Clarity, Direction, Technology

Executive Summary The most successful platform initiatives require leaders who can operate at three levels simultaneously: setting strategic direction, planning tactically with engineering teams, and addressing developers’ day-to-day challenges. This post illustrates each layer with real examples from my years at Microsoft – where senior leaders were expected to master technology, business, and people leadership alike – and from large-scale platform transformations that reached millions of users. Introduction Building a platform isn’t about controlling the system, but about guiding it. ...

“Price is what you pay; value is what you get.” - Warren Buffett In business, a dollar earned isn’t always just a dollar. The way that dollar is earned can make a world of difference – especially during times of transition. After listening to countless earnings calls over the years and after spending 29 years at Microsoft, I’ve learned first-hand that understanding how a company makes money is as important as how much money it makes. Let’s explore why not all dollars are created equal, and why the quality of revenue matters for strategy and the future of a company. ...

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, but tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu. So your competitors are all talking about the cloud, SaaS subscriptions are booming, and AI is promising to revolutionize software. It’s easy to feel the pressure – the “we need to do this now or get left behind” anxiety. As a CxO or VP, you’ve likely sat in meetings where someone says, “Our future has to be AI-driven cloud SaaS!”. And they may very well be right, but it takes more than this. ...

“Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.” — Clayton M. Christensen Innovation in established companies often begins with tension — the tension between what is known and what could be. As organizations scale and mature, they build up expertise, processes, and routines that deliver predictability. But launching something new — especially in times of fundamental change — requires letting go of some of that certainty in favor of exploration. ...