When I took the helm of Microsoft’s Surface Consumer Product Marketing, Strategy, and Go‑To‑Market organization, the business was emerging from a its first proof point as a viable product line that could reimagine the world or windows. Rebounding from a $1B hardware write‑down, Surface had a single form factor and a narrowly defined audience. Its future as a credible leader in premium Windows devices was uncertain and it took partnership, vision, and alignment from leaders across core product teams like Windows and Surface with functional leaders across engineering, supply chain, business planning, marketing, and sales teams.

What followed was a multi‑year transformation—turning Surface into a multi‑billion‑dollar flagship portfolio that reshaped Microsoft’s role in the consumer PC space and influenced the entire Windows ecosystem. In the steps below, you’ll find a high level summary of the lessons learned and tactics deployed to realize this.

1️⃣ Building True Customer Intimacy 🧠💬

Action: Led global research initiatives and absorbed the voice of the customer by triangulating behavioral data, purchase journeys, and in‑market feedback across 36 markets. Combining sell through data with truly listening to customer feedback, desires, and objects enabled the team to deeply know the customer and craft product strategy, messaging, demand generation, and key selling points that deeply resonated.

Impact: Discovered new audience clusters—mobile professionals, creative makers, and students—whose unmet needs weren’t fully addressed in existing product lines.

Lesson: The reality of who your customer is or who they are evolving to will always outpace your persona decks unless you invest in continuous active listening.

2️⃣ Innovating Through ‘Stair‑Steps’ vs. Galzxy shifts🪜✨

Action: Partnered with engineering to balance “now” solutions with “next” innovations is paramount. Engineering wants to get to the North Star quickly, but you have to be able to show the customer that you understand the things they are facing today and can solve that pain point vs. push them to accept something they aren’t quite ready for. Sometime the solution is the simplicity of taking a few steps—like blending familiar laptop functionality with sleek tablet design before introducing entirely new categories.

Impact: Drove innovation through category creation of providing something familiar like the marriage of the tablet with the functionality of the laptop. This enabled the Surface to build credibility and reinvent other categories aimed at diverse audiences and unlock experiences that hadn’t been enabled before with the launched 7 new Surface devices over three years. As a result, Surface grew its premium PC share by +4pts and expanding revenue to $5B annually in the consumer space alone.

Lesson: Adoption accelerates when you offer customers visible, achievable steps toward your vision.

3️⃣ Making the Product a ‘Need,’ Not a ‘Want’ 🎯💡

Action: Reframed Go-To-Market and messaging to focus on how the customer used the device vs. the features of the device. The pivot helped consumer not be inundated with speed and feeds but focused on how they could get more out of Surface devices and leverage it for task and more importantly life simplification. This was realized by partnership across marketing to develop and deliver persona‑specific selling stories integrated across owned web, social, training, retailer channels, and earned media environments.

Impact: Increased awareness by 20% across the funnel, trained retail pros globally to map each Surface device to specific personas, and achieved double‑digit YoY growth.

Lesson: When customers see their own life getting easier in your story, desire turns into demand.

4️⃣ Recognizing & Seizing Inflection Points 📈🔍

Action: Expanded from one audience and form factor to a flagship family of devices. Positioned Surface as Microsoft’s consumer R&D lab, setting design and experience benchmarks. This enabled use to pivot from the primary customer of business mobile professionals to think about students, creatives, and moms on the move as well as thinking about key design innovations like vibrant colors, sizing that fit in fashionable handbags, and aesthetic design that attracted even the most scrupulous style seekers.

Impact: The cache of Windows devices rose from being fundamental and functional to foundational yet fashionable. Extending the portfolio from, “the tablet that could replace your laptop” to a family of devices that anyone could find themselves in unlocked opportunity for growth not just for Surface but for all OEMs that leveraged the new blueprint established. By showing the business case for aligning the resolve of customer pain points with premium design, Windows ecosystem partners. Surface moved past the singular touch screen device to unlock a family of devices pairing touch, beauty and performance that enabled OEMS to emulated, therefore growing and sustaining Windows share in the consumer PC category.

Lesson: Category leadership comes from knowing when to scale breadth, while owning depth.

5️⃣ Simplifying Complexity for the Market 🛍️🗣️

Action: Built persona‑driven content for web and in‑store experiences that allowed the audiences to see themselves and their daily lives personified in the story telling. Coined “people of action” stories, this method of storytelling enabled everyday people to see the value of the experiences Surface devices could unlock for them. Carrying this methodology through every layer of the funnel enabled consistency of storytelling down to how global training was developed to simplify the messaging at retail for Retail Sales Professionals.

Impact: This holistic approach aligned global sales motions to persona‑based recommendations—elevating both attach rates and customer satisfaction. More importantly, it built reach with relevance—we weren’t just driving impressions, we were embedding resonance at every stage of the funnel.

Lesson: When innovation complexity meets persona clarity, brands unlock a powerful flywheel: salespeople sell with confidence, customers buy with conviction, and marketing spend works harder across every channel.

📊 Results in Summary

• 💰 $5B annual consumer revenue from hardware and accessories globally

• 🆕 Created new categories and expanded existing ones

• 📈 Increased premium PC market share by +4pts

• 📣 Boosted awareness by 20%

• 📱 Pioneered the first foldable Surface mobile device

💼 How can this help you

Today, I help companies turn market headwinds into inflection points, using the same disciplined, data‑driven, and creative frameworks that scaled Surface from recovery to market‑shaping dominance. Whether you’re reimagining a product portfolio, deepening audience intimacy, or crafting stair‑step innovation strategies, my process bridges vision and execution—delivering growth that endures.

Connect with us today to learn more about how we can translate our years of experience to value and growth for your organization.