From Peacekeeping to Platform Strategy: Naveed Husain’s Journey from CIO to CEO

In this candid and inspiring conversation, Naveed Husain—a 5-time Customer Advisory Board (CAB) member and former CIO at Columbia University’s Teachers College—shares how his diverse experiences shaped his leadership journey. From serving in UN peacekeeping operations across Africa and the Middle East to guiding digital transformation in higher education, Naveed brings a global, people-first lens to technology.

Now CEO of Sugar Hill Consulting, he reflects on the pivotal role CABs played in enterprise innovation, platform trust, and customer engagement at companies like RingCentral. This session explores how CABs not only validate product strategy, but also drive real-time innovation, executive alignment, and long-term customer success.

Naveed Husain 5X CAB Veteran Shares his Journey from CIO to CEO - Transcript

Irene Yam  0:00 

I'm here with Naveed Hussein, and I've known him for, I'm proud to say, probably, like, six or seven years, right?

Naveed Husain  0:09 

I think actually, it's more than that. I think it's eight years.

Irene Yam  0:13 

I don't want to grow up too fast. So a fun fact that I didn't know about you is that you, you went to Africa and the Middle East as a US or no, wait, UN peacekeeping ops. Is that correct?

Naveed Husain  0:28 

That's right, yeah, the United Nations Department of peacekeeping operations. That's where I really got my, you know, chops. It was probably the best experience of my life, right? Zagreb, the Middle East. You know, Palestine, Israel, Somalia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, was my first mission. So, yeah, that was, I was 21 years old, so it was a lot of fun, a lot of learning.

Irene Yam  1:08 

Why we picked you, too, is that you're such a good you're good at getting people to talk, and you're such a good diplomat. And in terms of meaning, you're you're bringing in, you want to bring in different people to have a conversation. But so then, after the peacekeeping ops were you left Africa and Middle East, you landed in New York, and your first big gig was at the Queens College as a CIO, is that correct?

Naveed Husain  1:32 

Yeah, so I didn't even apply for that job. My wife, did you know? And when Higher Ed does an interview, they have six or eight people around the table and lots of bottles of water. I think it's a way of interrogating you and hold it, seeing how long you can hold your bladder for this interview. You know, if you can hold it for three hours, you can get the job. I think that's, I think that was the goal, well, but, but to be honest, actually, a lot of like, you know, Queens College experience came from the innovation from the UN experience. Because in the UN in the field, you have to be innovative. You have to be creative, because you have to come up with things and solutions in real time based on the environment and the logistics that are available to you, right? So it's the same as a CIO. You have to be creative, curious and innovative, right? So it was a perfect fit as a job, and I was very lucky to have a great mentor, Sue Henderson, and James my skins and my colleague Joe Berlino, at that time to to actually, to nurture my growth in in higher education, because I didn't know much about higher education.

Irene Yam  2:55 

Well, while you were the CIO at Teachers College at Columbia University, and we were at Napa when I met you, and I saw you moving around like that. You were so comfortable. It was like you were, you know, walking around, talking to people. And there was Paul and Dave, and you guys were having fun, bringing everyone together and talking, and it you also broke the tension when people are in a cab meeting, sometimes people are a little nervous because they don't know what to do. And the three of you were just pros. You knew how to engage. And I'm so glad that Mitch and Ryan and Dave nominated you, because we really needed leaders like you to take us from mid market to enterprise. And I think really, we are so grateful to have you, Paul and Dave, really sit down and be true advisors.

Naveed Husain  3:53 

So you were actually pivoting like a humongous shift transformation for this company to understand that you're pivoting to enterprise, it and enterprise, it doesn't just want to go reboot the modem, but they actually have an enterprise network, and things have to be reliable, and there has to be redundancy, and there's expectations on on service quality, you know? And that's where, like a five nine reliability, and trying to get the six nines, and the fact that Ring Central has managed to maintain a very strong six nines type service. Now, by the time I met you, I was already second year or third year into the cab. Yes, Anita was running the cab prior to you. Yes. But what was pivotal, you know, what was different about this whole thing was the culture, the company, culture that you guys brought, which was, we'll roll up our sleeves and make it work. We're going to be strong about it. We're going to stand by it. You know, you can trust us. And you could be straight with us, like I didn't have to be politically correct. And, you know, I wasn't very politically correct when it came to billing or outages or customer success.

