I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. This is for the people I’ll work with over the course of my career: so you understand where I’m coming from, how I think about the work, and who I am outside of it.
About Me
I’ve spent 15+ years in B2B SaaS, mostly in the Bay Area, mostly in categories where the product is complex and the buyer is skeptical: HRTech, AdTech, Developer APIs, AI in CX. Twilio, Segment, SendGrid, Kustomer.
Outside of work, I’ve always been drawn to competition. Before moving to the US, I played basketball at the national level in India. These days that energy mostly goes into keeping up with a toddler, which is its own kind of sport. And yes, I watch reality TV. More than I’ll fully admit.
What Is the PMM Role About
I’ve been doing product marketing for over 15 years, and the part that still energizes me most is the same as it was at the beginning: sitting down quietly and writing a positioning document. Getting the logic right, finding the sentence that actually lands, making sure the story holds together end to end. That’s the work I love.
When most people think of PMM, the first thing that comes to mind is product launches. Get the press release out, write the one-pager, brief sales. That’s real work, but I believe it’s only part of what the role actually is.
The real job is corporate-level storytelling. How does what you’re launching connect to where the company is going? How does this release fit the bigger arc of what the business stands for?
I’ve seen this play out in practice at two companies in particular:
- At Twilio, every launch was a chapter in a larger narrative about what developers could build. We ended every blog post with “We can’t wait to see what you build.” This was Twilio’s core philosophy. The builders mindset ran through everything: the copy, the docs, the events, the way we talked about customers.
- At Kustomer, we repositioned the entire company around AI-native CX before that framing was mainstream. Calling ourselves AI-native meant something concrete: no AI sold as an add-on, and pricing built so customers were never penalized for using AI. Customers could adopt AI across the platform without the pricing working against them.
That storytelling only lands if you have a sharp ICP. If you don’t have a deep, specific understanding of what resonates with your buyer, you’re guessing on everything downstream: positioning, messaging, channel, timing. You return to it every time something isn’t landing.
That storytelling responsibility is why PMM has to sit at the center of the product, demand gen, and sales relationship. Product builds the thing. Demand gen creates awareness and pipeline. Sales closes deals and surfaces what buyers actually care about. That signal feeds back into product. PMM connects the loop, making sure the narrative is consistent across all of it and that the insights from one part are actually reaching the others.
When the flywheel works, the company feels aligned. When it breaks, it almost always breaks at the handoffs. A launch lands flat because sales wasn’t briefed properly. Pipeline stalls because messaging hasn’t kept up with where the product went. PMM owns those handoffs, which means PMM owns a lot of what makes the difference between a company that feels coherent and one that doesn’t.
Hiring Philosophy
I’ve built PMM teams from scratch three times. Team sizes have ranged from two to ten depending on the stage of the business and what it needed. I’ve made great hires, some that surprised me, and learned something from every one of them.
Because PMM sits at that intersection, the hire matters enormously. Early in my management career I made a hire from the same industry, someone who already knew the buyer, the competitive landscape, the category. It felt like the safe, logical choice. What I got was competent but uncreative. They knew the playbook so well they just ran it again.
In a market flooded with AI-generated content and AI-generated companies, familiar strategy is invisible strategy. What I actually screen for is commercial instinct. Can this person connect a marketing decision to a business outcome? Do they understand how revenue works? That instinct is harder to develop than marketing craft, so I look for it first, before category experience, before title history.
The best hire I ever made had never done product marketing. They’d run sales and product at startups. On paper they looked like a stretch. But in the interview it was obvious: they had been doing product marketing for years without knowing that’s what it was called. And because they’d actually sat in the seats of the people PMM serves, they understood those stakeholders better than anyone else on my team. That hire changed how I read candidates.
Genuine passion for the craft, wherever it was developed, is the green flag. Skills develop. That enjoyment doesn’t if it isn’t already there.
Management Philosophy
Over the course of my career I’ve managed 15 individuals, from PMMs to Director-level, across teams I built from scratch and teams I inherited. What’s stayed consistent across all of it is the approach.
Stretch projects and visibility are how people grow
One of the first conversations I have with anyone new on my team: where do you want to go? What does your next level look like, and where are the gaps between who you are now and who you need to be? Closing those gaps is part of my job.
