The story
What is Asterial? It’s a personal blog.
AI is making individuals extraordinarily capable. But companies aren't individuals. They're complicated systems of people, incentives, decisions, technologies, processes—and increasingly, other companies. Making each part faster doesn't necessarily make the whole thing work better.
You can see the cracks in ordinary moments: the leads that disappear between marketing and sales. The product that launched months ago but sellers still can't find. The partnership where everyone did their job and somehow nothing happened. The meeting that exists because two parts of the organization have no other way to exchange context.
Those little frustrations aren't always little. They're often evidence of something structural underneath.
Asterial starts there: with the thing you deal with every day, pulls the camera back to see the system behind it, and asks what it tells us about how work needs to change.
Sometimes there's a solution.
Sometimes seeing the problem clearly is the insight.
Who I am
I’m Megan Arnold, a marketer and strategist whose career has taken me from Hollywood to advertising, B2C ecommerce, enterprise technology and global partner ecosystems.
I started in film development and production, including work at The Gersh Agency and in various capacities with filmmakers Peter Berg, Christopher Nolan and Taylor Sheridan. Hollywood taught me about narrative, conflict, taste and point of view—and eventually led me to a belief that still shapes how I think: stories and strategy share the same fundamental building blocks.
I later led marketing and creative at SparkFun Electronics, earned my MBA from the University of Colorado Boulder, and spent nearly seven years at NetApp, ultimately leading its Microsoft marketing team and strategy.
Today, I lead partner marketing strategy at Microsoft across a roughly $4 billion portfolio of software partners.
