
I have done product marketing long enough to know that most positioning frameworks are a way of avoiding the harder question: what does this mean to someone's day?
I am Senior Director of Product Marketing at ServiceNow, where I lead AI strategy and implementation for the global product and solutions marketing organization. The job is working out how a large marketing team adopts AI as part of how positioning, content, and strategy get done, rather than as a tool bolted on at the end. Before ServiceNow I spent nearly seven years at Microsoft. The common thread has been closing the gap between what technology promises and how people use it.
I also have ADHD, which I did not figure out until I was 29. The diagnosis changed how I work and how I think about marketing. Good marketing meets people where they are, not where you wish they were.
The work
Nearly two decades in enterprise SaaS, most of it on one question: how do you make complex technology feel human?
At Microsoft I built product marketing across several product areas over nearly seven years, with a focus on segments and industries. I started with SMB and later ran industry product marketing for retail, manufacturing, and healthcare on the Microsoft Teams team. The scale was enormous and the internal complexity was a discipline of its own. I learned to operate in organizations where alignment is never given and the work happens in the translation between what engineering builds and what customers can absorb.
At ServiceNow I first led product marketing for Employee Workflows, the part of the platform that shapes how people experience work. The buyers were HR and IT leaders. The users were everyone else. That gap between the economic buyer and the end user is where most of the interesting marketing problems live, and it is still the lens I bring to everything. Today I lead AI strategy and implementation for the global product and solutions marketing organization. The question has shifted from how we market one product to how the whole marketing function operates once AI is part of it.
The AI work started with a simple observation: the teams that build AI into their workflow, not just their tool stack, will have a structural advantage. I wanted to understand that from the inside, so I built the pipelines, the knowledge bases, and the evaluations myself.
The Climb with Abid started as a place to think out loud about things that did not fit inside my day job.
Career navigation. What happens to your identity when your path does not follow the expected arc. The loneliness of professional life, including when things are going well. Emotional intelligence as the thing that decides whether working for you is survivable for the people around you.
I am also interested in what happens to creative and strategic work as AI gets built into it. The pull between automation and authenticity is real, and I would rather take it seriously than wave it away.
I write, record, and talk with people who are in the middle of a change they did not fully plan. That is the audience. It is also where I am most of the time.
The newsletter
Notes from the Machine
Occasional emails on AI & automation, building things, and the climb. Every issue also lives in the open archive.
I live in Seattle with my wife Katia and three cats, Izzy, Poncho, and Raja. I am 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 be true.
Cats
Izzy, Poncho, & Raja
Music Obsession
Lifelong Pink Floyd obsessive



