Before Microsoft Azure, before Salesforce, before UiPath — I was making television. The automobile show I created captured 11% of primetime viewership in India. That experience shaped everything.
Creating a television show that reached 11% of primetime viewership in India before transitioning to enterprise technology reveals specific transferable skills that most PMMs don't have: knowing how to capture and hold attention across a full segment, the discipline of writing for audiences who didn't ask to be educated, the editing instinct that cuts whatever isn't earning its place, and the research methodology of starting from what the audience already knows rather than what you want them to learn.
The automobile show I created and produced in India reached 11% of primetime viewership at its peak. I'm proud of that number, and I almost never mention it in professional contexts, because it seems irrelevant. What does a car show in India have to do with product marketing for enterprise AI software?
The answer is: more than I expected, and in ways I've only fully understood in retrospect.
Television taught me something about attention that I've never read in a marketing textbook. Viewers don't give you their attention because they decided to watch your show. They give you their attention in thirty-second intervals, and they continue giving it only if each interval justifies the next. The commitment is continuous and conditional.
This sounds obvious stated directly. But most professional communication is designed as if the audience has committed in advance — as if, having opened the email or joined the meeting or picked up the sales deck, they've agreed to follow you to the conclusion. They haven't. They're re-evaluating constantly. The question "why should I keep reading/watching/listening to this?" is being asked and answered every thirty seconds whether you know it or not.
In television production, you feel this viscerally. You can see when a segment loses an audience. You learn to cut anything that isn't earning its place — the contextual setup that seems necessary, the scene that transitions smoothly but doesn't add anything. The discipline of making every segment justify the next one is the same discipline that makes a launch brief actually read, a positioning document actually persuasive, a conference talk actually worth attending.
The automobile show was not made for car enthusiasts. It was made for general audiences — people with varying degrees of prior interest in cars, tuning in to a primetime slot on a channel that served broad demographics. The challenge was to make car content compelling to people who might not have cared about cars.
This is the challenge of B2B content that most B2B marketers don't acknowledge. Enterprise buyers are not primarily interested in your product category. They are interested in the business problem they're trying to solve, which your product may or may not address. Writing for people who didn't ask to be educated about your product — finding the framing that connects your category to something they already care about — is exactly the skill television trains.
We did this by always starting with the story rather than the subject. Not "this week we're reviewing the new Mahindra SUV" but "a family in Bangalore is trying to figure out whether to sell their old car and buy this new one, and we're going to help them make that decision." The car was the subject. The family's decision was the story. The story was what created the engagement that let us deliver the information about the car.
The PMM translation: your product is the subject. Your customer's problem is the story. Lead with the story.
The most useful skill I took from television to technology is the editing instinct — the ability to read a piece of content and immediately identify what isn't earning its place.
In television, you edit because you have a fixed run time. Forty-five minutes is forty-five minutes. If you have sixty minutes of material, twenty minutes goes on the floor, and your job is to make sure it's the right twenty minutes. This creates a discipline of ruthless prioritisation: every minute of content has to justify itself against every other minute, because the trade-off is explicit and visible.
In professional communication, the run time is elastic — you can always add more — so the discipline has to come from inside rather than from external constraint. Most launch briefs I've reviewed are twenty pages when they should be eight. Most positioning documents have five sections when two would be more persuasive. The extra material doesn't add information. It dilutes signal with noise.
The editing question I learned to ask in television is: if I had to cut this, would anyone notice it was missing? If the answer is no, cut it. The answer is no more often than people think.
"Every piece of professional communication has a run time. The discipline is cutting what isn't earning its place — and there's almost always more to cut than you think."
I didn't know, when I was producing that show in India, that I was building skills that would be useful two decades later in enterprise software marketing. The connection only became clear in retrospect, which is usually how it works.
But when I hear a product marketer say they don't know how to write — when I see a launch brief that buries the value proposition in the fourth section — I think about those early years in television. The most useful communication skill isn't knowing what to say. It's knowing what to cut. That, more than anything, is what making television taught me.
Kuber Sharma leads platform product marketing at UiPath. He writes Positioned, a newsletter on AI-era product marketing strategy for enterprise PMMs.