Job Description

About the company and the team

At Microsoft, we have bold ambitions: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. To make that a reality, the Cloud + AI DesignOps team is charged with driving the strategy that turns a product vision into action. How? By designing inclusive environments that promote creative exploration and building productivity frameworks that allow Design to operate at the peak of efficiency and effectiveness.

About the role

Microsoft Cloud + AI Design Studio is looking for a customer-focused Design Producer II to join the DesignOps team to help drive design for the AI Platform Experience (AIPX) Team within the Cloud + AI division.

Our team's vision is to create professional, seamless, and friction-free experiences that enable our customers to work less and accomplish more. We strive to transform Microsoft's powerful and complex technologies into experiences that customers will love.

The producer role will collaborate across multiple disciplines and partner cross-functionally with multiple organizations: Marketing, Engineering, Product Management, Data Science, and with Senior Leadership team. Producers excel at creating clarity and driving design excellence in often-changing and ambiguous environments.

Design Producer manages three key areas:

Design Program Management -- the Producer works closely with our Design Leads to drive our operational strategy and raise the bar of our practice. This includes building and overseeing our roadmap, and supporting organizational development efforts such as hiring, onboarding, and career development.

Creative Operations -- the Producer partners with Design Managers and works closely with designers to create and refine briefs, facilitate design reviews, and explore better ways to prototype creative solutions, ensuring we are building the best solutions for the right problems at the right time.

Production Operations -- the Producer is responsible for creating efficiencies in the design and production process, enabling designers to stay focused on delivering high quality work on time. On the AIPX UX team, this includes staff and resource planning, vendor management, and everything else that goes into delivering the work that our team does.

As a Design Producer 2, you will have the following responsibilities:

* Support Design, Engineering and PM partners to drive design deliverables for each product cycle
* Drive the design team's rhythm of business and operations
* Evaluate the team's design process to find efficiencies and create supporting documentation
* Partner with design leads to identify capacity and help forecast for design workloads; allocate work to design contributors accordingly
* Manage design work items, scope and requirements, work-back calendar/schedules, and design deliverables
* Facilitate design reviews and ensure action items are captured and communicated
* Keep a pulse on team health and morale; generate positive energy
* Propose new tools and process to optimize on cross team collaboration

Required:

* Strong communication and organizational skills
* 3-5 years of relevant experience
* Experience managing projects and coordinating the efforts of multiple teams across the business
* Self-starter with demonstrable understanding of user experience and design
* Understands how to utilize design specialties and how/when to integrate with partnering teams (PM, engineering, data science, marketing, and content teams)
* Customer-centric mindset with a solid understating of the importance of qualitative and quantitative research

Preferred:

* Familiarity and working knowledge of current design or management tools (Figma, Sketch, Invision, Adobe suite, Jira, Azure DevOps, and others)
* Awareness of inclusive design and how it supports Microsoft's mission
* Willingness to question established thinking in pursuit of better outcomes
* Familiarity with agile or lean methodologies

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.