Speaker 2  5:12 

You held us to a high bar. You did

Naveed Husain  5:15 

because, you know, in a way, it was my company too, because I had taken the risk of, you know of buying the product and convincing my constituent, students, faculty and the administration, that moving things, changing the system right, changing it, making it lighter, moving it to the cloud, was a better way to do it than to go build a data center and maintain all of this equipment on site and hire people, right? I actually showed an 18 month payback period, which you know, which is phenomenal, right? So you have this payback period where you're replacing 10 year old technology. That's happening in 18 months a year and a half, right? That's what 18 months really is right, versus waiting three years before you actually see benefits of of the technology and adoption and usage, right? And then on top of that, you have your your your changing the concept of this being a hardware and physical solution to this is really software, and now I can do a whole bunch of other things with it, where I can make things work for students, or I can send notifications to students. I you know, I can make things available for them to communicate, communicate within the class, right, in a secure platform that was FERPA compliant, right? And meeting all of those compliances and security and then integrations with the other applications that you know, software beats hardware type solution, and that was exciting, and that's what David nurse and Paul Chapman and I really enjoyed. Why did we bring other people in? Because the cross industry exchange was worth every minute of it. If we're going to spend three or four days with you guys, we don't just want to approve the product, but we want to learn from other people's experiences. And the only way you can learn from other people's experiences is if you get other people to talk right, right, share their experiences, and they need to know that it's a safe environment to share their experiences, because they don't know. They don't know Vlad as well as I did at that time. Or, or David sites, or or, or Mitch, necessarily. Maybe everybody knew Mitch, because Mitch is like the mayor of the world, right? Like this guy is super energy. He, you know, he calms everything down. Just good, right?

Irene Yam  7:45 

We got to shout out to Mitch. I mean, he had to defend Ring Central. He flew out with Dave sipes, right? And he sat across your CFO, yeah,

Naveed Husain  7:57 

yeah. He, you know, look, this is also what got me to be part of the customer advisory board right is because I knew that there were people at the organization that was sincere about delivery and standing behind the product, but not only standing behind the product, but standing behind the vision of what we were going to do, Like e9 one didn't e 911 didn't exist. The dashboard for utilization didn't exist until we at Teachers College started, you know, building it. We built the E 911 application where the designers built the dashboard for me, right? And I started using the dashboard when it was in beta, and I was told not to use the dashboard, right? When you guys came out with it. Said, don't use the dashboard. I said, No, we gotta make the dashboard better, because this is how I tell how my network is doing, also, right? So I was using it for, you know, the adjacent possibilities. You build something, and then the customer goes and uses it for something totally different that you didn't expect them to do, right? But that's what I mean, is that the customers, you know, the customers would buy into an idea or an innovation, right? And why did they buy into the idea or innovation? They bought into the people, right? And they bought into the vision, and your people bought into the vision, right? But it became like this trusted relationship, where we knew anything was possible, right? And if you knew that it was possible, and have these customers, I mean, where did Paul Chapman come from? He came from box, right? David Ness came from Crescent real estate, right? I came from the oldest universe, oldest college in education in the country, right? The record,

Irene Yam  9:40 

huh? You were educating us. You were educating us around tech, Ed, around SAS, around the real estate,

Naveed Husain  9:47 

right? It it was about building, building a company that was ready to go to the next level, right? It was the next level company, right? You guys didn't have 30% Euro. Your growth, if you weren't willing to do that, then you know Vlad and Kira, hands on approach to to product, right? I mean, you've seen Vlad when it comes to product. He is like a perfectionist, right? Which is what we want as customers. We want somebody who's passionate about their product. Yeah, and that that was the culture of the company, and that's the trust that it brought. And eventually I came to work for for the company. But you know, if we went from 50% you know, small business, medium sized business, right? Or actually 80% small, medium sized business, to 50% and then I would say that it's now flipped right, like enterprise is probably bigger as a customer base than than your small, medium sized business.

