Bernard Slowey

“I'm so thankful that Bernard chose to lead the Digital Customer Success team at GitHub. His leadership really helped jumpstart our digital customer success initiatives that were really in their infancy when he joined. He empowered my team of engineers and PMs and me to do some of the best of work of our careers at GitHub. During his tenure, we built powerful functionality onto GitHub's support platform that enabled our customers to self-serve their own issues with a native Virtual Assistant, we launched non-English language support and we made the support experience feel like a more native GitHub experience with things like markdown support and dark mode. What differentiates Bernard from other leaders is that he was able to make an outsized impact in a short time by setting clear goals without being prescriptive on how we got there. Additionally, he really took the time to truly understand our customers, our products and our culture at GitHub. This combination of efforts gained him the respect from me and my team. We shipped features than we ever have before and we had fun doing it! The foundation he's laid within the org have positioned us well for future success. I will truly miss working with Bernard and hope that our paths cross again. ”

“I had heard a lot about Microsoft. About how it had become this great supportive environment with strong culture and a drive to do good. This was really compelling but I was still nervous to leave my current company. After listening to the pitch on the job I was still not entirely sure this was a good fit for me. I had a great track record of amazing leaders and it's always scary going into the unknown, but after our brief interview, I immediately knew that Bernard was a leader I wanted to work for. Every kind of curveball that comes his way, he always seems to know how to approach or how to pull the right people in to approach. He's extremely flexible and always has a positive outlook and demeanor. His positivity is infectious, where I find myself having the same positive thinking and passing that on to my team. I realized that Microsoft culture was great on its' own, but Bernard's culture that he established was exceptional. Every team under him and every team partnering with him are infected with a positive, collaborative, and transparent culture without judgement. He's always had my back, and always looking for development opportunities for me. Besides that though, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention his drive for diversity and inclusion. Being inclusive and having diverse ideas is hard, and it requires a lot of work. I still struggle as a leader balancing the business goals, development opportunities for my team, and addressing diversity of backgrounds and ideas, but Bernard makes it such a high priority that it becomes part of our DNA. I'm sure he will be humble here and say that it's just part of the Microsoft mission, but there's no way that mission could be accomplished without someone like Bernard working hard, learning, and listening. He is a leader who cares, and you feel it every day at work. There are a few leaders who could give me a call and convince me to jump into something completely new and unknown. Bernard is one of those leaders.”