At Adam Harmetz’s childhood home in San Diego, the rules were simple. Video game consoles were not allowed. If he wanted to play, he had to learn to use a computer.
Harmetz’s parents — his father, a dentist and UCLA alum, and his mother, an educator — made sure he was exposed to computers early, giving him an Apple and later a Compaq computer. Now a vice president of product at Microsoft, Harmetz credits them with nurturing his interest in computers.
“I was part of the first 1% of humanity to use the internet,” Harmetz said. “It was such a lucky gift of a lifetime to be exposed in those formative years to something so world changing.”
Over the past two decades, Harmetz has helped build Microsoft’s content and collaboration platforms, including Microsoft 365 — a suite of applications such as Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook, now augmented with the AI assistant Copilot. He manages a team of roughly 100 product managers, data scientists and customer success experts across the U.S., Europe, India and China, supporting services such as OneDrive and SharePoint, which process billions of pieces of user content daily.
It’s a role shaped in part by his time at UCLA, where he double majored in computer science and business economics after starting college without declaring a major. Following a summer internship coding with the Office of Naval Research, Harmetz realized that while he enjoyed writing code, that’s not all he wanted to do.
