My Microsoft PM internship experience
I was a Product Manager intern on Microsoft’s Power BI team within Azure Data during Summer 2024.
This was my 2nd internship at Microsoft, as I previously interned for 8 months as a business program manager intern in business and compliance.
What is the role of a Product Manager?
If you are interested in hearing about other internship experiences, Michelle Xu wrote a great article about her PM internship in which she also states:
As a disclaimer, my PM experience may vary from others. The PM role differs from company to company (a Microsoft “Program Manager” is like a combination of a “Technical Program Manager” and a “Product Manager”) and from team to team (in my team, I was able to drive product direction like a Product Manager and interact with engineers like a Technical Program Manager, but other teams might lean more into one or the other).
While I cannot go into depth about the specific feature that I worked on as it is still in the process of being released, (I can make updates after it is made public to this post) I can give a general overview of the experience and the product suite.
What Does a Product Manager Intern Do?
As a PM intern, you typically might expect to:
Work on real product features or improvements that will ship to customers
Conduct user research and gather requirements
Collaborate with engineers, designers, and other stakeholders
Write product specifications and documentation
Present proposals and progress to leadership
Learn about product development lifecycle
Participate in team meetings and planning sessions
I agree with what Michelle stated in her blog:
A PM’s job is to make decisions and execute them.
A lot of the decision-making and execution involves working closely with your engineers, designers, researchers, and customers.
I’ll be quoting directly from the public documentation on the MS Learn site article to give the most up-to-date information on the product.
What is Power BI ?
Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data might be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.
The parts of Power BI
Power BI consists of several elements that all work together, starting with these three basics:
A Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop.
An online software as a service (SaaS) service called the Power BI service.
Power BI Mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices.
These three elements—Power BI Desktop, the service, and the mobile apps—are designed to let you create, share, and consume business insights in the way that serves you and your role most effectively.
Beyond those three, Power BI also features two other elements:
Power BI Report Builder, for creating paginated reports to share in the Power BI service. Read more about paginated reports later in this article.
Power BI Report Server, an on-premises report server where you can publish your Power BI reports, after creating them in Power BI Desktop. Read more about Power BI Report Server later in this article.
I interned specifically on the service side during my internship.
My favorite part was meeting and working with an amazing team while learning about new products, features and integrations, including Copilot for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric!
As an intern, I also had access to certifications and cloud credits which I could use to explore my interests furthur. I attended an Azure Fundamentals Workshop and also watched some modules from the learning platform within Azure Data.
Beyond the engaging work, I hiked and explored the city with interns. The intern communities I joined became spaces for meaningful connections and growth, shoutout to the PM Intern Community Group, Asians at Microsoft and Women at Microsoft ERG!

3 quick tips if you are going to be interning in an upcoming term!
Document things - it will not only benefit yourself to onboard if you return, but also for future people on your team!
Stakeholder Communication is important!
Build Relationships - within and across your team, and disciplines
Thanks for reading, and as always, I hope your taking care!