Transformations I’ve led. Lessons I carry forward.
First-person accounts of the strategic problems, pivots, and operating models that shaped how I lead today.
Taking ControlUp from Practitioner Favorite to Enterprise Leader
How three years of coordinated change scaled a beloved PLG business from $20 million to $75 million in ARR.
The repositioning around Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and investing in VMware changed the conversation. The website, campaigns, and sales enablement were rebuilt for CIO-level outcomes. The result was a three-year journey from $20M to $75M ARR, 62% more high-intent leads, 44% more demos, and a 20% reduction in marketing spend.
The Quick Reference Card That Sold $120 Million of Windows
How a single quick reference card unlocked $120 million in new Windows revenue and became a company-wide sales model at Microsoft.
Microsoft Corporate Accounts was seen as a difficult assignment with limited upside. The problem was not effort. Sellers had 30 minutes with a prospect and tools built for long enterprise sales cycles. A Good, Better, Best quick reference card, trained in 30 minutes and localized market by market, removed that friction and delivered more than 4,000 new customers, $120 million in new revenue, and 76 percent net-new growth, before spreading across Microsoft as a company-wide model.
Turning F5’s Software Portfolio into a Growth Engine
How a simpler commercial model unlocked more than $100 million in revenue without a new product launch.
By 2014, F5 was a $1.73 billion company and the established leader in Application Delivery Controllers. The hardware was selling, but the software portfolio built to ride on it was not. Pricing was inconsistent, modules were hard to combine, and the path to F5’s next growth phase was unclear.
As a director in Product Management, I led the development of Good, Better, Best, a three-tier packaging model that replaced dozens of individually priced modules with three clear offers. The model broke even if just 12 to 18 percent of customers chose Better or Best. It hit 50 percent. The result: more than $100 million in incremental revenue, no new products required, and a commercial structure that remains part of F5’s licensing model more than a decade later.
Building the Commercialization Capability Concur Needed
How one strategic problem revealed the operating model, and the organization, behind it.
When SAP acquired Concur for $8.3 billion, the mandate was clear: prove the cloud transition and unlock a $1.2 trillion travel market. I joined to build Concur’s first global Product Marketing organization, and quickly realized the real work was bigger: creating a commercialization capability that aligned Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and regional teams around common investment decisions.
Rather than start with org design, we started with a real problem, international expansion, and built a shared framework for deciding which markets came next. The framework changed the conversation, exposed a capacity problem, and pointed the business toward a distributed operating model that ultimately delivered seven new AI and cloud products, entered six new markets, and influenced more than $200M in pipeline.