Ryan Roslansky, the executive who oversees Microsoft's Office and Teams products, is leaving the company after nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and Microsoft. His departure comes a week after Microsoft announced its new Copilot, which the company is positioning as "the OS for work," and about a month after Roslansky used a LinkedIn post to call fully AI-generated documents a "doom loop" for workers.
In an internal memo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Roslansky leaves the organization in a strong position. Nadella credited Roslansky's team with critical work over the past year bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that made the next phase possible. Roslansky described the decision as a hard one in his own memo to his teams.
Roslansky said leading the next phase of the work well would require being in Redmond full time, every day, but that his life and his family's life are in the Bay Area. He wrote that his wife Leigh gives her time to more local organizations than he can keep track of, that their youngest daughter just started high school, and that their dog Buddy remains committed to the trails on the Peninsula.
Microsoft is moving the teams behind Office and Microsoft Teams to Charles Lamanna as part of the Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization. This is the second major reshuffling of the Office teams after Rajesh Jha, former head of Microsoft's experiences and devices group, retired from Microsoft earlier this year. Microsoft's chief design officer, Jon Friedman, is also moving to report to Copilot chief Jacob Andreou.
Microsoft appointed Dan Shapero as its LinkedIn CEO earlier this year, and he will continue in that role and report directly to Nadella. In his memo, Roslansky recounted teaching himself to code in 1996 as a college freshman so he and a few friends could help other students find housing around campus. He said Jeff Weiner made him his first hire at LinkedIn in 2009, and that he spent the nearly 18 years since working on a bigger version of that same idea.
Roslansky wrote that he got to build dozens of features as a product manager, some good and some not so good, and that he became CEO in 2020 as the world was months into a pandemic that changed what work meant. Since then, he said, LinkedIn has passed a billion members and nearly tripled its business, crediting the people who built it. Last year, he wrote, Nadella asked him to help build the future of M365, where AI was rapidly changing how professionals work.
Roslansky said the progress over the past year was inspiring to watch, and that many talented people set aside their own roadmaps to make it happen. He said the work now goes to leaders who are set up to take it further. He also wrote that he spent his career working where doing good and doing well are the same thing, and that technology will keep touching every job on the planet, leaving the people building it to decide what kind of world it helps create.
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