After nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and Microsoft, Ryan Roslansky is leaving the company. Roslansky, who until recently was the CEO of LinkedIn, was promoted to the head of Office last year and then took control of Microsoft Teams earlier this year. Roslansky’s departure has triggered another leadership shuffle inside Microsoft.
“Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an internal memo. “Over the past year, Ryan’s team has done critical work bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that have made this next phase possible.”
Roslansky is leaving a week after Microsoft announced its new Copilot, which the company is positioning as “the OS for work.” He’s also leaving around a month after calling fully AI-generated documents “a doom loop” for workers. “If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness,” said Roslansky in his LinkedIn post.
Microsoft is now moving the teams behind Office and Microsoft Teams over 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 this role and report directly to Nadella.
Roslansky describes the decision to leave Microsoft as a hard one in his own memo to his teams, and reveals he wasn’t willing to move to Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters full time. “I know what it would take for me to lead the next phase of this work well: being in Redmond full time, every day,” says Roslansky. “But my life and my family’s life are here in the Bay Area.”
Here’s Roslansky’s memo in full:
Team,
In 1996, as a college freshman, I taught myself to code so a few friends and I could help other students find a place to live around campus. I didn’t know much. I did know the internet was about to change how people found things, and I wanted to be as close to that as possible.
In 2009, Jeff Weiner made me his first hire at LinkedIn. I’ve spent the nearly 18 years since working on a much bigger version of that same idea: helping people find opportunity, and then helping them do great work once they have it.
This has (obviously) been the best professional experience of my life.
As a product manager, I got to build dozens of features that are still around today (some good, some not so good!). When I became CEO in 2020, the world was months into a pandemic that changed what work even meant. Nobody hands you a playbook for that. This team wrote one anyway. Since then, LinkedIn has passed a billion members and nearly tripled its business, and every bit of that belongs to the people who built it.
Last year, Satya asked me to help build the future of M365. Once again, the old rules didn’t apply. AI was rapidly changing how professionals work, and the world’s largest productivity suite needed to lead the way. That meant figuring out what Copilot, and the future of work, should look like as one ecosystem.
We still have a ways to go, but the progress over the past year has been inspiring to watch. A lot of talented people set aside their own roadmaps to make that happen. Thank you. I know it wasn’t easy.
Satya, thank you. When LinkedIn joined Microsoft, you gave us room to build, and then trusted many of us with a lot more. I’ve learned more from you than I can fit in an email, and I’m grateful for the friendship that came with it.
All of which made this a hard decision. I know what it would take for me to lead the next phase of this work well: being in Redmond full time, every day. But my life and my family’s life are here in the Bay Area. My wife Leigh gives her time to more local organizations than I can keep track of. Our youngest daughter just started high school, and our dog Buddy remains deeply committed to the trails on the Peninsula!
I thought about this for a long time. It’s the right call. The work now goes to leaders who are set up to take it further. I can’t wait to see what they do with it.
Over the years, people have asked me what’s kept me so energized and motivated in this work. I think the answer is that I got to spend my career working where doing good and doing well are the same thing. In technology, that’s the best place to operate.
Most companies start by focusing on doing well, so doing good becomes a compromise. It’s the last slide of the PowerPoint, or a separate .org. But when doing good is built into the product itself, it becomes a real competitive advantage. When we build valuable products, people find jobs, they hire, they learn skills, they start companies, they run companies. That creates value for members, customers and the world. And for our business too.
Not many companies get to work this way, and not many people get the chance to build something like it. We do.
That matters more now than it ever has. Technology will continue to touch every job on the planet, and the people building it will decide what kind of world it helps create. I can’t think of a better group to figure that out than the people reading this note.
Thank you for the best 18 years I could have asked for.RR