Overview
Microsoft empowers every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. For our enterprise customers, that means building solutions grounded in a real understanding of the people who use them: their goals, workflows, constraints, and the decisions they make every day. In the Microsoft Frontier Company, you won’t just build software; you’ll deliver real outcomes for some of the world’s most complex organizations.We are seeking a Principal Design Researcher to lead discovery and help customer engagements start in the right place. You will get close to customers, make sense of complex and ambiguous situations, and align customers and internal teams on scope and direction before solutions are built. You will plan and run research end to end, lead workshops that turn insight into shared decisions, and work with engineering to carry findings into what gets delivered. Where it helps, you will make ideas tangible through concepts and prototypes.This role suits someone who is comfortable at the ambiguous front end of a project. You can take an open-ended problem, find the questions that matter, organize the work to answer them, and bring stakeholders to a clear, evidence-based direction. You will also apply current AI-enabled tools to scale research and synthesis, and help teams shape AI-powered experiences that people understand and trust.
Responsibilities
- Scope and manage research. Define research plans, set timelines, coordinate participants and logistics, manage stakeholders, and deliver on schedule. Keep work moving across multiple engagements at once.
Lead discovery research. Plan and conduct research at the start of customer engagements, including stakeholder and user interviews, contextual inquiry, field observation, and surveys. Choose methods that fit the question, timeline, and customer environment.
Make sense of complexity. Synthesize large amounts of qualitative and quantitative input into clear insights, frameworks, journey maps, and problem statements. Find the patterns, tensions, and opportunities that others miss.
Think in systems. Map and understand the end-to-end process, including people, roles, workflows, data, technology, and where AI can help or harm. Identify dependencies, failure points, and leverage points so solutions improve the whole system, not just isolated parts.
Design and facilitate workshops. Plan and run workshops with customers, engineers, and senior stakeholders, including discovery sessions, co-design, prioritization, and alignment. Move groups from open discussion to concrete decisions.
Align on scope and direction. Turn research into shared understanding. Help customers and internal teams agree on the problems worth solving, priorities, success criteria, and a clear direction forward.
Make ideas tangible. When useful, translate findings into concepts, flows, storyboards, or prototypes to test assumptions and communicate direction.
Validate and iterate. Test concepts with users, mea