In practice that means giving people projects they’re not quite ready for, and putting them in rooms with senior stakeholders specifically so those stakeholders can see them do good work. Visibility matters for careers.
Own your work, communicate everything
Growth only happens if people are actually operating with autonomy. The two things that matter most on my team are ownership and a bias for action. If I hand you a project, I expect you to own all of it: the ambiguity, the blockers, the stakeholders who aren’t responding. I’m not here to be in your critical path. What earns trust fastest is when someone writes up the situation, lays out the options, and comes with a recommendation. That’s the kind of thinking that moves fast and compounds.
Alongside that, I want to hear everything: when a deadline is slipping, when a decision needs a second set of eyes, when something went really well. The teams I’ve been most proud of over-communicate. That’s the standard I hold myself to too.
Feedback should be regular, not saved up
Autonomy without feedback is just abandonment. I had to tell someone once that they weren’t being impactful at their level, that nobody on the broader team knew what they were working on. It was a hard conversation. But accountability matters deeply to me, because when one person goes quiet the whole team feels it even if they can’t name why.
I give direct, specific feedback consistently throughout the year. If something isn’t working I say so clearly, and I give the person a real opportunity to change. If nothing shifts, I move to a more formal process. But I never skip the direct feedback step.
The version of management I actively try not to be: no feedback, no performance conversations, shows up to 1:1s unprepared, runs team meetings that go nowhere. The team always notices. The best people notice first, and they’re the first to leave.
Meetings are where connection gets built
For 1:1s, my bar is simple: everyone walks away with something, a decision made, a piece of clarity, a win acknowledged, something to look forward to.
For team meetings I start with a real icebreaker, something that actually makes people want to talk, not groan. I always go first so no one’s sitting there feeling awkward. Then I run a cascade: what’s happening in the business, how our work connects to it, what each person is focused on. I don’t do round robins. I explain what each person is working on and ask them to add to it. When I was interim CMO at Kustomer I did this for the whole marketing org. For the first time, people said they finally understood how everything connected.
Leading a whole org taught me clarity is the job
Doing that at scale, across an entire marketing org, taught me something I hadn’t fully understood before: at the CMO level, driving clarity is the whole job. I don’t need to be the best at building an ABM campaign. I need to be the best at connecting the dots across the org, making priorities legible, and making sure the people around me know exactly where they’re going and why. Everything else follows from that.
How I Work
I get in the weeds alongside my team
I own projects end to end alongside my team regularly. I take on initiatives independently so my team knows I understand the craft. When I give feedback or set a direction, it’s coming from someone who does the job. If I’m asking people to do hard things, I need to be willing to do them too.
Writing it down as a discipline
I started out as an engineer. That background never really left me. Engineering school was long hours and problems that didn’t have clean answers. It taught me to sit with hard things longer than is comfortable, and it made me obsessive about writing things down. Engineers document everything. They work through problems on paper before they touch a system. When I write something down, whether it’s a positioning doc, a decision memo, or a brief, writing is how I think. I carried that into marketing and I’ve never stopped.
Slack for quick decisions, email for real thought
Most of how I manage comes down to communication. My team calls me Nupurbot, I respond to email almost instantly unless I’m in a meeting, I’m direct, and I over-communicate.
The way I think about channels: Slack is for quick decisions: yes, no, done. If something requires weighing options or getting input from multiple people, write me an email or put it in a doc. That’s where real thinking happens, and it creates a record that matters later. I strongly prefer async and I appreciate teams that can work the same way.
Building culture when you’re not in the same room
I bring my whole self to work, which means yes, you will hear about my toddler. I’ve found that when I’m open about my life, my team understands me better and we work better together.
Async-first doesn’t mean disconnected. Remote work is real and I’ve made my peace with it, but I don’t think you can build a genuinely great team culture entirely through a screen. I set aside budget and time for real in-person gatherings on a regular cadence, actual unstructured time where people can talk without an agenda running.
In remote meetings I create space for people to share something about themselves. Just room for people to exist as full humans at work.
If any of this resonates, that’s probably not an accident. The people I’ve worked best with are the ones who care about the craft, want to understand how the business actually works, and show up fully for the work and for the people doing it alongside them. If that’s how you operate, we’d probably work well together.