Before Microsoft Azure, before Salesforce, before UiPath — I was making television. My first boss taught me something that still shapes every launch brief I write.
Before tech, Kuber Sharma was a TV producer and journalist in India. His first editor gave him a rule that changed how he thinks about communication: "If your neighbour's grandmother can't understand it in 30 seconds, rewrite it." Twenty years later, that rule still governs every product positioning document, launch brief, and analyst pitch he writes. The five questions journalists ask — who cares, why now, so what, what changes, what's at stake — are the five questions product marketers almost never answer well.
My first editor was terrifying. He had been covering Indian politics for twenty years, had survived multiple governments, and had exactly zero patience for unclear writing. On my first day he handed back a piece I'd spent three hours on and said: "If your neighbour's grandmother can't understand this in thirty seconds, it's not ready."
I was twenty-two. I thought this was unfair. I was writing about policy, about infrastructure, about things that required nuance. I pushed back. He looked at me like I'd said something embarrassing and said: "Complexity is not an excuse for obscurity. If you don't understand your story well enough to explain it simply, you don't understand your story."
I've been in enterprise technology marketing for over twenty years. I've written positioning documents for Azure, for Tableau, for Salesforce, for UiPath. And I think about that conversation almost every week.
Journalism taught me that every good story starts by answering five questions. Not in sequence — simultaneously, in the first paragraph, before the reader has decided whether to keep going.
Who cares? Why now? So what? What changes? What's at stake?
These sound obvious. They aren't. Most product launch documents I've reviewed in my career — including ones I wrote early on — fail at least three of them. They answer "what is it" and "how it works" in exhausting detail. They almost never answer "why now" or "what changes for the person reading this."
The journalist's version of "who cares" is not a persona document. It's a much harder question: given everything this person already knows, believes, and is busy with right now, why would they stop and pay attention to this? The answer can't be "because our product is good." That's the equivalent of a news story that says "this happened, and it happened."
TV production taught me something that writing alone didn't: the audience's attention is not given to you. It's borrowed, and you pay it back every thirty seconds or you lose them.
In television, you feel this immediately. You can watch attention leave. A producer's instinct is to cut — not because the material isn't interesting, but because you haven't yet earned the right to ask someone to stay with you through complexity. You earn that right at the beginning, or you don't get it.
Product marketing rarely works this way. Most launch briefs I've read assume that the audience — whether it's an analyst, a customer, a journalist, or a sales rep — will stay with you through the background section, through the feature list, through the competitive context, and arrive at the value proposition ready to engage. They won't. They decided in the first paragraph whether this was worth their attention.
The editing rule I took from television: cut the first paragraph. Almost always, the real opening is the second paragraph. The first paragraph is where you warm up.
The journalistic inverted pyramid — most important information first, context and detail later — is the direct opposite of how most product marketers structure their work. We tend to build to the point. We provide context, explain the problem, describe the solution, and then arrive at the value.
Journalists learned decades ago that readers don't arrive at the value. They make a decision at the headline, reconsider at the first sentence, and either commit or leave by the end of the first paragraph. Everything after that is for people who've already decided to stay.
When I brought this to product positioning — lead with the most important thing, support it afterward — it changed how I wrote value propositions, analyst briefings, and launch emails. Not as a stylistic trick, but as a discipline: you have to know what the most important thing is before you can put it first. Most positioning fails because the writer doesn't actually know what the most important thing is. They know what's interesting about the product. That's different.
My editor's rule — grandmother, thirty seconds — took me an embarrassingly long time to apply to B2B work. I assumed enterprise software was different. The buyers were sophisticated. They expected detail. They wanted to be taken seriously.
I was wrong, and the evidence was in front of me the whole time. The Salesforce pitches that worked were simple. The Azure announcements that got picked up were the ones with one clear headline. The Tableau messaging that moved pipeline was the messaging that a VP of Sales could explain to their CEO in a single sentence.
Enterprise buyers are not less busy than consumers. They are more busy, more skeptical, and have more competing claims on their attention. The complexity of the subject matter is not a reason to be complex in your communication. It's a reason to be more disciplined about simplicity.
The grandmother test, it turns out, applies everywhere. If your VP of Sales can't explain your product's value in thirty seconds, your field team can't either. If your field team can't, your deals won't close the way they should. This is not a communications problem. It's a positioning problem. And positioning is the journalist's job as much as the marketer's.
"Complexity is not an excuse for obscurity. If you don't understand your story well enough to explain it simply, you don't understand your story."
I still hear my first editor's voice when I review launch documents. I still cut the first paragraph more often than not. And I still ask, before any major announcement: can I explain this to someone who has never heard of our company, in thirty seconds, and make them care?
If the answer is no, it's not ready. It doesn't matter how many stakeholders have approved it.
Kuber Sharma leads platform product marketing at UiPath. Before tech, he was a TV producer and journalist in India, where he created an automobile show that reached 11% of primetime viewership. He writes about product marketing, enterprise AI, and the craft of positioning at Positioned, his newsletter for enterprise PMMs.