery, go-to-market, launch, and retrospectives.
- Ensure cross-functional partners have the customer context, product rationale, timing, trade-offs, and decisions needed to deliver franchise moments and studio commitments with quality.
2.
Franchise & MCO/MGE Product Coordination - Partner with Franchise, Marketing, Consumer Products, Licensing, Business Development, Legal, and studio teams to identify product dependencies, sequence work, clarify customer and business impact, and support integrated execution plans.
3.
Prioritization, Risk & Decision Management - Proactively identify customer, business, schedule, resourcing, technical, partner, legal, compliance, and operational risks; drive mitigations and clear product recommendations.
- Maintain dependency maps across teams and workstreams, ensuring critical path items and product decisions are visible, tracked, and resolved before they impact quality, delivery, or customer outcomes.
- Facilitate crisp decision-making by framing options, trade-offs, owners, deadlines, customer impact, business impact, and execution implications for leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.
4.
Product Communication & Team Effectiveness - Create executive-ready communications that synthesize complex product work into clear strategy, progress updates, risks, decisions, metrics, and next steps.
- Support a culture of accountability, transparency, inclusion, customer focus, and high-quality execution across geographically distributed and cross-discipline teams.
- Continuously improve product planning and operating practices by applying data, retrospectives, operational metrics, stakeholder feedback, and lessons learned across the portfolio.
Qualifications- Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development
- OR equivalent experience.
- 1+ year(s) people management experience.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience in games, live services, entertainment franchises, consumer products, publishing, creator ecosystems, marketplaces, or digital experiences.
- 10+ years in product management, program management, product operations, or related roles.
- 5+ years leading complex, cross-functional product initiatives across multiple teams, disciplines, or organizations.
- Experience driving product strategy, roadmap planning, prioritization, dependency management, stakeholder alignment, metrics, and execution for large-scale products, services, games, or entertainment initiatives.
- Experience coordinating product work across product, engineering, design, marketing, business development, legal, licensing, analytics, operations, and executive stakeholders.
- Proven product leadership skills, including customer insight, roadmap strategy, success metrics, launch readiness, portfolio tracking, decision framing, executive communication, and operational rigor.
- Ability to bring clarity to ambiguity, influence without authority, and drive accountability across distributed teams and stakeholders.
- Passion for games and deep empathy for Minecraft players, creators, partners, communities, and the teams that serve them.
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Product Management M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.
