With a billion-dollar investment in Azure cloud services, Microsoft needed to communicate new acquisitions in their tech stack and convert developers. At the annual Game Developers Conference, I helped them speak to developers in a language they understand – games. In came Game Studio Stacker, an original tabletop card game written by me and designed by my agency team that pit players against each other as rival indie game studios.

It gamified the development process with cards that riffed on decades of gaming culture, and was the most sought-after swag item of the show. I also wrote a longform book, The PlayFab Guide to LiveOps, to offer in-depth content positioning Microsoft as a leader for dev communications.