Summary
Work History
Education
Skills
Publications
Teaching Experience
Timeline
Juliana Salles

Juliana Salles

Summary

Strategic and impact-driven Product Manager with a strong track record of delivering results across complex, cross-functional environments—including enterprise engineering, academic research, and public-private partnerships. Adept at navigating ambiguity and aligning diverse stakeholders around shared goals, I thrive at the intersection of user needs, business outcomes, and system design. Over the years, I’ve led 0→1 product development efforts, driven user-centered innovation in cloud infrastructure and observability tools, and helped shape national-scale research initiatives through deep collaboration with scientists, government agencies, and technical teams. Whether working with academic researchers to grow Brazil into a top Azure Cloud adopter, partnering with engineers to transform system health monitoring at Microsoft, or designing experiences with UX teams, I bring clarity, empathy, and relentless focus on value. Known for creative problem-solving, operational rigor, and a bias for action, I bridge vision and execution to build solutions that scale.

Work History

Senior Product Manager

Microsoft
01.2021 - 05.2025
  • Spearheaded the concept-to-launch of Brain Service Health Dashboard (v1), an internal observability tool adopted across Azure to improve real-time service health visibility, reduce triage delays, and increase cross-team coordination.
  • Translated DRI, SRE, and incident manager pain points into product vision and scope; integrated SLI-based anomaly detection and a machine learning-powered health model to expose systemic and regional health signals.
  • Led UX strategy to make complex telemetry accessible to non-experts, enabling autonomous decision-making without reliance on service-specific knowledge.
  • Delivered measurable platform improvements including reduced DRI dependency, faster root cause identification, and streamlined incident recovery.
  • Fostered deep user engagement through open-ended feedback loops; feedback directly shaped the product experience, enhancing credibility and adoption.
  • Championed a collaborative, insight-driven approach that bridged engineering, design, and operations — enabling the dashboard to evolve from a tool to a strategic capability within Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.

Senior Program Manager

Microsoft
01.2019 - 01.2021
  • Championed a customer-driven product development approach across a 60+ PM organization, shifting the team's mindset from feature delivery to end-to-end scenario design that reflects how users actually engage with observability tools to complete their jobs.
  • Developed and operationalized frameworks for rigorous qualitative user research, coaching PMs on how to consistently gather and apply customer insights to product decisions—driving clarity, focus, and alignment across the org.
  • Partnered deeply with engineering, UX, and customer teams to uncover critical pain points and product opportunities, leveraging your unique combination of technical fluency in observability and expertise in user-centered design.
  • Delivered measurable UX improvements, including higher task-completion rates, faster time-to-task, and fewer steps to accomplish key workflows—leading to increased customer retention, adoption, and satisfaction across Azure’s 1P and 3P user base, including major teams like Office.

Senior Program Manager

Microsoft
01.2017 - 01.2019
  • Revived a mission-critical internal targeting platform used across Microsoft for scenarios like targeted marketing campaigns and OS updates. Took over during a period of instability with multiple weekly outages, and led the effort to restore partner trust by improving system reliability and reducing latency, in close partnership with engineering.
  • Established a scalable, customer-centric onboarding framework for internal partners. Transitioned from ad hoc integrations to a repeatable process that aligned engineering deliverables with partner goals, reducing onboarding friction and increasing partner satisfaction.
  • Led the deprecation of a legacy high-touch service and migrated strategic partners to a modern, self-service solution. This shift enabled partners to independently launch campaigns while freeing up engineering resources to focus on forward-looking investments.
  • Drove alignment between partner scenarios and the product roadmap by leveraging deep customer insights to guide engineering priorities. Translated real-world campaign use cases into actionable investments, effectively advocating for usability, flexibility, and performance improvements that addressed the most critical partner needs and elevated the platform’s business impact.

Senior Design Researcher

Microsoft
01.2015 - 01.2017
  • Led end-to-end user research across web and mobile (Android and iOS) platforms to inform feature development for OneDrive and SharePoint, serving a diverse user base—from small businesses to large enterprises.
  • Drove cross-functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and engineers to integrate user insights into product decisions, ensuring features aligned with real-world workflows and organizational needs.
  • Conducted mixed-methods research (interviews, usability testing, surveys, field studies) to evaluate early versions of critical features, including sharing experiences later adopted across the Microsoft Office suite.
  • Transformed user insight into strategic product influence by using data to clearly demonstrate where design and engineering investments would have the highest impact—shaping prioritization, de-risking decisions, and moving beyond advocacy to evidence-backed direction.
  • Elevated product impact by translating research findings into actionable recommendations that influenced roadmap prioritization, design decisions, and long-term product strategy.

