What we talked about
Madhuri Somara, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, joins Federico to unpack how she builds AI agents that actually help people, not just impress on paper. Fresh off being honored with the 2025 Product Leader Award by Products That Count, Madhuri traces her path from coding and business analysis to product leadership, and why empathy, rigorous evaluations, and clear user value are her north stars.
Show notes
Madhuri Somara did not land at Microsoft by waiting for the right job posting, she spent years studying what Microsoft PMs actually did each day, building relationships on LinkedIn, and deliberately positioning herself for the role. That same intentionality defines how she builds products: before shipping the case management agent she owns, she shadowed support engineers to watch where they got frustrated, then tracked the sentiment shift when the agent removed that friction. The 2025 Product Leader Award from Products That Count followed.
What we covered
- Madhuri started her career as an AngularJS developer doing double duty as a business analyst for a government client in New York, which gave her early exposure to both sides of the build-and-ship process. She realized she was enjoying the customer conversations more than the code, and that realization pulled her toward product management.
- At GS1 US, the organization behind global barcode and data standards, she built a Power Automate flow that auto-filled a few fields in the customer service team’s workflow. What felt minor to her generated thank-you messages from the support engineers. Shadowing them afterward showed her that removing even two clicks from a repetitive workflow is a meaningful intervention in someone’s daily life.
- The case management agent she owns at Microsoft automates the full lifecycle of a support case, from creation through troubleshooting, resolution, and follow-up, for large enterprise customers. She emphasizes that humans can oversee and intervene at any point; the agent acts independently without requiring human approval at each step, but supervision is always available.
- AI evals, she argues, are now as non-negotiable for shipping AI products as testing is for software. Because agents learn and adapt rather than following fixed instructions, intuition-based testing is no longer sufficient, structured evaluations and golden datasets are what give teams and customers confidence that the model will behave as intended.
- On the tension between AI capability and responsible use: Madhuri’s guiding principle is to first ask whether a problem can be solved with or without AI, then decide whether to add it. She explicitly pushes back on the “everything is a nail” mindset she sees spreading, where AI gets forced into features that do not need it and ends up overcomplicating rather than improving the product.
- Her advice for women and underrepresented voices entering AI product leadership: network actively on LinkedIn, there are more mentors willing to coach than most people realize, and be genuinely curious, asking engineers how they built a model or asking designers what drove a particular decision, because that curiosity compounds over time in ways that cannot be taught.
About Madhuri
Madhuri Somara is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, where she leads AI agents, NLP, and intelligent automation initiatives including the case management agent announced at Microsoft Ignite 2024. She serves on the editorial board of Women in AI Ethics and was named one of the outstanding product leaders of 2025 by Products That Count.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/madhuri-somara-589375b2
- Website: https://microsoft.com
Episode 74 of the PreVetted Podcast.