Michael Assefa

About Michael Assefa

I\'m a product and business leader passionate about shipping experiences that win customers over and drive business impact at pace!Currently, I lead a team building self-serve and AI-enabled services to empower game publishers to drive revenue growth and engagement on the Xbox commerce platform. This includes strategic areas like pricing and promotion, personalized offers, advertising, and data and insights. My background in Corporate Strategy, Business Development, and Consulting also enables me to excel at working cross-functionally, to consider and integrate the GTM, financial, and legal considerations a product needs to find market fit and scaleIn my free time, I enjoy experimenting and prototyping with AI tools such as Replit, Claude, ChatPrd, Expo, and recently, agent.ai.

Experience

1. Sr Product Lead, Xbox Commerce

   Microsoft

   Feb 2023 — Present

   Delivering self-serve and AI enabled service to enable game publishers to drive revenue growth and engagement on the Xbox platform across pricing and promotion, personalized offers, events, data and insights, and advertising. Select areas of impact include: 1) Increased the number of publishers participating in key sales events and in-turn Xbox\'s store revenue for large sales events by double digits yoy2) Lead a cross-fuctional effort to identify and gain commitments from top 10 mobile game publishers to be launch partners for a webstore that allows them to boost margins by 20%+ by surpassing the Apple/Google rev share3) Identified and presented to Xbox\'s President and her leadership team ways to drive material reduction in operating costs through product investment including leveraging AI while improving the customer experience4) Delivering and iterating an LLM based search service that increased total purchases by 2% across millions of users and billions of dollars in revenue 5) Leading key rhytms with business stakeholders to ideate new opportunities, formulate GTM plans, manage key customer relationships, and track the business impact of my teams\' product investments

Education

• University of Washington

  Industrial and Systems Engineering, Industrial Engineering

  2013 — 2017

• Ballard High School

  High School Diploma

  2009 — 2013

Skills

• Powerpoint
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Powerpoint
• Recruiting
• Staff Development
• Microsoft Office
• Science
• Analysis
• Teamwork
• Research
• Data Analysis
• Public Speaking
• Marketing
• English
• Tutoring
• Leadership
• Teaching
• Time Management
• Start-Ups
• Microsoft Word