Senior Research Program Manager

Microsoft Research
01.2007 - 01.2015
  • Company Overview: Microsoft Research Outreach- Brazil and Redmond
  • Led a high-impact research partnership portfolio across Brazil and Latin America, bridging Microsoft Research with top-tier universities, funding agencies, and cross-disciplinary scientists to advance innovation in climate science, ecology, traffic systems, and computing.
  • Created and executed a multi-year regional engagement strategy that became a blueprint for other markets. Delivered scalable, metrics-driven programs that elevated Microsoft’s presence in Latin American research ecosystems and strengthened Azure’s role as a platform for scientific computing.
  • Designed and managed award-winning collaborative projects applying cutting-edge technologies—including cloud computing, machine learning, and computer vision—to real-world challenges such as plant monitoring (e-Phenology), traffic forecasting, and ecological sensing in rainforests.
  • Forged strategic partnerships with internationally respected institutions (e.g., FAPESP, UFMG), aligning research interests and creating joint centers of excellence focused on long-term societal impact.
  • Advocated for interdisciplinary collaboration, integrating environmental sciences with data science, and ensuring researchers had access to Microsoft tools and support for large-scale analytics, modeling, and visualization.
  • Demonstrated a rare ability to operate at the intersection of science, technology, and user needs, engaging directly with scientists, academic leaders, and end users to uncover motivations, blockers, and opportunities that shaped investment priorities and product decisions.
  • Consistently ranked among top-performing regions globally in key metrics—such as number of Azure research grant applicants and strategic engagements—surpassing larger regions through a combination of outreach, trust-building, and program excellence.
  • Recognized by internal and external stakeholders as a thoughtful, strategic, and versatile leader who could flex across roles—from architecting strategy to driving execution—while cultivating strong relationships and delivering measurable impact.
  • Microsoft Research Outreach- Brazil and Redmond

UX Researcher

Microsoft
01.2004 - 01.2007
  • Led user research across core consumer-facing services including email, privacy and security, calendar, messaging, and social features—spanning both web and mobile platforms during a pivotal era of platform evolution and feature expansion.
  • Designed and executed mixed-methods research (e.g., usability studies, field research, surveys, diary studies) to uncover user needs, pain points, and behavioral patterns, informing product strategy and feature development.
  • Collaborated closely with engineering, design, and PM teams to translate insights into product improvements that balanced user experience goals with technical constraints and business objectives.
  • Drove alignment across teams and disciplines to ensure experience consistency across Windows Live services, establishing research-informed frameworks that supported a cohesive and secure end-to-end user journey.

UX Researcher

Microsoft
01.2003 - 01.2004
  • Led UX research for key components of Visual Studio Team Server V1, a foundational enterprise tool for development teams, supporting collaboration, source control, and project management workflows.
  • Partnered closely with PMs, designers, and engineers to embed user-centered thinking into a deeply technical product space, shaping early feature design and prioritization through evidence-based insights.
  • Applied a variety of research methods—including contextual inquiry, usability studies, and heuristic evaluations—to understand developer workflows, identify usability barriers, and optimize end-to-end experiences.
  • Influenced the team’s cultural shift toward user focus, establishing trusted research practices and championing developer empathy in a product area traditionally driven by engineering complexity.

UX Intern

Microsoft Corporation
07.2000 - 11.2000
  • Conducted usability research for Microsoft MoneyCentral, supporting design decisions in a complex financial product space with high user expectations for clarity, accuracy, and trust.
  • Explored the integration of clickstream and web analytics data into the research and design process—an early effort to combine qualitative and quantitative insights to inform product direction.
  • Gained hands-on experience applying user research in a fast-paced, real-world environment, building a strong foundation in usability methods and stakeholder engagement.

