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I’m leaving my Bing Search PM role at Microsoft — Here’s Why
I handed in my 2 weeks today to join a smaller company in the enterprise B2B space. I’m laying out my reasons below.
Pivoting jobs is common in the tech industry, but my situation was a bit different. I had been at Microsoft Bing, working as a product manager on backend features, for the past two years. If I had kept my role, there could have been much more opportunity for impact and value. While I’ve delivered my fair share of product success and value during my tenure, I still feel like I’m leaving a lot on the table — perhaps guilt from leaving such an incredibly smart and hard-working team.
My role at Microsoft
Microsoft Bing has shifted from being a “meh alternative to Google” to being at the forefront for the integration between powerful internet search and AI. The new Bing Chat, which leverages powerful LLMs to enable creative and engaging answers, has forced competitors to pick up the slack. Otherwise, Bing’s marketshare growth could truly make a run for it.
I’ll be honest: being a product manager in the platform team of Bing Search has been absolutely daunting at times. There’s a core problem of scaling a massive platform that processes billions — and one day trillions — of URLs (and its content!) per day across the internet, but there’s also the core problem of, “how can we make the search experience better for users?”
I knew the problem space was deeply rich and convoluted, but I never thought about how that might affect my product role to shape out. Needless to say, I found myself working on so many areas: the dynamic rendering platform at Bing, various AI models to better understand any given website in our database, and so many other experiences.
One thing to note is despite the necessity of knowledge depth within my domain, especially for the search space, I lacked thereof initially and still consider myself inexperienced compared to my peers. It was absolutely critical of me to jump into a domain and become the SME (subject matter expert), but because of how dynamic my role was and how I forced myself to be involved in so many product areas, my context-switching got the better of me. I could never really become as deeply knowledgeable in my domain as I had wished…
