Ryan Roslansky spent nearly two decades climbing through LinkedIn and Microsoft, first as the professional network’s chief product officer, then as its chief executive, and most recently as the executive who ran Microsoft’s Office and Teams businesses. On October 1, he told colleagues he was leaving. The reason he gave had little to do with the company’s strategy. Keeping the job, he said, would have meant moving his family from the San Francisco Bay Area to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington — a trade he was not willing to make.
He is not the only veteran stepping away. Peter Lee, who ran Microsoft Research for years and most recently served as president of Microsoft Science, is also leaving after more than 16 years at the company. Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s longtime communications chief, said in September that he would depart at the end of the year. The Verge and CNBC reported the latest moves on October 1.
The exits land as Microsoft rebuilds its Office and Teams organizations around Copilot, the AI assistant the company is trying to turn into what Chief Executive Satya Nadella has called an operating system for work. Roughly a week before Roslansky’s announcement, Microsoft unveiled a new Copilot offering, and the company has been pushing the assistant deeper into every product line.
The reorganization reaches well below the two departing executives. Office and Teams engineering now report to Charles Lamanna inside the Copilot, Agents and Platform group, according to people familiar with the matter. Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s chief design officer, will report to Jacob Andreou, who leads Copilot. Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s chief executive, and Mohak Shroff now report directly to Nadella.
Roslansky’s rise was swift by the standards of a company that has spent decades consolidating its productivity tools. He joined LinkedIn in 2009 as chief product officer and became its chief executive in 2020, guiding the network through the surge in remote hiring and learning during the pandemic. After Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for about $26 billion, the subsidiary was largely left to run itself. Last year, Nadella promoted Roslansky to executive vice president, putting him in charge of both LinkedIn and Microsoft Office, and earlier this year added Teams to his portfolio.
The move pulled the professional network and Microsoft’s flagship productivity software under one leader for the first time, an arrangement meant to bind LinkedIn’s data on jobs and skills to the tools where hundreds of millions of people do their work. Roslansky described the integration in his goodbye note as work that has set up the next phase, and Nadella thanked him for bringing together the product, engineering and design foundations behind it.
Lee leaves through a different door. Before Microsoft he spent 22 years at Carnegie Mellon University, where he headed the computer science department. At Microsoft he led the research division that produced breakthroughs in natural language processing and cloud-based health tools, and he was named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in health and life sciences in 2024. In a LinkedIn post announcing his resignation, he described his next move as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that fulfilled a childhood dream, without saying what it was.
For Microsoft, the wave of departures is less a crisis than a changing of the guard at a moment when Nadella has staked the company on AI. Power is flowing toward the teams building Copilot and the underlying platform, and away from the executives who ran the older productivity and consumer businesses. Roslansky is expected to stay through the end of the year as an adviser to Nadella, which gives the company months to hand off his responsibilities rather than days.
The exits cap a year of high-level turnover at Microsoft. Rajesh Jha, a longtime leader in the Office business, retired earlier in the year, and the company has cut jobs across divisions including its gaming unit as it redirects spending toward AI. Microsoft has told investors that demand for Copilot and its Azure cloud services is running ahead of the capacity it can bring online, and Nadella has argued that the company’s sprawling customer base gives it an advantage rivals lack.
None of that changes what the three departures share: they are voluntary. Roslansky’s decision hinged on where his family lives. Lee framed his exit as the pull of a new opportunity rather than a push from Redmond. Shaw gave months of notice, a courtesy that signals an orderly transition rather than a rupture.
The timing matters because it coincides with one of the most consequential product bets in Microsoft’s history. The company is asking customers to pay for an AI layer that sits on top of everything from email to spreadsheets, and it is reorganizing the teams that build those tools to match. The executives who led the old structure are stepping aside, one by one, just as the new one takes shape.
