Microsoft executive Ryan Roslansky, who served as LinkedIn chief, is leaving company: Read CEO Satya Nadella’s memo
Microsoft executive Ryan Roslansky, who led the software company’s LinkedIn subsidiary for six years, will leave at the end of 2026. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, announced the departure in a memo to the employees. The Redmond, Washington-based company has seen multiple leadership changes in recent months. The high-profile exit comes after gaming head Phil Spencer and Office leader Rajesh Jha both left this year, and Charlie Bell, the company’s head of security, took on a new role focused on engineering quality.Roslansky joined LinkedIn as product chief in 2009, when it was still a privately held company. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016. In 2020, Roslansky replaced Jeff Weiner as LinkedIn CEO. During Roslansky’s tenure, LinkedIn’s membership expanded from 700 million to 1.3 billion. Previously, he had held management roles at Yahoo and Glam Media.In 2025, Roslansky took on additional responsibility in Microsoft’s Office productivity software group. Earlier this year, Nadella named Roslansky and two other executives as leaders of the Microsoft 365 applications and the Copilot artificial intelligence platform, and Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s chief operating officer (COO), became the professional social network’s CEO.
Read Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s memo to employees on Ryan Roslansky’s exit
After nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and Microsoft, Ryan Roslansky has decided to leave Microsoft and embark on his next chapter.As Ryan and I have been discussing our roadmap and work ahead, we felt this was the right moment for this change. Ryan will stay through the end of the calendar year as an advisor to me and will support on the transition.Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position. With Copilot, we are executing rapidly against our vision to build a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task, with Office fully embedded in Copilot and vice versa! 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. Last week’s launch was an important milestone in that journey, and the strong response from customers, partners, and the broader ecosystem reinforced both how far we’ve come and how much opportunity remains ahead.At LinkedIn, we remain focused on our core vision of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, helping our 1.3 billion members access the knowledge, insights, and opportunities they need to navigate rapidly changing professional and labor markets.Effective today we will make the following changes:Sumit Chauhan and Lan Ye will report to Charles Lamanna.Jon Friedman will report to Jacob Andreou.Dan Shapero will continue as CEO of LinkedIn and Mohak Shroff will continue in his role, both reporting to me.Over his nearly two decades at Microsoft, Ryan has helped shape how people around the world find opportunity, build their careers, and get their work done. I’ve always appreciated his clarity of thinking and I’m deeply grateful for everything Ryan has built, for the leaders and teams he has developed, and for his friendship and counsel.Please join me in thanking Ryan for his extraordinary contributions to LinkedIn and Microsoft, and in wishing him the very best in what comes next.SatyaWhat Ryan Roslansky told workers in a memoTeam,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
