Microsoft
Trust is a product you ship.
Unblocking Fortune 500 purchase decisions.
Between 2023 and 2026, Windows PCs lost approximately 30% market share to competitors. The hardware was ready. The architecture was capable. But enterprise customers weren't moving — and the reason wasn't technical. It was trust.
My VP brought me this problem because of my ability to bridge complex technical realities with clear, compelling narratives. The Windows and Surface marketing organizations had identified the issue through customer engagements, but lacked the product and technical resources to translate the insight into action. I was brought in to close that gap.
Insight
The blocker wasn't the product. It was the story.
I opened with a listening tour — conversations with field sales representatives, enterprise account managers, and the customers themselves. What emerged wasn't a single problem but a layered one.
The Diagnosis
Three root causes
Storytelling
Our narrative around Windows on Arm was informational, not persuasive. It wasn't moving people. Enterprise buyers make decisions with both logic and conviction, and we were only speaking to one.
Education
Critical knowledge gaps were fueling skepticism. Customers equated "emulation" with degraded performance, without understanding the modern reality. They didn't know how to evaluate, pilot, or build a procurement case for ARM devices.
Feedback Loop
Marketing and engineering were operating in silos. Neither team had the shared context needed to communicate credibly with customers — or with each other.
Three root causes surfaced:
Storytelling — Our narrative around Windows on Arm was informational, not persuasive. It wasn't moving people. Enterprise buyers make decisions with both logic and conviction, and we were only speaking to one.
Education — Critical knowledge gaps were fueling skepticism. Customers equated "emulation" with degraded performance, without understanding the modern reality. They didn't know how to evaluate, pilot, or build a procurement case for ARM devices.
Feedback Loop — Marketing and engineering were operating in silos. Neither team had the shared context needed to communicate credibly with customers — or with each other.
Idea
Build the product that earns the sale.
From that foundation, I synthesized a roadmap that spanned UX improvements, content design, and net-new technical features — all oriented around a single goal: getting enterprise buyers over the purchase threshold.
I led the product engineering effort end-to-end. Working as the sole engineer, I used AI design and development tools — Figma Make, GitHub Copilot, and Claude Opus 4.6 — to move from concept to production launch. The approach was deliberate: use AI not as a shortcut, but as a force multiplier that allowed one person to move with the velocity of a full team.
The product was built to meet customers where they were: providing transparency, comparisons, and real-world compatibility data that replaced uncertainty with evidence.
Impact
Confidence at scale.
Within days of worldwide launch, the product reached over 10,000 unique daily active users. But the reach was only part of the story.
We embedded the product directly into the sales motion — training field sales teams and enterprise account managers to use it live in customer conversations. We hosted key Fortune 500 clients on-campus for hands-on demos, gathering real-time feedback and generating compatibility reports in the room.
What began as a trust deficit became a proof point — that the right story, told with the right tools, can move markets.
