Program & Launch · Design Program Management · Product Marketing

Find it.
Ship it.

Most people do discovery or delivery. Borke does the whole arc, from the research that finds the real problem to the launch that puts the fix in front of customers. A PhD who builds programs, runs launches, and gets things out the door.

Based inNorth AmericaNowPMM, MicrosoftExperience9+ years industry & research
Borke Obada
30+
enterprise accounts onboarded into a program she built from zero
100+
stakeholders aligned on launch readiness for strategic initiatives
$2M+
research budget owned across Forrester, Ipsos, and Concentrix
12+
product teams running on AI workflows she put into production
Where she has workedMicrosoft / University of British Columbia / Vesta
01 The story

The short answer to what she actually does.

There is a particular kind of waste that happens inside big companies. A team commissions research, gets a sharp insight, and then loses it somewhere between the slide deck and the launch. Borke built her career on closing exactly that gap, and then on running the launch herself.

She started in research, with a PhD in human-computer interaction and peer-reviewed work on privacy, trust, safety, and how people actually behave around technology. But the finding was never the finish line. Across more than nine years she moved deliberately into delivery: building customer programs from scratch, driving launches across a hundred-plus stakeholders, owning multi-million-dollar research budgets, and putting AI workflows into production across a dozen teams.

She can run the study and run the launch. Today she works in one of the most scrutinised corners of tech, Microsoft's Sovereign Cloud and Azure, where governance, sovereignty, and AI infrastructure collide.

02 Selected work

Five things she owned end to end, the problem, what she did, and what happened.

Built a 0-to-1 enterprise customer program from scratch

Microsoft, Viva Amplify
Problem

A new product with no customer-validation engine. No cadence, no framework, no way to turn user reality into roadmap decisions.

What she did

Designed and operationalized the entire program: tiered engagement cadences, adoption frameworks, structured feedback loops, then onboarded customers herself.

Why it worked

Built by a researcher who understands evidence and an operator who understands shipping, so the insight reached the roadmap.

30+ enterprise accounts onboarded to validate product-market fit, with feedback that directly shaped roadmap and retention.

Authored the story that sells the hardest topic in cloud

Microsoft, Sovereign Cloud
Problem

Sovereignty, data residency, and governance are dense, high-stakes, easy to get wrong. Buyers and field teams needed clarity, fast.

What she did

Authored the data residency whitepaper and built demo content and sales talk tracks, aligning engineering, legal, policy, and marketing on one narrative.

Why it worked

She owned the whole handoff, from technical truth to the words a salesperson says in the room, so nothing got lost in translation.

Now used by enterprise customers and sales teams worldwide to make real data-residency decisions.
Read the whitepaper →

Put AI agents into production to run program operations

Microsoft, Operations
Problem

Status reporting, documentation synthesis, and stakeholder comms were eating time across many concurrent programs.

What she did

Designed and deployed Copilot and AI-agent workflows that automated reporting, synthesis, and communications, treating AI as a design choice with tradeoffs.

Why it worked

Not a pilot. Live, governed, maintained workflows that scaled coverage quality without adding headcount.

Live across 12+ product teams, measurably cutting manual reporting overhead.

Ran the research that redirected a product, then shipped it

Vesta Social Innovation Technologies
Problem

An early-stage tool for survivors of sexual violence was heading toward an app-first build, an assumption no one had tested against real user needs.

What she did

Led the UX research and design program, then used the findings to challenge the direction and reshape the product around what survivors actually needed, not what the team assumed.

Why it worked

Research drove the decision rather than decorating it, the rare case where a study changed the roadmap instead of confirming it.

Shipped and deployed in the field, used by Kingston Police, Queen's University, and partner organizations in Ontario.
See the deployment →

Authored the State of AI report, then ran the research behind it

Microsoft, Azure
Problem

A flagship annual marketing moment needed a single, credible narrative drawn from messy, large-scale market research.

What she did

Authored the report and owned the $2M+ research program behind it, coordinating Forrester, Ipsos, and Concentrix and synthesizing findings into one executive story.

Why it worked

One person held both ends, the research rigor and the published narrative, and synced it to executive strategy announcements.

Published flagship report, synced to executive strategy announcements, informing Azure AI infrastructure direction.
Read the report →
03 Track record

The numbers behind the work.

Now, Sovereign Cloud & Azure

Launch readiness at scale

Drives end-to-end launch and release for strategic initiatives across Azure, Viva, and SharePoint, aligning 100+ stakeholders across product, engineering, design, data science, legal, and marketing.

Microsoft, Programs

Turned a conference around

Led the Polaris research conference's shift to virtual with workback plans, stakeholder cadences, and branded content. 50% attendance increase, reaching 578 attendees.

2020, Netflix

Research that reached a product

Invited to present PhD work on shared-account access at Netflix HQ. Netflix later shipped a profile-transfer feature in that space, noted publicly by her supervisor. The post →

What she is building toward

An industry role where research depth is the edge, not a footnote.

Program & Launch ManagementDesign Program ManagementProduct Marketing LeadershipCustomer & Research Programs

She is drawn to interesting, fast-moving problems across tech and likes being the person who moves them from plan to shipped.

05 On the record

Peer-reviewed research, for the record.

ACM CHI 2020

Amazon vs. My Brother

Shared smart-speaker privacy. Best Paper Honorable Mention. With Huang and Beznosov. CHI 2020 →

USENIX SOUPS 2020

Privacy in reporting sexual assault

Trauma-informed research with survivors and support workers. USENIX →

IEEE S&P

The dual nature of technology

How technology built for good can enable harm. Scholar →

06 Get in touch

Looking for someone who can do both halves of the job?

That is the whole point, and it is rarer than it sounds. For the right role or collaboration, she would love a conversation.

Connect on LinkedIn →
or send a note

Get in Touch

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© 2026 Borke Obada · North America · Publishes academically as Obada-Obieh