At mile twelve of the Lake Sammamish Half Marathon, April Moh stood in the drizzle with her two children and a handmade sign. Her husband, Abe, had spent two years working toward this point. The sign said “DAD” in construction-paper letters, followed by a determined abundance of O’s and hearts. When he appeared in the distance, moving unevenly but moving, Moh cried.
It was not the sight of a medal that caught her. It was the accumulated evidence of all the mornings that had no medal in them. Two years earlier, fifteen minutes of running had depleted him. Now his children were watching persistence arrive in public after practicing in private.
Three weeks later, Moh registered for her first half marathon. This was a curious choice for someone who described her old relationship with running as roughly equivalent to flossing: dutiful, useful, joyless. But curiosity has moved her before. Long before she became EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Kyriba, long before a European software IPO and the C-suite titles, she left Singapore for Seattle. There was no grand diagram of the career ahead. There was a conviction that another chapter existed and a willingness to turn the page.
A career drawn backward
Moh studied communication and media at Nanyang Technological University. She began in the startup world, helping young technology companies gain attention, launch, secure funding and, sometimes, get acquired. It was an education in consequence. In a startup, communications cannot live as decorative prose around the real business. The story has to help the company move.
Work connected with Microsoft and Concur followed. At SAP, she rose to Vice President and Global Head of Communications. Then came SUSE, the open-source software company, where she became its first Chief Communications Officer. The remit was expansive: public relations, internal and executive communications, brand, events and customer marketing. Neat departmental fences would have been rather inconvenient.
In 2021, SUSE went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange at a valuation measured in billions of euros. Moh helped guide the company through the rebrands, acquisitions and narrative work around that passage. Its extended-reality IPO celebration later received two iF Design honors, including Gold. This is the photogenic end of corporate communications: a listing, a stage, a piece of work with a trophy beside it.
The less photogenic end is deciding what the company means before anyone designs the stage. Moh has described rebranding in story terms: identify the enemy, identify the hero. The enemy need not be a competitor. It can be an old habit or a limiting perception. The hero is the customer, not the vendor admiring itself under flattering lights. Public relations, in her view, begins with knowing the perception you intend to change and having the patience to measure long-term demand, not merely this quarter’s tidy attribution.
Most work is Tuesday
At Kyriba, which she joined in 2023, Moh leads brand strategy, communications, demand generation, product marketing and pricing strategy. It is a business full of serious nouns: liquidity, payments, risk, cash forecasting. Her job is to make their stakes legible, then connect the promise to growth. Her advice to marketers is equally direct: stop thinking only like marketers. Break silos. Think in systems. Place company goals above departmental goals. “Own outcomes, not just outputs,” she has written.
The phrase lands because Moh has spent a career widening her own lane. It also explains why her 2026 running essays feel less like a hobby bolted onto an executive biography than another way of examining work. By week seven, the novelty had vanished. Tuesday meant six miles at an easy pace. The route went to the lake, around the parking lot and back through a neighborhood where somebody pressure-washed a driveway at six in the morning. A dog barked around mile four. Her watch lost its signal near the lake. Her body had developed what she called a grudging competence.
She found the boredom unsettling. New difficulty provides instant evidence that something is happening. Competence removes the struggle, then has the poor manners to feel like nothing at all. Moh recognized the same condition at work: the years when a person is no longer new, not yet in the next role, reliably doing what the role requires. Performance without drama. Professional life as an endless stack of Tuesdays.
Her useful reversal is that the plateau may be the proof. A presentation delivered without notes and a difficult conversation handled without panic are not evidence that growth stopped. They are growth made repeatable. Business narratives love breakthroughs because breakthroughs have before-and-after photographs. They are less interested in the middle, where the capability actually settles into the muscles.
Making room for other voices
There is another kind of story Moh wants to change. As board secretary of Stand with Asian Americans, she works with a civil-rights organization formed to combat anti-Asian violence and discrimination. Her board biography notes that she has founded employee-resource groups, mentored diverse talent, and worked to increase the representation of women and Asian Americans in leadership.
At a 2024 gathering in San Francisco, the conversation moved beyond the agreeable surfaces of heritage month toward the uglier mechanics of workplace stereotypes: Asian Americans cast as useful but harmless, diligent but not leadership material. Moh wrote afterward that speaking together creates power beyond the individual. She enjoys boba and matcha ice cream, she added with a wink, but celebration without voice was too small an ambition.
Her own leadership language tends to return to teams. In 2026, writing after a sales and marketing kickoff, she praised the planners, fixers and steady hands who hold work together when something goes sideways. These are not always the people invited to the microphone. She wanted them seen. A colleague’s public recommendation describes Moh studying both the strategic direction and the details of an Excel table during a major pricing transformation, while offering mentoring without micromanaging. The point is not that spreadsheets reveal the soul. It is that attention does.
During a later visit to Kyriba’s Singapore team, the place where her journey began, Moh spoke about career growth and self-advocacy. The principle she offered was plain: leave things better than you found them. Titles change, companies change and markets change. The leaders who endure in memory create opportunity, improve systems and make the team stronger. A title is rented. Its consequences are not.
The finish is not the point
This is where the corporate story and the running story meet. Both tempt the storyteller to skip ahead. SUSE’s IPO becomes a date and a valuation; the repetitions that enabled it disappear. A half marathon becomes 13.1 miles and a medal; the six-mile Tuesdays disappear. A promotion becomes proof of readiness; the years of quiet competence disappear.
Moh’s writing restores the missing footage. It includes resistance, fear, sprinklers, a lost satellite signal and mornings when motivation fails to report for duty. Action comes first anyway. Confidence, if it is coming, may arrive somewhere around mile two.
She once wrote about a dinner with a longtime friend who had helped Klarna through its IPO. Moh began to downplay one of her own accomplishments. Her friend reached across the table, held her hands and interrupted: “You did this.” The anecdote sits beside Moh’s public advice about self-advocacy with a pleasing human contradiction. The executive who tells others to own outcomes is still practicing how to own hers.
Perhaps this is why her current chapter feels less like a victory lap than a calibration. She has the awards and the broad CMO brief. She also has a route where the same dog barks in the same place. One world measures attention; the other refuses to care. Between them is a more durable definition of progress: take the step, do the ordinary work, notice who made it possible, and leave the path a little better for the next person.
The race will supply a finish line. Moh has already found the more interesting question beneath it: what becomes possible once a person stops negotiating with doubt? The road, as ever, will reveal only as much of itself as the next step requires.