At Microsoft, I learned the value of aggressively seeking out opportunities to help the company—a mindset that deeply influenced my growth. By engaging with diverse projects—from launching groundbreaking features on Bing to optimizing integration and data access solutions—I discovered that stepping up to tackle challenges leads to rapid learning and adaptability. These experiences taught me the importance of looking beyond immediate tasks to understand broader organizational needs, cultivating technical breadth and strategic thinking. This thinking helped me earn seven promotions, and drive impactful, scalable solutions within a large organization.

When I first arrived at Google, I felt like Darth Vader arriving on Endor. The Ewoks deeply hated Microsoft and everyone from the Death Star. At Google, I learned that deeply understanding company culture, building strong networks with influential colleagues, and persistently advocating for positive change are key to professional growth. Immersing myself in the company’s ethos taught me the importance of active listening, strategic thinking, and maintaining a long-term commitment to goals. I discovered that a long term vision, deep relationships, and a focus on giving back—mentoring colleagues and supporting their growth—were critical in effecting meaningful, company-wide improvements. By making sure the interests of the team were considered, I learned that nurturing those around you is as important as achieving technical and strategic milestones. This approach underscored the value of patience, resilience, and a people-first mindset in driving innovation and sustainable progress.

Within 24 months, our team transformed our release process by launching over 200 releases through better execution, meticulous planning, effective project management, and rigorous goal tracking—a stark change from our previous struggles to release products. Together, we introduced new SKUs for AI, advanced data privacy and security, and workforce engagement management, while also driving M&A diligence and integrating Tymeshift, Klaus, and Ultimate. On a compressed timeline, we pivoted the entire company strategy to focus on ML/AI, driving significant business progress in just six months and leading to the highest-impact first-year product launch in Zendesk history. Our transformation delivered extensive automated responses and hundreds of millions of predictions, while modernizing and migrating customers to a new productivity surface. This migration enhanced customer satisfaction, saved agent time, and set the foundation for future expansion. By introducing a new omnichannel backend for higher scale and better performance, we minimized new feature development costs and strengthened our infrastructure. Additionally, we launched integration features enabling companies to share data models, greatly improving the admin experience, agent UI, workflows, and reporting capabilities, and rebuilt our chat and messaging infrastructure for better scale and unified administration. These efforts demonstrated our commitment to our customers, mitigated churn risk, and set the stage for future growth.

The Board's expectations were clear: investments needed to show a positive ROI, products had to maintain a leadership position in the mid-market measured by GRR, and we needed to accelerate the development of generative AI customer service solutions. These constraints required bold and timely recommendations, balancing the need for innovation with the financial and operational realities of delivering a mission-critical service used by 100K businesses. Business customers' satisfaction and continued loyalty were directly linked to our success, demanding execution excellence while modernizing and differentiating the platform. They sought faster, more efficient ways to handle large volumes of high-quality support inquiries while maintaining neutral OpEx, and their expectations for online support grew post-pandemic, expecting fast responses across multiple channels like voice, email, chat, and SMS. Meanwhile, the entire employee population looked for optimistic leadership and signals that we were invested in Zendesk's long-term success and growth. To foster this confidence, our team delivered several levels of communication, including written strategy summaries, regular reviews, annual tech meetings, weekly video updates, and regular innovation demos and write-ups.

I managed a global organization of 1,900 people, including 1,300 engineers, 150 product managers, and specialists in applied/data science, design, security, and project management. Distributed across the AMER, APAC, and EMEA regions with a dozen significant sites and primary hubs, I developed a talent hiring strategy that contributed to significant non-employee cost savings and exceeded combined cost-saving and gross margin targets, directly impacting the company's financial success. Using employee feedback, I established a performance feedback mechanism that reshaped management—reducing the number of managers by 30%—and implemented a low-performance process to transition out the lowest performers while focusing on strengthening our top leaders. We hired and ramped up around 350 new team members, many in AI, and launched a new R&D site in Pune, scaling it to critical mass within two quarters. Additionally, I onboarded new leadership (e.g., CISO) and teams in multiple global locations, improved the span of control, and ensured that all employees received effective manager feedback, enhancing overall team morale and productivity.

I served as Executive Sponsor on 20 top Fortune 500 accounts, and we establishing an intake and triage process for feedback and feature requests from 100K customers and conducting 50 trips to our distributed sites and our biggest clients such as TicketMaster, The Home Depot, and Four Seasons. I partnered with Sales to develop ROI reports for each customer—delivered in product demos, sales meetings, and emails—that provided actionable improvements to optimize practices, enhance product use, and boost customer experiences and agent productivity. Collaborating with Premier Support teams, we launched a “Single Customer Outage” practice that reduced the time to communicate issues, increased direct engagement with product and engineering leaders, and cut time-to-resolution by over 50% for more than 4 million worldwide agents. we also greatly improved security incident response by reducing mean time to acknowledge incidents by 95% and mean time to resolve by 86%, securing releases through 189 engagements and activating secret scanning for all code repositories. Additionally, we introduced features aimed at improving agent's First Response Time and reporting productivity, such as Messaging Service Level Agreements and Auto Accept, which significantly reduced response times. These efforts, combined with operational improvements and an OpEx dashboard to prioritize work, helped achieve and maintain 99.96% platform stability.