Irene Yam  10:52 

Okay, I don't want to take Yeah, but I don't want to take any credit, but I'm just joking about the cab, but I think the safe places were you, Renee Gareth, you know you, you understood us, and you were breaking bread with us, and we were you're giving us criticism. But it was very it was very timely, and that trust that you built with us. So it seemed automatic to run sales a part

Naveed Husain  11:23 

of, well, actually, it's funny, because the cab, right? Yeah, the way you ran the cab, you Irene, I'm gonna well

Speaker 2  11:31 

and Anita beforehand. You guys, you

Naveed Husain  11:35 

guys were major OCD, and your agenda was tight. You didn't waste any time. You kept us on track, but you also inserted fun. So it wasn't like we were working all the time. We were we had, we had, we had excellent lunches and dinners and, you know, and great places and venues to do it at. The schedule was thoughtful and predictive, you know, rather than you know that that's that's very important, right? Like, if that, it's that customer experience. So it's a complete customer experience, right? Not only did we have input and work so there was quality of time usage, but it was also, you know, the quality of time in networking with each other and networking with the executives, and networking so that we learned and exchanged ideas and just like relaxed, right? Where you don't have the opportunity to do that when you're in the middle of your normal work day and you can't think about new ideas, right? It was Mitch his idea to create the office of the CIO. Oh, and yeah, it was, it was mitches idea. And Mitch wanted CIOs, with experience, right and innovation, to go talk to CIOs in the enterprise to help convert these customers. You know, when I first came on board, Pfizer's response was, Naveed, your Mitch is closer, right? Like I didn't know what that was. I didn't know anything about sales. Mitch taught me that, but, yeah, we became his closers, right? And we built industry expertise when you came on board in verticals, right? Healthcare, education, government, retail, financial services, absolutely, and, and. And we did that in a thoughtful way. We didn't just say, Okay, we're going to go build these verticals, and we're talking about them in the vertical language, and that would be our vertical strategy, right? Our vertical strategy was everything from from product compliance, programmatic to marketing, right,

Irene Yam  13:45 

buy from they buy from people and you Renee and Gareth that I remember when I was running cabs for people on the board who are experts

Naveed Husain  13:56 

and could could talk from real experience, not like imagine, imagine if right it was, I did this, and I think in the next iterations of product, will be able to do this, this and this in this industry. And we'll introduce push to talk, and we'll do this, and we'll introduce, you know, integrations into contact center, and we'll meet the compliances. What you don't. We don't have these compliances, and we need them now. We'll get those right. How do you think that we built the integration with data lake? Right? We needed, we needed a compliance tool that helped us with E discovery and financial services and to meet FINRA requirements, but then the same product we apply to education, because we needed an ediscovery tool in education, right? And we worked with Anthony Kresge at Data Lake to make that product a reality within our product, and that those were the kind of ISP integrations that became real, that were sold on our paper, and that comes from experience. From actually having implemented the product and worked in the industry to know what you need to make it possible. So Sugar Hill consulting, we're small group a couple of former RingCentral employees, right? Dean from a university as well, right? So we and great partnerships, right? So that's the other thing I learned about ring Central's growth. Ring Central's growth came from channel partners, and it came really, you know, like 65% of our leads came from channel right? But the growth in product is a growth in ecosystem, right? So in order for you to be able to to scale, you have to have great partners. So one of the things I did is I, I have great partnerships with unified communication and service providers. Contact Center as a service providers, I have an excellent development partnership with Akiba labs, who was our Salesforce developer at Ring Central, and having experience working with them as as the CIO for Ring Central at one point, right? I I now have them as a partner of mine for development, right? So they give me the scale and the depth of expertise in Salesforce, while I have another partner, like Ben Corp, who does, you know the integrations and the design and the app builds and all the technology builds and Postgres SQL stuff, right? And that's how you scale. You don't just hire a bunch of people hoping that you get customers, but you know you get product. You know you get get into deals, and you get into delivery to customers, but you do it in a reliable, secure, intelligent, thoughtful manner, not promising more than you can deliver. And so Sugar Hill acts like, in a way, a GC, you know, general contractor type thing, but it starts with strategy and advisory, and then goes into implementation. And then it also provides managed services, but all through, through curated service providers, right? And at the end of the day, it's It's sugar hills, neck on the line, and it's sugar Hills back to Pat, depending on how the thing goes, right, right? So

