Mike Bogdan

Success stories

Success story · 01

Running a Plan for Election Night

The Associated Press runs the vote-tally infrastructure that powers national election calls. Election cycles are AP's highest-stakes operational window of the year.

Problem The 2024 U.S. presidential election was approaching against a backdrop of polarized national rhetoric and "rigged election" claims, with AP's vote-tally infrastructure positioned as both the operational fulcrum and a primary cyber-target. Election night and the immediate aftermath were AP's most consequential 48 hours of the year. No purpose-built coverage plan existed.

Action Coordinated a 48-hour staffed-support plan with global support leadership: TAM handoffs at fixed intervals and a joint escalation channel staffed before the night began, with real-time internal coverage so every escalation had a clear owner at any hour.

Impact Election night ran without operational drama on the platform side. The 48-hour plan held end to end, carrying the customer's most consequential window of the year on a coverage layer staffed before it started.

Success story · 02

Surfacing a Churn Problem the Partner Couldn't See

A global managed-services partner navigating a partner-first transition. Half managed-services (MSP), half resell book. Only the MSP side had ever been tracked.

Problem Multi-year churn was sitting silent in the resell book. Prior coverage tracked the MSP side only; the resell side had no renewal motion and no shared view of the book between Cloudflare and the partner.

Action Surfaced the resell-book churn via manual SFDC reconciliation. Built a joint 180/90/60/30-day renewal cadence with the partner's account team, with escalation paths and customer-level renewal forecasting baked in. Deliberately did not hand them a polished dashboard. The point was for them to own the motion.

Impact The partner's account team operationalized the cadence with their own tooling and ran it forward without me in the room. Inside the first year they won a multi-cloud consolidation deal away from a competing platform partner.

Success story · 03

Building an Operating View the Partner Could Run

A digital experience platform (DXP) partner with a large embedded customer base. Their account team had appetite to grow accounts; they didn't have a usable customer-level view to act on.

Part A — The upsell engine

Problem The partner's account team had no per-customer operating view. Every upsell conversation required someone to pull usage data, cross-reference entitlements, and frame the commercial pitch by hand.

Action Built the operating view in Claude using internal data connections (MCP). Pulled customer-usage data and mapped what each customer was paying for against what they actually used. Web lookups on customer domains flagged service fit (page-shield for payment-processing sites, API gateway for API-heavy traffic, bot management for high-automation patterns). Tied signals into established package pricing for self-serve quote generation, exported as a downloadable PDF the account team could put in front of the customer.

Impact The dashboard is in the partner's hands and being used by their account team to ground upsell conversations in actual usage; the manual data-pull cycle that bottlenecked every prior conversation is gone. Ownership transition on the tooling is in progress.

Part B — The migration tracker

Problem Multi-year migration across three parallel paths, affecting 300+ existing customers plus any joining during the migration window. End-customer production environments at stake. No central tracking of which customers needed what work, on which path.

Action Extended the same operating view into a migration tracker. Pulled DNS records across the install base. Ran NS lookups to identify customers who'd hit the static-IP requirement, the single biggest migration blocker. Tracked all three paths in one view, with the customers carrying the heaviest lift surfaced first. Tied in active orders, upcoming renewals, month-over-month revenue and year-over-year churn so migration sat next to commercial context in the same dashboard.

Impact Customer-level migration risk became visible and actionable. The partner's team started sequencing work on operational difficulty instead of reacting to whichever escalation got loudest. Same operating layer running both upsell and migration motions.

Success story · 04

Building Visibility Into a Partner's Customer Book

An enterprise cloud platform partner where most ACV came from the partner's own consumption of the underlying service. New product introductions kept stalling on missing feature requests. The partner's book of business was opaque to both sides.

Problem NPI deals blocked on missing features. No shared visibility into which customers were on which side of the internal/external classification line after the partner negotiated new pricing for internal consumption. The book of business was opaque to both Cloudflare and to the partner's own commercial teams.

Action Built the classification audit first: domain heuristics auto-flagged partner-name and subsidiary domains as internal; web-fetches resolved ambiguous cases. Aligned with the partner on classification logic in a question-and-scenario loop, then set a quarterly audit cadence the partner could run. From that base, layered in book mapping across geography, industry, region and stack, sourced from customer websites, Wikipedia, SEC filings and zero-trust telemetry probes. Fed the same operating layer into an agentic feature-request tracker built in OpenCode with Claude: ingested partner conversation across email and Jira, captured technical requirement plus partner-stakes context, auto-tagged PMs on Confluence, pulled Jira and GitLab status for follow-through.

Impact Classification accuracy on the partner's internal/external book rose from ~80% to 98% against partner ground truth, with a quarterly cadence the partner can run. PMs accelerated development on partner-prioritized feature requests; the account team ran joint GTM conversations off the same operating layer. The partner's book of business is legible at a resolution they hadn't shared with us before this work existed.

Success story · 05

Listening to the Field at T-Mobile

T-Mobile. Apple's brief was iPad attach across the carrier. T-Mobile's actual problem was different. You only heard it if you spent enough time in their stores to surface it.

Problem T-Mobile was missing SMB lead-gen targets. The iPad and Apple Pencil story was sitting silently unsold across thousands of retail conversations.

Action Built a partner-specific enablement workshop with Apple's SMB development team: talk tracks and hands-on conversion skills designed for the SMB-conversation moment in carrier-retail. Piloted as a 4-day workshop with T-Mobile's NYC district leadership team at their Times Square office.

Impact ~20–30% SMB lead lift in the NYC patch with a tracked iPad sales lift in the same cohort. Apple's training team picked the program up, ran it nationally and pulled it into AT&T and Verizon partnerships through their alliance managers.

Approach