Before working in tech, I spent two years as a Teach For India Fellow teaching in a low-income government school in Delhi. Later, as a Program lead, I led program strategy and implementation for Teach for India's largest site. It was challenging, chaotic, and deeply clarifying. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was learning how to build and market products - just in a room full of nine-year-olds who weren’t afraid to let me know when something wasn’t working.
💡 Lesson 1: Design Interventions Rooted in Context
In the classroom, nothing worked straight out of the box. No matter how polished the lesson plan or how meticulously researched the curriculum, if it didn’t meet students where they were - culturally, emotionally, developmentally - it flopped.
One of the recurring challenges in my Grade 2 classroom in Sangam Vihar was working with state-mandated English textbooks that featured stories far removed from my students’ daily lives. While the content was technically appropriate, it often described festivals, foods, and routines they hadn’t experienced firsthand. To bridge that gap, I supplemented the lessons with shared storytelling sessions where the girls contributed examples from their own neighbourhoods and families. When we anchored reading and writing in familiar details, participation and comprehension improved noticeably.
As a PMM, I bring that same awareness into how I think about positioning. Features don’t matter unless they map to something real in a user’s life. During my time at Meta, I worked on bringing first-time female tech users online in Bihar - India’s second most populous state - where digital literacy was low and apprehension was high. We partnered with local facilitators to co-create induction guides that spoke to their aspirations - staying connected with their children, supporting their home businesses, and learning new skills - rather than abstract promises of “connecting the world.” Context wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the reason they trusted us enough to try.
💡 Lesson 2: Start with Value, Not Features
Every lesson had to answer an unspoken question: “Why should I care?” If I couldn’t connect the lesson to something that mattered to them - their families, games, or daily rituals - I would lose them in fifteen seconds.
My students were first-generation learners who had never worked with a teacher consistently for more than three months in a year. I felt an urgent responsibility to help them close a learning gap of nearly three years. That urgency shaped everything - my lesson plans, my assessments, and the expectations I set. But for my students, and even more so for their families, this urgency didn’t resonate. Attendance rarely crossed thirty percent, and many parents saw little reason to prioritise school over immediate needs at home. I realised that before I could teach any lesson plan, I had to build trust and show why education mattered in the first place. I began visiting families, listening to their concerns, and organising small community programs to illustrate how accelerated learning could open doors for their daughters. Only when they saw tangible value did genuine engagement start to grow.
In product marketing, this principle is just as critical. Users rarely respond to specifications alone - they respond to relevance and value. Before any campaign or narrative, I ask: What’s the value this product delivers on a human level? Why now? Why them?
During one campaign to promote ad tools for social impact organisations on Facebook, I saw this firsthand. We had initially focused our messaging on sophisticated ad targeting features. But many organisations didn’t relate to that language. What resonated was talking about and showing how their social change behaviour campaigns were reaching a wider audience with a significantly better recall. When we reframed the narrative, the adoption accelerated. The lesson was clear: people don’t buy features. They buy better versions of their own lives. If we can’t connect what we’re building to something the user already cares about, then we’re just adding more noise.
💡 Lesson 3: Feedback Loops Are Non-Negotiable
In the classroom, feedback wasn’t a quarterly ritual - it was hourly. I ran Checks for Understanding mid-lesson, had students share their writing in pairs, and held quiet chats during lunch about what felt difficult.
One week, I thought my students were making steady progress in reading simple sentences. Every day, a few confident readers came up and breezed through the text. But during an informal conversation, one of the quieter girls told me she couldn’t follow the story when it was her turn. The fear of embarrassment kept her silent. That conversation changed my approach. I started using small reading circles and paired reading, so every girl had the chance to practice without feeling exposed. By the end of the term, even the shyest readers had found their voice.
That muscle of iteration has stayed with me. As a PMM, I don’t just ship messaging - I treat it as a living thing. I track responses, gather insight, and refine continuously because users, like students, evolve quickly. At Meta, I facilitated roundtables and focus groups with community leaders, organisations leveraging our ad products and emerging creators. We discovered that although the product training modules were technically clear, many users found the tone intimidating. After revising the materials to be more conversational and relatable, completion rates increased significantly. Later, those insights helped inform the design of simpler help articles and video walkthroughs that lowered the barrier to first-time adoption.