Irene Yam  17:35 

how I have to toot your horn? Because I think the one thing that stands out for you and your team, is that you really want to maximize the whole stack or the whole offering. When you go in and you're walking in, yes, your customers will have requirements and where they need and what they need implemented, but you're constantly going back and saying, you could do more with your technology. You could do more with RingCentral. This is what you can do. You can set this up. You can, I we can, we can make it custom for you to really connect with your customers or in or make sure that you're using the AI receptionist,

Naveed Husain  18:14 

for example. Well, we can exactly right? You got the AI receptionist. You've got the end to end customer care experience. You've got the bot, you know. Let me give you an example of the bot, right? A lot of people think, oh, you know, we're going to deflect all our calls to bots. We're going to reduce the number of agents. We're going to save money on agents. Agents, as in humans, not the automated agents, right? Not, not agentic AI. We're not talking about agentic AI yet, right? But when you implement contact center and you implement the integration into UCAS, that's great, but you don't get the entire Know Your Customer experience right, hyper personalized, so that the customer care rep knows. You know, Irene yam just called me. She bought XYZ of product, and we also promised her on the roadmap that we're going to deliver this by q4 right? And maybe it's being pushed out to q1 2026, I want to be able to know as a Customer Care rep that this, these are her expectations, and this is who she is, and this is what we've done for her, and these are her top five complaints, and this is where we've been successful for her, let's build a rapport, understand her needs and make sure that she doesn't have to repeat all of those things over again, right? So we look like a coordinated company, and that's something that's disjointed, right? And when I go in to see you know, a customer, let's say PC Richards, for example, Irene Central, right? And I'm going to go see Steve. I need to know, like, what we talked about with Steve the last time, what we sold Steve? Yeah, you know, maybe a little bit about his his children, or whatever, maybe a little bit about his interests. You know that? Rapport is very important for an executive sponsor. Right? Cab makes that possible too, right? Because when you meet with them in person, you get to learn a little bit about the human side of the customer, right? And then the other thing is, is actually being able to take what you know about that person and making sure and their company and making sure that you have addressed those things, and that those issues are not just things that show up on a spreadsheet, on a turn report or something like that, but they're actually actions issues to actions right, and that we have actions around them, and as an executive sponsor, you can credibly represent your company to that customer based on real information, rather than, Oh, you know, I think it's on the road. Now, let me get back to you. I'll get Jimmy to give you a call, because he's really in charge. No, at the end of the day, you own that relationship as that executive sponsor, you should be able to answer those questions, right? The last CEO and president that I worked with, which was mo katiba, he was very good at getting down to those things. He was almost a Dave sipes equivalent, right? Of of that type of knowledge around the customer. It was great. So those are the kind of things that you should be able to do, that's what that's the value add that Sugar Hill is trying to bring to the table is give that coordinated, integrated approach. So we have a partnership with calabrio As a matter of fact, that allows us to do the overlay. And they have a tool called wisdom, which helps with the deflection and and the chat bot and learning the interactions with the chat bot and improving that experience. But now with, for example, iba capabilities in RingCentral, you can build virtual, you know, calling paths and things like this that makes it even more powerful, right, dynamically and then integrating that with your sales force and integrating that with your work day. You know, you've got a complete system that's now giving you agent scheduling, Agent skills development, you know, training real time. You know, coaching, customer information all coming into a consolidated single pane of glass type approach. That's where we need to go. That's going to be transformative. And that's what Sugar Hill is trying to help with, on on the student on the on the university side, on the healthcare side, on the government side, and even international services

Irene Yam  22:43 

that's great.The that's like, the perfect company for you. I'm so glad you're

Naveed Husain  22:48 

leading it. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. We're excited. We're excited we have good people working with us and and you know, again, you have to have that culture that's sincere and true about getting it, getting stuff done and standing by your customer and standing by your

Irene Yam  23:06 

commitments, yeah, and having fun. It sounds like too

Naveed Husain  23:10 

Absolutely, it's gotta be fun, otherwise. Why are we doing anything I love? You know that you you quoted me in the book, and thank you for the plaque that you sent me. Oh, yeah. So you know if, if you can, I don't know if you have it, if you could share the plaque, yeah, look at that.

