Poornima Muthukumar uses data to improve MS products

2023 was an incredible year for Poornima Muthukumar. She graduated from her parttime Master’s in data science course from the University of Washington. She had her first baby. And both of these while managing a full-time job as a senior product manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Seattle.

The journey, she says, was filled with anxiety and doubts, but the end result has been beautiful and rewarding.

Poornima grew up in Mumbai and did high school in the DAV school in Chennai. She ranked sixth in the Tamil Nadu board exam in Std XII. She went on to do a Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from National University of Singapore. She was passionate about programming to solve challenging real-world problems.

“I became good at finding my ground in a new place and getting along with people from various backgrounds and walks of life. And that’s a much needed leadership skill,” she says.

Her first job was with Goldman Sachs in Singapore and then New York, where she spent time building software for banking systems and capital markets. In 2015, she moved to Microsoft’s Ireland Research Centre, where she worked as part of the MS Office Team, and then moved to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. In the MS Office Team, she was involved in the design, architecture and development of all Office products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and Teams, to all customers, across all platforms – Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

She got the opportunity later to work with petabytes of Office telemetry data, and realised the power of Big Data and how data can drive business growth. That encouraged her to take up the Master’s degree in data science.

Poornima today holds four patents at Microsoft in areas like AI, ML, and data science, and was the winner of the Microsoft Global Hackathon in 2016 in the AI category.

“The patents are related to ensuring software changes do not introduce new bugs or regressions that can compromise the functionality, performance, security or usability of the software system. My patents propose a novel solution using machine learning techniques, such as natural language processing, clustering, classification, and regression, to extract useful information and insights from bug data for predicting and preventing future bugs in software engineering systems,” she says.

As a senior product manager in Microsoft today, she leverages her data science and technical background to build data-driven products. Poornima believes data is the fuel of product management.

“A product manager who can analyse large amounts of data and draw insights to guide product decisions will have a competitive edge in the market. Data-driven product management enables faster and more informed decisions, better understanding of customer needs and behaviour, and more effective measurement of product performance and impact. A good product manager should master the skills of data collection, analysis, visualisation, and communication, and use them to drive business growth and innovation,” she says.


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