Sandhya Simhan brings more than 13 years of strategic marketing expertise to her role as Head of Content, Customer & Growth Marketing at Glean, an enterprise AI platform. She operates at the intersection of product, marketing, and community, focused on helping Glean’s customers get full use of the product as easily as possible.
Throughout her career, Simhan has developed deep expertise across product and content marketing, operations, and GTM strategy for SaaS and AI-driven companies. Her approach centers on translating complex technical capabilities into compelling customer narratives that drive both engagement and business results.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list in partnership with The Wall Street Journal, Simhan shared her insights on AI integration across the customer journey, building sustainable growth systems, and the importance of developing great judgment.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
I love Lenny’s Podcast for thoughtful interviews that bridge product, growth, and go‑to‑market with real operator tactics, not just theory. My rule of thumb: pick one concept from each episode or chapter and apply it within a week. Turn learning into a small experiment, then compound the gains. I also really like the big audacious ideas and theories you get from a16z’s main podcast feed. I think our industry is changing too fast for books to be relevant, but Gaurav Vohra’s growth marketing Substack is one of my most frequently referenced resources.
How are you and your team currently using AI?
We use AI across nearly every part of the customer journey — from drafting lifecycle content and summarizing feedback to generating learning videos for Glean Academy and surfacing insights from adoption data. AI is a habit more than a tool, but that’s partly because our company is building a bleeding-edge AI platform and internal employees are the first alpha testers for all new features. On any given week, AI helps us synthesize customer signals, pressure‑test narratives, generate structured first drafts, and accelerate experimentation by automating analysis and QA checklists. We add guardrails, of course, with clear prompts, context-aware grounding thanks to Glean, brand/style guides, and we frequently review our agents to ensure quality. The biggest unlock is not one siloed tool — it’s the full system.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years?
Marketing becomes AI‑native and measurably closer to product. Personalization shifts from campaigns to continuous, context‑aware experiences driven by first‑party data and in‑product signals. Measurement moves beyond last‑click/first-click to modeled incrementality and decision‑ready insights. The most durable advantage won’t be prompt tricks; it will be proprietary data, distribution/access, and brand trust — plus, the judgment to orchestrate them. Companies that level up their teams’ AI literacy and operationalize AI (guardrails, governance, and feedback loops) will out‑learn and therefore out-ship competitors who either try to automate too much or get left behind.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
Customer marketing is actually a new function at Glean. We have had CSMs and now specialized CSMs for years, but we’ve never had a scaled marketing/education/support motion aimed at customers before. I pitched the role to my CMO in February, was given the reins in April, and we’ve been running full throttle since. This year, building version 1 of Glean Academy has been a highlight. It’s our effort to help users, especially non-technical ones, move along the AI maturity curve. We’ve only gone public with the first stage right now with short videos, but there’s a lot of things we’re working on that will come out over the next few months. It’s been exciting to design something that doesn’t just teach features, but actually builds confidence and sparks curiosity.
What’s the most pressing business challenge you’ve faced in the last year and what have you done to solve it?
Our biggest challenge has been scaling customer engagement efficiently as our user base grew. Instead of hiring more headcount, we doubled down on instrumentation by mapping every adoption signal in-product and aligning lifecycle messaging to those triggers. We built playbooks for our CSMs and layered in community-driven support through Gleanaverse. The result was higher seat utilization and stronger retention, without adding friction for customers.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
If I had to pick one: judgment — especially under uncertainty. It’s the ability to weigh imperfect data, choose the next best action, and set crisp boundaries on scope and quality. Judgment multiplies the value of every other skill: positioning, storytelling, experimentation, and cross‑functional influence. Practically, it looks like writing down assumptions, defining success thresholds, and time‑boxing decisions; then it’s growth mindset: learning fast and course‑correcting with humility. The companion muscle is communication: make tradeoffs explicit, set expectations early, and keep teams aligned on outcomes, not activity.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
A family friend told me just before I started by first job at Unilever: “Learn the business, not just the craft.” Early in my career, I focused on perfecting campaigns, but as you move up the ladder it’s not just how you move a metric but choosing which metric to move. It’s a subtle but powerful shift — from being a good marketer to being a strategic operator. It’s also what earns marketing a true seat at the table when shaping company and product strategy.
What gives you energy and inspiration outside of work?
I get energy from creating, so I have intentionally found many ways to make space for it in my life. I write songs and use Suno AI to create the backing arrangements. I create AI literacy courses. I’m currently working on one about systems thinking and Claude Code for non-technical users. I write a lot about my industry ideas on LinkedIn. (It’s a mix of marketing + product + design + AI trends + org management.) I’m also intentional about mentoring: helping someone unlock a skill or navigate a transition is very grounding. It reminds me that progress is a series of small, well‑chosen steps. However, my biggest source of inspiration is usually my kids. Their blank slate mentality helps me keep an open mind about new things. As an example, my 8-year-old was the one to suggest that if I was stuck on a work problem, I should talk to Glean about it and now that’s a daily habit.
Marketers to Watch is a recognition series to spotlight highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.
