
I've been doing product marketing long enough to know that most positioning frameworks are just ways of avoiding the harder question: what does this actually mean to someone's day?
I'm a Director of Product Marketing at ServiceNow, where I lead PMM for Employee Workflows — the part of the platform that shapes how people experience work itself. Before that, I spent nearly seven years at Microsoft. The common thread across all of it has been trying to close the gap between what technology promises and how people actually use it.
I also have ADHD, which I didn't figure out until I was 29. That diagnosis reframed a lot — not just how I work, but how I think about what good marketing is supposed to do. Good marketing meets people where they actually are, not where you wish they were.
The work
Nearly two decades in enterprise SaaS. Most of it spent on the question of how to make complex technology feel human.
At Microsoft, I built out product marketing across multiple product areas over nearly seven years, focusing on segment and industry product marketing. I started with the SMB segment, and later drove industry product marketing for retail, manufacturing, and healthcare as part of the Microsoft Teams PMM team. The scale was enormous and the internal complexity was its own discipline. I learned how to operate in organizations where alignment is never given, where the real work happens in the translation between what engineering builds and what customers can actually absorb.
At ServiceNow, I lead PMM for Employee Workflows. While my current focus happens to target HR and IT leaders as the primary buyers, the core challenge remains segment-driven: how do people actually experience work, and what role does technology play in making that experience better or worse? The users are everyone else. That gap between the economic buyer and the end user is where almost all the interesting marketing problems live.
The AI work I've taken on — building automation pipelines, knowledge bases, evaluating and integrating tools into how my team operates — came out of a straightforward observation: the teams that figure out how to embed AI into their actual workflow, not just their tool stack, are going to have a structural advantage. I wanted to understand that from the inside, not just talk about it.
The Climb with Abid started as a way to think out loud about things that didn't have a clean home inside my day job.
Career navigation. What happens to identity when your path doesn't follow the expected arc. The particular loneliness of professional life that nobody really talks about — the kind that exists even when things are going well. Emotional intelligence not as a soft skill but as the thing that actually determines whether leadership is survivable for the people around you.
I'm also genuinely interested in what's happening to creative and strategic work as AI gets embedded in it. Not the hype version of that conversation. The actual version, where the tension between automation and authenticity is real and worth taking seriously.
I write, record, and have conversations with people who are somewhere in the middle of figuring things out. That's the audience. That's also where I am most of the time.
Newsletter & Writing
The Climb with Abid
Reflections on product marketing craft, building leverage with AI, and navigating careers when they don't follow the standard arc.
Read the publicationI live in Seattle with my wife Katia and three cats named Izzy, Poncho, and Coconut. I'm a lifelong Pink Floyd obsessive. I think too much about the origin of the universe and whether the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics might actually be true.
Cats
Izzy, Poncho, & Coconut
Music Obsession
Lifelong Pink Floyd obsessive
Mindset
ADHD diagnosed at 29, open about therapy



