Every office has a drawer full of cables whose purpose nobody remembers. The digital workplace has the same drawer, except every cable sends notifications. There is an app for the desk, another for the room, another for the news, another for the chat, and perhaps one more to explain where the first four live. Mike Hicks has spent much of his career on the business end of that confusion.
Hicks is a B2B technology marketer from Kitchener, Ontario, whose résumé moves from agency communications to Research In Motion and BlackBerry, then through two digital-workplace specialists, Igloo Software and Beezy, before arriving at Appspace. The job titles climbed from advisor and marketing manager to vice president, chief marketing officer, and now Chief Growth Officer. The subject barely budged: how to turn complicated enterprise software into a clear reason for people to care.
That is harder than polishing a tagline. Enterprise software accumulates stakeholders the way an old desk accumulates coffee rings. IT wants control. Facilities wants rooms to be used. Communications wants messages to land. Employees mostly want to finish the task without consulting a map. Hicks's work has sat between those interests, translating a catalogue of features into a promise that can survive an ordinary working day.
A career in translation
The public record begins with seven years at Quarry Integrated Communications, where Hicks worked as a senior advisor. He moved into Research In Motion in 2005 and held marketing roles around technical services and technology segments. By 2012 he was directing enterprise marketing at BlackBerry, leading marketing and global demand generation for its software portfolio while the company worked to become a software-driven business.
This was marketing with a moving target. BlackBerry had to be understood as more than the object that had once colonized executive belt clips. Hicks's later roles kept him close to similarly awkward acts of explanation: the intranet that should be a workplace rather than an archive; collaboration software that should reduce interruptions rather than multiply them; a category broad enough to join the physical office to the employee's screen.
The through-line
In 2016, Hicks joined Kitchener-based Igloo Software as vice president of marketing. The move also placed him inside Waterloo Region's technology ecosystem at a moment when Igloo was expanding. As the company prepared to add local jobs in 2017, he credited the region's schools, startup infrastructure, and ability to help companies become sustainable and scalable. Global software, in this chapter, had a distinctly local address.
At Igloo he argued that the old intranet had been a place where information supported decisions already made while the actual work happened elsewhere. The newer ambition was a central place where work could happen, with services, training, benchmarks, and governance wrapped around the software. He became CMO in 2018, writing and speaking about disconnected tools, knowledge gaps, and collaboration fatigue before those phrases became unavoidable boardroom furniture.
The slow creep of app sprawl
Hicks's central observation is that digital clutter rarely arrives as a dramatic mistake. It grows through reasonable decisions. Scheduling needs an app. Announcements need another. Frontline teams need a third. Each solves a local problem, but the collection becomes a new global problem: duplicated information, scattered attention, and a daily scavenger hunt for the right source.
He has called app sprawl a silent productivity killer because it builds slowly. The metaphor is apt. Nobody schedules a ribbon-cutting for the twelfth browser tab. Yet the cost appears in repeated logins, interrupted concentration, missed messages, and the low-grade uncertainty of not knowing where the authoritative answer lives.
The percentages are figures Hicks highlighted from Appspace's workplace research in a 2025 interview.
His remedy starts with a move so basic that technology projects can overlook it: ask. Listen to employees describe what works and what gets in the way. Then consider the entire experience instead of optimizing each tool in isolation. Hicks is not arguing that every company should become a digital monastery. He is arguing for a deliberate system in which channels have clear purposes and important information reaches people where they already work.
He made that case at Beezy, where he served as CMO from 2020 to 2022. In a long podcast conversation, Hicks described a useful old-office image: the whiteboard visible to anyone walking past. Distributed teams needed a digital version of that visibility, a habit he called “working out loud.” Knowledge should become more valuable through open collaboration, not through being privately hoarded until its owner chose to reveal it.
The acquisition route
Hicks did not arrive at Appspace through the usual executive courtship. He joined through an acquisition. That matters because his earlier work on intranets and collaboration became part of a broader platform linking employee communications with physical spaces. At Appspace, a message might travel to an intranet, a mobile device, or a screen in an office. A desk or meeting room could sit in the same general experience as company news.
He became Appspace's CMO in 2022 and led global marketing strategy and execution. By 2025, he was talking publicly about category creation, the balance between short-term wins and long-term positioning, and the questions demand-generation leaders should ask before reaching for another tactic. Appspace's current leadership page now lists him as Chief Growth Officer, a title that widens the brief from explaining a category to helping turn that explanation into company growth.
The distributed nature of Appspace gives the argument some lived texture. Hicks has described working from Canada while the company's CEO was in Tampa, its innovation leader in Costa Rica, and marketing colleagues across the United States, Europe, and Canada. The platform's premise is also the team's operating condition. Consistent access is not a speculative future-of-work panel. It is how Wednesday's meeting happens.
Brand begins behind the front door
Hicks makes an unexpectedly persuasive case that workplace technology belongs on the CMO's desk. Marketers can spend months tuning an external promise while employees navigate internal clutter. But if the team cannot find the mission, get the latest information, or understand why a change matters, that confusion eventually reaches customers. Brand consistency is first an inside job.
This connects his career's two halves. Demand generation asks how a business earns attention outside the company. Workplace experience asks how it earns clarity inside. Hicks treats them as related systems. When employees feel informed and aligned, they are better able to deliver the experience marketing promised. When they are not, no amount of immaculate campaign typography can hide the seam forever.
The Hicks test for a workplace tool
Illustrative framework based on Hicks's stated principles, not a measured score.
His warning about measurement lands cleanly: “Don't mistake activity for impact.” The line is a useful rebuke to any dashboard glowing importantly in a dark conference room. An organization can count logins, clicks, messages, posts, and opens while missing the question that gives those numbers meaning. What were we trying to achieve, and did any of this help?
For Hicks, return on workplace technology includes cost but does not stop there. Productivity, retention, engagement, and connection belong in the discussion. The point is not to distrust data. It is to insist that data answer to an outcome. A metric without a decision attached is merely office décor with decimals.
Fewer tools, better questions
There is a modesty to Hicks's public playbook. He does not begin with the flashiest technology. He begins with employees, their friction, and the work already in front of them. He favors fewer tools that do more, but consolidation is not the end goal. The end goal is a working day with less searching, less switching, and more confidence about what matters.
That also explains his advice to rising marketing leaders. Ask the right questions. Balance the urgent campaign with the category you want the market to understand years from now. Decide what belongs inside the team and what can be handled by outside specialists. Keep strategy close enough to execution that neither becomes theatre.
A career spanning BlackBerry's software turn, Kitchener's intranet scene, Beezy's Microsoft-centered workplace, and Appspace's broader platform could be told as a procession of products. The more revealing story is a procession of friction. Hicks keeps finding the seam between what technology can do and what people can reasonably absorb. Then he asks marketing to make the seam smaller.
It is not glamorous work, which may be why it is useful. The office of the future still has meetings, messages, rooms, colleagues, deadlines, and that one file whose final version has acquired three additional “finals.” Hicks's proposition is that technology should make these ordinary things easier to navigate. A connected workplace, in his telling, is not one with the most software. It is one where people can stop thinking about the software long enough to work.