Work

A mature hardware business with strong market position was losing ground in a category being redefined by software-native competitors. The product was good. The go-to-market was not. Channel partners were selling on specs. Buyers weren’t understanding the value. Revenue had plateaued and the competitive gap was widening.

A full audit of the product, positioning, and channel motion identified the core problem: the value proposition was being lost in translation between product and the people selling it. I rebuilt the GTM motion from the channel up, reframing how the product was positioned, how partners were enabled, and how the value story reached buyers. Compensation structures were redesigned to reward the right behavior. The channel started selling differently.

2× Revenue

Revenue doubled. In a competitive landscape where most players were fighting for incremental share, a repositioned product and a retrained channel produced a 2× outcome. The transformation wasn’t a product launch. It was a GTM rebuild that made an existing product perform like a new one.

Poly had 100M+ connected devices in the field and almost no visibility into how they were actually being used. Sales knew what CRM told them. Marketing knew what pixels and analysts reported. Product learned from customer calls. Operations found out something was wrong when warranties were claimed. Every function had its own version of reality, all of it lagging, none of it talking to the others. The product was generating signal constantly. No one was listening.

I delivered Mirror, an enterprise data intelligence platform ingesting real-time telemetry from 100M+ connected devices into a centralized data lake with a SQL-queryable layer on top. Dashboards were co-created with Sales, Marketing, Product, Supply Chain, and Finance, so each function’s view was built around the decisions they actually needed to make. The goal wasn’t a reporting tool. It was a shared surface where functions could sit together and look at the same reality.

Data Driven Decisions

Manual reporting cycles gave way to at-your-fingertips dashboarding. The shift that mattered most wasn’t speed, though decisions moved faster. It was fidelity. Leadership conversations stopped being about whose data was right and started being about what to do. When every function is looking at the same truth, the debate moves from reconciling sources to actually bending the curve.

COM DEV had been inside 80% of the communication satellites ever launched. That’s not a market position, it’s a foundation of the industry. But foundations don’t grow. The number of satellites launched each year was constrained by the number of rockets available. With dominant share already captured and new entrants applying price pressure from below, the math was unfavorable. Meanwhile a new frontier was opening: communication satellites could now beam connectivity directly to commercial aircraft, and the fundamental questions were still open.

I led the strategic work to answer those questions. Market sizing from first principles: fleet sizes, adoption curves, certification timelines, revenue per aircraft. Competitive landscape mapping across the emerging players and the incumbents repositioning toward the category. Build, partner, and acquire options stress-tested against COM DEV’s actual capabilities and balance sheet. The output was a 10-year strategic growth plan that gave leadership a clear view of the opportunity size, the path to capture it, and the decision points along the way.

$455M Acquisition

The plan became a foundational input to COM DEV’s strategic positioning in the aerospace connectivity category. Within the same period, Honeywell acquired COM DEV for $455M, with the aviation satellite communication business and its growth trajectory as a central part of the investment thesis. The bet on in-plane connectivity wasn’t just a strategic recommendation. It was the value story that attracted a Fortune 100 acquirer.