Alignment Without Titles: How Indian Women Shape Global Product Strategy
Dhvani Unadkat’s work in product marketing at PayPal and Amazon Ads offers a clear view into how leadership operates, and why it is becoming central to global product strategy.
By : Reshmi AR
Update: 2025-12-23 10:38 GMT
For decades, the global narrative around Indian talent in technology has focused on scale, execution strength, and technical depth. What has received far less attention is a quieter shift unfolding inside global product organisations—where influence is increasingly exercised not through titles, but through alignment. As products grow more complex and decisions cut across engineering, compliance, trust, and go-to-market strategy, organisations are relying more on professionals who can connect fragmented inputs and move teams forward amid uncertainty.
Indian women are increasingly stepping into these in-between roles, shaping outcomes without formal authority. Dhvani Unadkat’s work in product marketing at PayPal and Amazon Ads offers a clear view into how this form of leadership operates—and why it is becoming central to global product strategy.
Q: The global tech narrative often highlights scale and execution. What shift are you observing within product organizations today?
A: For a long time, Indian talent has been known for strong execution and technical skills. That’s still true. But what I’m seeing now is something more subtle. Many Indian women are starting to influence key product decisions, not because they have big titles, but because people trust their judgment. They help teams stay aligned, ask the right questions, and bring different viewpoints together when decisions are being made.
Q: These don’t sound like traditional leadership roles. Where do these positions typically sit?
A: They usually sit between teams rather than above them. These roles touch product, engineering, legal, compliance, marketing, design, and customer teams. There isn’t formal authority involved. The influence comes from understanding how all these pieces connect and helping people move forward when things aren’t fully clear yet.
Q: Why are these skills becoming more critical now?
A: Products today are built by teams spread across countries and time zones. A small decision in one place can affect users, revenue, or compliance somewhere else. Because of this, alignment doesn’t just happen on its own anymore. Someone has to actively bring people onto the same page and keep that alignment intact as things change.
Q: Who exemplifies this kind of influence in practice?
A: This form of influence can be seen in the work of Dhvani Unadkat, a product marketer whose roles at PayPal and Amazon Ads have sat at the intersection of engineering, compliance, and go-to-market strategy. In these environments, product decisions are rarely isolated. Engineering trade-offs, regulatory considerations, and customer trust are tightly linked, and even minor misalignment can escalate quickly. Her work has focused on navigating these dependencies and helping teams maintain coherence as products scale.
Q: What kinds of friction did she notice inside large organisations?
A: She noticed that customer insights existed, but every team understood them a little differently. As decisions moved through planning and review stages, the original intent often shifted. Things might look aligned within one team, but that alignment would slowly weaken as the product scaled.
Q: How did she respond to this challenge?
A: She built a framework called Beyond VOC. The idea was to look beyond surface-level customer feedback and understand where gaps were forming between what customers experienced, how teams interpreted that input, and how decisions were finally made.
Q: How is Beyond VOC being used today?
A: It doesn’t replace customer research or data. It works alongside them. Teams use it to trace how information moves across functions and to spot where meaning starts to get lost. It’s been used during go-to-market planning, launch reviews, and retrospectives to catch issues early instead of fixing them later.
Q: What does its wider adoption signal about the industry?
A: The fact that Beyond VOC will be featured at GTM Alliance 2026 and discussed on Products That Count shows something important. It tells us that misalignment isn’t just a one-off problem. It’s built into how large organizations operate, and more people are starting to acknowledge that.
Q: Why do Indian women seem particularly effective in these roles?
A: A lot of these skills come from real-life experience, not from textbooks. Managing shared responsibilities, limited resources, and competing priorities builds a natural ability to coordinate and prioritise. Those instincts are incredibly useful inside complex global organizations.
Q: Are these roles visible within organizations?
A: Not always. Much of this work happens quietly, without much credit. But you can see the impact in smoother launches, clearer decisions, and fewer last-minute fixes.
Q: What does this mean for the future of product strategy?
A: As products become more complex, spotting and fixing misalignment early becomes essential. These roles may not look like traditional leadership positions, but they are increasingly shaping how product strategy is created, communicated, and executed across global teams.