Melanie Kraintz.
I grew Azure Red Hat OpenShift 56% year over year.

Melanie was a fantastic asset to the Microsoft/Red Hat Partnership as a great Marketing leader, master orchestrator of our in-market global Microsoft/Partner events efforts and as an overall stakeholder of the partnership virtual team. She has been missed since the day she transitioned. Melanie, please consider me a strong advocate and professional reference.

I worked with Melanie for two years on the Red Hat partnership at Microsoft, across both Azure Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL. She started on ARO and took on RHEL without missing a beat when the team needed coverage. What stood out about Melanie was consistency. She was always on the ball, thorough in her preparation, reliable in her delivery, and genuinely easy to work with. She was excellent at coordinating the messaging across our presence at Red Hat Summit. I'd work with Melanie again without hesitation.

Melanie is a standout product marketer who combines deep technical expertise with a strong ability to [bring] solutions to market in complex environments. She excels at aligning cross-functional stakeholders across product, marketing, and sales, and knows how to deliver impactful go-to-market strategies, not just content—especially in partnership with some of the industry’s largest software vendors. Her commitment to collaboration, clear communication, and excellent quality of work truly sets her apart. She’s one of the best product marketers I’ve had the opportunity to work with.

I've had the pleasure of working closely with Melanie in her PMM role on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and she consistently operates well beyond the traditional scope of product marketing. She independently drives GTM strategy, field enablement, and cross-functional execution — work that typically requires an entire team. Whether it's equipping sellers, sharpening positioning, or partnering with engineering and product to land complex narratives, Melanie shows up as an owner, not just a contributor. Any team would be lucky to have her — she's the kind of PMM who raises the bar for everyone around her.

Melanie is an accomplished project manager and marketing consultant with a can-do attitude and uncanny ability to untangle things. She was the best partner one could ask for when demand for our device management solution surged in response to everyone working from home globally in early 2020. Our small two-person team managed to not only keep up the momentum but also created tons of fresh assets to help people who were newly introduced to endpoint security management solutions. As the team grew, Melanie became the bedrock of institutional knowledge and orchestrated bigger and more visible projects for successful impact across the board.

Melanie's ability to lead through ambiguity, maintain transparency, and foster trust across teams was essential to our success. Her proactive engagement, clarity, and leadership, even in challenging situations, truly set her apart.