Know Your Line Before You Walk In | Rebecca Norlander

Rebecca Norlander is a renowned technology leader and Chief Product Officer at Verific.AI. In this episode, Rebecca tells her story from when she was a Group Manager at Microsoft running the release of Windows XP SP2 during a white-hot security crisis.

Microsoft was facing intense pressure. Customers had serious security vulnerabilities, and trust in Windows was on the line. Rebecca was tapped to lead the release, shipping what amounted to a full version of Windows in just 11 months.

Then came the moment that tested everything. A senior executive demanded she withhold the update from millions of users. She said no, in a room full of people who outranked her, with her job on the line.

Rebecca talks about what it takes to stand your ground when the stakes are real: knowing where your line is before you walk into the room, building executive air cover in advance, and accepting that sometimes you’ll be wrong. And that’s okay.

We also talk about being one of the few women in a 50-person engineering team, why fit matters more than cool projects, and what her mother’s mechanical heart valve taught her about falling in love with technology.

About Rebecca Norlander

Rebecca is Chief Product Officer at Verific.AI, where she’s building AI compliance solutions that help companies move at the speed of AI without breaking the law. Previously she spent over two decades at Microsoft shipping products used by hundreds of millions of people.