The first clue is the donut. In March 2025, Eva Hedfors had just moved to Dallas to join the leadership team of a newly formed Ericsson Americas. There were employees to meet, geographies to connect and a marketing operation to lead across a vast market. In the middle of that corporate reset, she posted a photograph of the welcome she received and singled out one detail: a very large Texas donut. Everything really was bigger, she wrote, including breakfast.
The joke does useful work. It punctures the polished language that can gather around an executive appointment. It also shows the habit that runs through Hedfors's career: enter a new system, notice how people live inside it, and find the detail that makes the change legible.
Telecommunications rarely offers such convenient props. Its products tend to vanish into rooftops, data centers and software stacks. People notice a network when the video freezes, the call drops or the app stalls. When everything works, the machinery disappears. Hedfors has spent much of her career giving that invisible system a human outline.
A career built sideways as well as up
Hedfors is a Stockholm native who studied business administration at the University of Gothenburg. Her telecommunications career began around the Ericsson Hewlett Packard Telecom joint venture, where her work included customer satisfaction. She later moved through Ericsson roles in strategy, sales and marketing across value-added services, multimedia, television and media, and operations and business support systems.
The sequence matters because it is not a tidy specialist's climb. It moves between studying customers, selling technology and explaining it. From 2010 to 2012 she led Ericsson ConsumerLab in Stockholm, part of the company's consumer-insights operation. That meant attending to behavior before returning to the network underneath it.
In 2012, the map changed. Hedfors moved to Tokyo to lead the Core and Cloud practice for Ericsson's North East Asia region. Her customer work covered mainland China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, with subjects including cloud transformation, communications services and machine-to-machine connectivity. Consumer observation had given way to core infrastructure and a regional sales brief. The through-line was still the customer.
strategy and marketing
regional customers
marketing leadership
By July 2016, she was back in Stockholm as vice president and head of marketing and communications for Ericsson Digital Services. The remit included 5G Core, distributed cloud, analytics and digital engagement. The business area later became Cloud Software and Services, and Hedfors remained at the center of its public explanation through launches, podcasts, expert videos and industry events.
In early 2025, she moved again, this time to the United States. As vice president and head of marketing and communications, now described as Chief Marketing Officer, she joined Ericsson Americas as the market area brought North America and Latin America together.
“Leadership is universal.”Eva Hedfors, 2026
Her longevity at Ericsson can look static from a distance. Up close, it contains repeated acts of starting over: consumer research to sales, Stockholm to Tokyo, infrastructure to communications, Europe to the Americas. Hedfors has said the long tenure does not feel long because the company and the work keep changing. Curiosity, in her telling, comes from the journey rather than a single destination.
The village behind the vocabulary
Corporate technology language is good at naming capability and weaker at conveying consequence. Throughput, latency and network slicing are precise terms, but none tells a reader why to care. Hedfors's answer begins with a memory from Tanzania.
She visited a village as it became connected and watched the effects ripple outward. Students could reach new bodies of knowledge. Families gained a reliable line beyond the village. Small businesses could reach markets that had previously been distant. The experience turned a broad belief into something observed: communication can change who gets to participate.
That is why she has called connectivity a human right. The phrase is not merely about owning a phone or seeing a signal bar. It is about access to education, the digital economy, public services and other people. In remote communities, she argues, communication can be a lifeline.
This way of seeing also reveals why her time at ConsumerLab still belongs in a story about cloud software. The consumer is not downstream decoration. Behavior determines where a network's promise becomes useful, frustrating or irrelevant. Technical marketing works when it connects the architecture to that lived threshold.
Make the complicated thing tangible
Hedfors has described the challenge plainly. In an advanced technology company, the sophistication of the engineering naturally attracts attention. But a campaign has another obligation: show the value of the network and what it lets customers' customers do.
Her example is Moments That Matter, Ericsson's campaign around differentiated connectivity. The underlying idea is technical: networks can deliver different levels of performance when and where an experience requires them. The campaign moves the focus to recognizable situations. A live event, an important video call or an overloaded household gives the audience a reason to understand prioritization before learning the mechanism.
The execution crossed countries, channels and languages. Hedfors has emphasized both consistency and local relevance, along with the campaign's use inside Ericsson to build employee participation. That combination is easy to underestimate. A global message needs enough structure to remain coherent and enough room to sound native in each market.
The same instinct appears in Hedfors's public explanations of 5G. She has called it an innovation platform rather than simply a faster generation of mobile technology. She has also warned providers against waiting for a perfect launch plan. Her staircase metaphor is revealing: there is no elevator to the top floor. Learning happens step by step, in the market.
Leadership across cultures starts with listening
Hedfors's three-country career gives her an easy way to perform cosmopolitan expertise. She resists it. Her reflections on Sweden, Japan and the United States return instead to a shared set of needs. People want to feel heard and valued. They want to understand how their work connects to a larger purpose. Leadership, she says, is universal because it remains about people.
That principle becomes practical in moments of change. A leader provides clarity around a difficult problem, encourages people to take risks and creates enough safety for them to fail and grow. The goal is not comfort. It is an environment where experimentation does not require pretending certainty.
Her public advice to women in technology follows a similar pattern. At Ericsson's 2021 Girls in ICT event, she encouraged women to claim space in innovation and to find mentors willing to champion them. She also committed to advocate more proactively for female colleagues. Participation, in that framing, is built through personal agency and active sponsorship.
“Across all cultures, people want to feel heard, valued, and connected to something bigger than themselves.”Eva Hedfors, 2026
Learn how to learn
Asked what she would study if she returned to college, Hedfors shifted the question. The useful choice, she said, is less about a subject than a method: how to learn when the industry and the available roles refuse to stand still.
Her list of durable skills is notably unglamorous. Critical and analytical thinking. Turning information into action. Communication and listening. Leading oneself and others through change. Asking for feedback and learning how to give it. These are the tools that travel when the job title, country and technical vocabulary change.
Her own route makes the argument. A business graduate entered telecom through customer satisfaction, learned to read consumer behavior, took responsibility for cloud and core-network customers, and eventually led the story of 5G software across regions. No single degree could prewrite that itinerary. A learning practice could support it.
Now in Dallas, Hedfors is explaining networks across an Americas market shaped by large geographies, uneven infrastructure and fierce demand for reliable digital experiences. The visible subjects include 5G, private networks, automation, AI and the early horizon of 6G. The quieter subject is continuity: how to keep the person in view while the system grows more complex.
The donut returns as a fitting symbol. It is local, funny and concrete. It takes an executive transition and gives it a texture anyone can understand. That is also Hedfors's craft as a marketer. The infrastructure may be hidden, but the story cannot be. Find the moment, show the human consequence, and let the machinery support it.