This article was based on the interview with Marcus Fontoura, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, as CTO for Azure Core at Microsoft by Greg Kihlström, Artificial Intelligence and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
In the modern enterprise, the term “agility” is ubiquitous. It’s a North Star for leadership, a buzzword in boardrooms, and a frequently unfulfilled promise for teams on the ground. We talk about breaking down silos, but our technology stacks often reinforce them. We aspire to rapid iteration, but our processes are mired in dependencies and technical debt. The challenge, as many of us have learned the hard way, is that true agility isn’t something you can purchase with a new software license. It’s not a methodology you can simply adopt in a quarterly planning meeting. It is a fundamental cultural and operational shift, one that requires a different way of thinking about how technology, people, and processes interact.
This is where the concept of a “platform mindset” becomes so critical. It’s a strategic approach that moves organizations from a collection of disparate, vertically-integrated teams to a collaborative ecosystem built on shared, reusable components. This isn’t just an IT concern; it’s a core business strategy that directly impacts a marketing leader’s ability to innovate, personalize at scale, and deliver a coherent customer experience. To explore this concept, we draw on insights from Marcus Fontoura, Technical Fellow at Microsoft and CTO for Azure Core, whose work has placed him at the center of one of the most significant platform-driven transformations in business history. He argues that by building a culture of collaboration around common platforms, organizations can unlock a powerful multiplier effect, enabling them to achieve more with less and freeing up top talent to focus on what truly differentiates the business.
The Multiplier Effect: Build Once, Reuse Many Times
At its core, the platform mindset is about identifying common needs across an organization and building centralized, robust solutions to meet them, rather than having every team reinvent the wheel. Think about a function as fundamental as user authentication. In a siloed organization, the e-commerce team might build one system, the mobile app team another, and the customer portal team a third. The result is not just wasted effort and duplicated costs, but a fragmented view of the customer. A platform approach, by contrast, would create a single, shared authentication service that every team can leverage. This is the essence of the “multiplier effect.”
Fontoura saw this play out on a massive scale at Microsoft during its transformation under CEO Satya Nadella. The company moved from a collection of powerful but separate entities—Windows, Office, Bing—each with its own infrastructure, to a unified “One Microsoft” approach built on its Azure platform. This wasn’t merely a technical consolidation; it was a strategic decision to create leverage.
“What it takes to create this multiplier effect, like this idea that I’m encapsulating a whole bunch of code, a whole bunch of processes, reducing multiple teams into a single team and then using this combined platform, this combined team to power lots of experiences in the company. And that’s what I call the multiplier effect, right? Like you build it once, reuse it many times, and you get like more agility because you can innovate and build more differentiated solutions for users while reusing platforms that will enable you to have that agility and leverage the engineering resources a lot better.”
For marketing leaders, the parallels are immediate and potent. Consider the core components of a modern martech stack: a Customer Data Platform (CDP), a content management system (CMS), a digital asset manager (DAM), a personalization engine. When these are treated as enterprise-wide platforms rather than department-specific tools, the multiplier effect kicks in. The product team, the marketing team, and the customer service team can all draw from the same single source of customer truth in the CDP. A global marketing campaign can be executed efficiently because all regions are pulling from the same approved assets in the DAM. The result is consistency, efficiency, and a more coherent experience for the customer, all while freeing up teams to focus on strategy and creativity instead of wrestling with disparate systems.
The Real Roadblock: Culture, Not Code
If the benefits are so clear, why do so many organizations struggle to make this transition? The simple answer is that the biggest hurdles are rarely technical. They are human. A platform mindset often runs counter to entrenched behaviors, departmental politics, and the natural desire for autonomy. A team that has always controlled its full technology stack, from the database to the user interface, can view a mandate to use a shared platform as a loss of control, an impediment to their roadmap, and an unwanted dependency.
Overcoming this resistance requires intentional, top-down leadership that redefines what success looks like. It’s about shifting the organizational focus from individual or team-level achievements to collective success. Fontoura points to a specific, powerful mechanism implemented by Satya Nadella that was fundamental to Microsoft’s cultural shift. It wasn’t just about encouraging collaboration; it was about embedding it into the core incentive structure of the company.
“One of the things that Satya did really early on in his CEO tenure at Microsoft was he changed the evaluation at the end of the year, the performance evaluation for every employee so that everyone now had to write how did you empower others, right? How did they contribute to the success of others? And this seems like a small thing… but it’s like directly tied to your compensation and directly tied to the direction you wanted to guide the company. And that was, in my opinion, I think very fundamental for like making people more open to collaborate.”
This is a profound lesson for any leader championing a platform-based approach. Simply funding a CDP or a new CMS is not enough. You must also change the incentives. Are teams rewarded for adopting the enterprise standard, or for shipping features the fastest, even if it means building a redundant solution? Is cross-functional collaboration a talking point in all-hands meetings, or is it a weighted component of a director’s performance review? Fostering a platform mindset means making “empowering others” a measurable and rewarded part of everyone’s job, transforming collaboration from a soft skill into a hard-and-fast business objective.
Platforms as the Foundation for AI and Innovation
The urgency for a platform mindset has been supercharged by the rise of generative AI. The promises of AI—hyper-personalization, predictive analytics, automated content generation—are immense, but they are entirely dependent on a clean, unified, and accessible data foundation. As Fontoura notes, AI cannot create insight from chaos. If your customer data is scattered across a dozen disconnected systems with no common definitions, your AI initiatives will stall before they even begin.
“There is no AI without data… my experience has been like that one crucial platform that people normally get wrong is the data platform. They don’t have a data lake. Many times they have multiple data lakes and the data is not consistent. And then they don’t have even basic definitions of what a customer is, what a transaction is and so on. And then when they try to cross reference this data across these multiple systems that they have, normally there are like impedance mismatches and semantic mismatches.”
A robust data platform is no longer a “nice to have”; it is the essential substrate for competing in the age of AI. It’s the platform upon which all other intelligent applications are built. This is where the platform mindset pays its greatest dividends. By investing in a single, well-governed data platform, you create the conditions for responsible and effective AI experimentation across the entire organization. It ensures that when a marketing team builds a predictive model for churn and a sales team builds a model for lead scoring, they are both working from the same definitions and the same trusted data. This not only accelerates innovation but also provides a framework for managing ethical considerations, data privacy, and governance from the start, rather than as a panicked afterthought.
Leading Through Uncertainty
In an economic climate marked by uncertainty, the mandate for leaders is to do more with less without sacrificing innovation or burning out top talent. A platform strategy is tailor-made for this challenge. It is an inherently lean approach, eliminating redundant work and focusing resources on high-value activities. By providing stable, powerful, and easy-to-use platforms, you empower your teams and create an environment where the best talent can thrive. The most skilled marketers and technologists don’t want to spend their days integrating broken systems or recreating basic functionality; they want to solve interesting problems and create differentiated value.
The transition to a platform mindset is not a short-term project with a clear end date. It is a continuous process of cultural cultivation, strategic alignment, and technical refinement. It requires leaders who champion collaboration, incentivize shared success, and possess what Fontoura calls a “growth mindset”—an innate curiosity and a willingness to learn and adapt in the face of constant technological change.
Ultimately, this is about building an organization that is resilient by design. By moving away from a collection of brittle, independent silos and toward an interconnected ecosystem built on shared platforms, you create an enterprise that can adapt more quickly to market shifts, scale its successes more efficiently, and innovate more responsibly. It’s a shift from building individual solutions to building a compounding capability—one that ensures your organization isn’t just prepared for the future, but is actively building it.
