Leigh-Margaret
Stull

Mid-Stride at Mural

July 2024. Leigh-Margaret Stull walks into Mural's CEO seat and the first thing she says publicly isn't a pivot announcement or a restructuring memo. It's a question about what happens when empathy meets artificial intelligence in the same room. That tells you something.

Mural is a visual work platform - digital whiteboards, collaboration templates, LUMA design methodology baked in - and it's woven into the operating fabric of most of the planet's largest enterprises. When IBM needs to run a remote design sprint, when a Fortune 50 healthcare company needs to map a customer journey across three continents, they open Mural. The product is quiet infrastructure for how the world's biggest organizations think together.

Stull inherited a platform with serious market penetration and a question mark in the air that every enterprise SaaS CEO was being asked in 2024: what does this company do when AI reshapes the nature of collaboration itself? Her answer wasn't to bolt on a chatbot. It was to argue, loudly and specifically, that the five percent of organizations actually succeeding with AI aren't the ones with the most compute - they're the ones with alignment, curiosity, and genuine cooperation on their teams.

She's citing MIT research when she says that. She's not improvising. That's the operational leader in her - the one who spent a decade at CareerBuilder navigating through VP, CPO, and COO, turning data intelligence into product, and product into measurable business outcomes. She doesn't do rhetoric without receipts.

The Road That Made Her

Louisville, Kentucky. Western Kentucky University for a marketing degree, then Belmont University in Nashville for information technology. Not the traditional Silicon Valley origin story - and that's probably the point. Stull's career arc cuts through industries in a way that almost reads as deliberate research into how organizations actually function.

General Motors first, in training and communications. Then TeleTech Holdings - the customer experience outsourcing giant - where she worked on business development and mergers and acquisitions. Then Grainger, the industrial supply company, where she led change management and innovation. A consulting firm. And then CareerBuilder in 2014, where she would spend a decade building out product strategy, AI integration, and eventually running operations as COO.

The CareerBuilder arc is worth dwelling on. When she arrived in 2014, the job-search platform was trying to figure out how to apply machine learning to matching candidates with opportunities - a messy problem requiring a mix of data science, UX intuition, and B2B product judgment. She built that capability across consumer-facing and B2B initiatives simultaneously. By the time she was COO, she was overseeing product, marketing, communications, and go-to-market strategy for a company with global reach. That's the breadth she brought to Mural.

When she announced her departure from CareerBuilder in July 2024, she called it "bittersweet" - the word of someone who built something real there. Then she stepped into Mural three weeks later and started writing publicly about the future of collaboration as if she'd been thinking about it for years. She probably had.

The Visual Thesis

Stull has a specific argument about why visual collaboration isn't just nice-to-have infrastructure. She's built a framework around it that goes beyond the product's feature set.

Mural's integration with LUMA - a structured system of human-centered design methods originally developed for workshops and service design - is central to her vision. Under Stull, the company deepened its commitment to baking LUMA methodology into the platform's AI features. The idea is to let AI facilitate the structure of design sprints, retrospectives, and strategic planning sessions, not just generate content for them.

That distinction - AI as facilitator versus AI as generator - is one she articulates clearly and returns to often. The difference matters to enterprise customers who need AI to make their teams more coherent, not just more productive.

Building the Leadership Bench

One measure of how a new CEO thinks is who they hire. In Stull's first year at Mural, she assembled a new executive layer with specific intent:

The pattern is deliberate. Every hire reinforces the same thesis: that Mural is not a whiteboard company that added AI, but an AI company with human-centered design at its foundation.

The People Bet

In a market full of AI-first positioning, Stull's differentiation is counterintuitive and precise. She quotes MIT research. She cites the five percent of organizations actually succeeding with AI. And she argues - with the specificity of someone who has run product and operations at scale - that the separator isn't the technology stack.

The practical translation: Mural's AI features are built to amplify the capabilities - empathy, intuition, creativity, trust - that humans bring to collaboration, not to substitute for them. In an enterprise context, where team alignment is often the actual bottleneck rather than individual capability, this framing resonates with buyers in a way that raw AI productivity claims don't.

She also brings something unusual to the conversation: she's not from San Francisco. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Her career ran through automotive, industrial supply, customer experience outsourcing, and HR tech before it landed in visual collaboration. She's seen how organizations of radically different types fail to coordinate - and she's built products to fix that problem at each stop.

What She Wants to Build

Stull talks about translating teamwork into measurable business metrics. This is operational CEO language, not visionary CEO language - and in the enterprise market, that's a feature, not a bug. CFOs and CHROs need to justify collaboration software spend. If Mural can show that a team running a LUMA-structured sprint via its platform produced a product decision 30% faster than the baseline, that's a line item that survives budget cuts.

Her stated aspiration is a future where collaboration "knows no boundaries" - but underneath the phrasing is a concrete product agenda: deeper AI facilitation, expanded LUMA methodology integration, tighter connections to the Microsoft 365 ecosystem (where most Fortune 100 workflows actually live), and the kind of enterprise security and compliance posture that makes regulated industries comfortable.

The deeper ambition is positioning Mural at the intersection of AI capability and human-centered design - not as a whiteboard that got smart, but as the visual operating system for how complex organizations think, decide, and execute together. She came to the right platform for that bet.