Software Engineer

Partnership between Federal University of Minas Gerais & Telecomm of Minas Gerais
01.1993 - 01.1998
  • Company Overview: Brazil
  • Developed software solutions to support the planning and design of telecommunications networks, collaborating with technical teams to meet infrastructure and operational needs.
  • Gathered and analyzed user and stakeholder requirements, which sparked a growing interest in understanding not just what to build, but why it mattered to the people using it.
  • This role marked the beginning of a deep commitment to human-centered technology, laying the foundation for a career shift toward Human-Computer Interaction and UX research, where engineering rigor meets user empathy.
  • Brazil

Education

Ph.D. - Computer Science

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
My dissertation focused on the integration of the user experience process into the development/engineering process.

M.Sc. - Computer Science

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

B.Sc. - Computer Science

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Skills

Product roadmaps

Publications

  • Thiago H. Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Jussara M. Almeida, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. Revealing the City that We Cannot See. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), 2014. To appear.
  • Thiago H. Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Jussara M. Almeida, Aline Viana, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. Participatory Sensor Networks as Sensing Layers. IEEE Conference on Social Computing and Networking (SocialCom '14), 8pp, Sydney, Australia. 2014.
  • Thiago H. Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Jussara M. Almeida, Aline Viana, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. Definition, Modeling, and Applications of Participatory Sensing Layers. XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, 14pp. Florianópolis, Brazil. 2014. (In Portuguese)
  • Thiago H. Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Aline C. Viana, Jussara M. Almeida, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. Traffic Condition is More Than Colored Lines on a Map: Characterization of Waze Alerts. 5th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo '13), 10pp, Kyoto, Japan. 2013.
  • Thiago H Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Jussara M. Almeida, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. A Comparison of Foursquare and Instagram to the Study of City Dynamics and Urban Social Behavior. ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp '13), 8pp. Chicago, USA. 2013.
  • Anna I. J. Tostes, Fátima de L. P. Duarte-Figueiredo, Renato M. Assunção, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. From Data to Knowledge: City-wide Traffic Flows Analysis and Prediction Using Bing Maps. ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp '13), 8pp. Chicago, USA. 2013.
  • Thiago H Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Jussara M. Almeida, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. A Picture of Instagram is Worth More than a Thousand Words: Workload Characterization and Application. IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '13), 10pp. Cambridge, USA. 2013.
  • Thiago H Silva, Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo, Jussara M. Almeida, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. Visualizing the Invisible Image of Cities (Best Paper Award). IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom '12), 7pp. Besançon, France. 2012.
  • Javier J. M. Diaz; Eduardo F. Nakamura, Hani C. Yehia, Juliana Salles, Antonio A. F. Loureiro. On the Use of Compressive Sensing for the Reconstruction of Anuran Sounds in a Wireless Sensor Network. IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom '12), 7pp. Besançon, France. 2012.
  • Maria C. C. Baranauskas, Juliana Salles, Roberto S. Bigonha. Looking Inside: Understanding Communication in the Organizational Context of Software Design. In: K. Liu, R. J. Clarke, P.B. Andersen, R. K. Stamper (eds): Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 301-304.
  • Maria C. C. Baranauskas, Juliana Salles, Roberto S. Bigonha. Bringing Interface Design and Software Development Processes Together: How Organizational Issues Impact Product's Usability (Best Paper Award). XIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 10pp. Florianópolis, Brazil. 2001.
  • Juliana Salles, Maria C. C. Baranauskas, Roberto S. Bigonha. Towards a Communication Model Applied to the Interface Design Process. Knowledge-Based Systems, v.18, n.8, p. 455-459, 2001.

Teaching Experience

I have taught undergraduate courses of Software Engineering, Human Computer Interaction and Introduction to Programming.

Timeline

Senior Product Manager - Microsoft
01.2021 - 05.2025
Senior Program Manager - Microsoft
01.2019 - 01.2021
Senior Program Manager - Microsoft
01.2017 - 01.2019
Senior Design Researcher - Microsoft
01.2015 - 01.2017
Senior Research Program Manager - Microsoft Research
01.2007 - 01.2015
UX Researcher - Microsoft
01.2004 - 01.2007
UX Researcher - Microsoft
01.2003 - 01.2004
UX Intern - Microsoft Corporation
07.2000 - 11.2000
Software Engineer - Partnership between Federal University of Minas Gerais & Telecomm of Minas Gerais
01.1993 - 01.1998
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - M.Sc., Computer Science
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - B.Sc., Computer Science
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - Ph.D., Computer Science

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Juliana Salles