Irene Yam  23:29 

Yeah. Can I read it?

Naveed Husain  23:31 

So please, could you read the Yeah,

Irene Yam  23:34 

so we were at the nascent, nascent edge of technology that we changed the world that is foundational, where the customer company's vision and the customer's goals are aligned to the point where the customer sees a company as the extension of his or her IT staff that is trust Naveed Hussain, chief information officer. And I have a little cold, sorry that I fumbled a little bit, but that's great words. So so philosophical of you. So thank you.

Naveed Husain  24:10 

No thank you for this, you know. Thank you for the plaque. Thank you for the

Irene Yam  24:13 

quote. Well, that was Naveed Hussain. We had a really in depth interview with him. We went from his days of being 21 in Mogadishu in Africa in the Middle East, working in the UN peacekeeping ops, to being a leader at both Queens College and Teachers College Columbia University, as a CIO, and then he pivoted, and he joined us at Ring Central At the time and became a sales leader, and now he's on his next journey, running Sugar Hill consulting and bringing his knowledge of it and people and delivery. I mean, I think for you, I just have to say for you, when you say it, you do it. So I think that's um. I don't know if that's your tagline, but I

Naveed Husain  25:02 

do believe they say. I think my wife's tagline is, mean what you say, and say what you mean. Okay, so we could, we could, you know, the most influential woman in my life. So we could end on her, you know,

Irene Yam  25:14 

okay, we'll give

Naveed Husain  25:16 

you what you

Irene Yam  25:17 

need. Okay, well, I think that's a good way to end. I hope we do that all, all us humans say that and do it and believe in it. Thank you.

Naveed Husain  25:28 

Okay, thank you.

Irene Yam  25:29 

Thanks. Naveed. Take care. Bye.

FAQ

1. How did Naveed Husain leverage CABs during his time as a CIO?

As a 5X CAB veteran, Naveed used Customer Advisory Boards to influence product direction, hold vendors accountable, and co-develop solutions like dashboards and e911 services. CABs created a trusted environment where he could speak candidly about outages, billing, and service reliability—shaping platform innovation from the inside out.

2. What role does executive engagement play in successful CABs?

Executive alignment is critical. Naveed recalls the importance of leaders like Mitch and Dave Sipes showing up, defending the product, and listening. These interactions built deep trust with customers and made CABs a space for honest feedback, strategic alignment, and accelerated decision-making—especially during pivotal moments like RingCentral’s enterprise pivot.

3. How can CABs support product innovation and adjacent use cases?

CABs surface real-world use cases that vendors don’t always anticipate. Naveed described using beta dashboards for unexpected network monitoring and co-developing integrations for compliance (like eDiscovery tools) that benefited both education and financial services. This feedback loop accelerated adjacent innovation across industries.

4. What’s the strategic impact of CABs on go-to-market (GTM) evolution?

CABs influence GTM strategy by validating vertical solutions, enabling cross-industry exchange, and informing verticalized messaging. As RingCentral moved upmarket, CAB insights helped shape its Office of the CIO model, expand into healthcare, government, and education, and support high-stakes enterprise deals with real-world credibility.

5. How does Sugar Hill Consulting apply CAB-style thinking to client success?

Naveed’s consulting firm, Sugar Hill, channels his CAB experience into full-stack advisory and delivery services. By treating client relationships like CABs—high trust, high accountability—Sugar Hill helps organizations maximize tech stacks, scale responsibly through partners, and build sustainable transformation strategies across industries.