Abhishek Sharma was wearing one of his company’s devices when an interviewer put the obvious question to him. There it was, visible on the wrist, ready to do the work of explaining GOQii. Sharma’s answer took the conversation somewhere less convenient for a product photograph. “We have always been a service company,” he said. The object was easy to notice. The business around it required a little more explanation.
It was a modest exchange in a 2023 discussion about startups and capital. Yet it offers a useful entrance to Sharma’s working life. He has been a product professional, a marketing executive, an operator and a co-founder. Today he leads GOQii UK from London. Across those roles, a recurring question follows him: what does a company continue to give somebody once it has secured their attention?
A device has the advantage of being available for inspection. You can hold it up. A service has to introduce itself through what happens next. That difference gives Sharma’s explanation its bite. Technology enjoys being admired at the launch; a business must still be useful after everyone has gone home. The following morning is a rather less forgiving audience.
The wrist gets the attention
In that conversation, Sharma described GOQii’s development in terms of services assembled around wearable hardware. He also spoke about investors looking for profitability and a model that could endure. Those are closely connected concerns. An ongoing proposition creates ongoing work, and someone has to pay for it. The sale may be easy to count; the cost of keeping a promise takes longer to reveal itself.
His answer is revealing because it resists allowing the most visible object to define the entire enterprise. For a founder, that is a practical problem of explanation. Customers, investors and colleagues need to understand the same business, even when they encounter different pieces of it. A neat photograph can introduce a product. It cannot be expected to carry an operating model on its own.
“We have always been a service company.”
Abhishek Sharma, 2023
A customer who would like a word
Go back to April 2015. Sharma was listed as GOQii’s chief marketing officer at Indian Retail Congress in Gurgaon. His remarks began with a decidedly unromantic assessment: “Providing choices with optimum service is now basic.” For a marketing executive, it was an interesting place to start. What a brand might be tempted to advertise as an achievement, he treated as an entry requirement.
He went on to discuss engagement, individual experience and the connection between online and offline commerce. Younger consumers, he argued, wanted involvement and a chance to be heard. The customer in this account had rather more to contribute than a payment. There was a person at the other end of the proposition, with preferences inconveniently capable of changing.
His panel brought him into a retail conversation alongside executives including Ruchira Jaitly of PepsiCo and entrepreneur Nishant Singhal. The subject was India’s young consumer population. Seen from that stage, his later insistence on the service around the product has a clear antecedent. The continuing experience already mattered to his account of what a brand should offer.
The customer would like a word. Sharma’s retail-conference portrait accompanies an argument for participation, experience and being heard.
A career with more than one map
Before GOQii, Sharma worked in product and consumer roles at Nike, with experience in India, the United States and the United Kingdom. The geography matters without requiring a glamorous airport montage. A product reaches people through particular markets. The same company name can sit above different expectations, habits and conversations. His professional background crossed those settings before his present UK leadership position.
He attended the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta in 2006–2007. That detail belongs in the story alongside the work rather than as a decorative credential. Education and commercial experience offer different sorts of encounters with a business: one gives room to examine it, while the other supplies people who expect an answer before the meeting ends.
GOQii was founded in 2014. Its founding group included Vishal Gondal, Sachin Janghel, Champ Alreja and Sharma. His earlier responsibilities spanned brand development, product marketing, public relations and social media, while his titles have included chief marketing officer and chief operating officer. That range puts communication and execution within the same career, an arrangement in which a promise may eventually return to the desk that helped compose it.
When a number needs a meaning
In 2018, Bengaluru ByDesign placed Sharma on a discussion about the future of wearable technology. The programme paired him with Ravi Bhogu of Monitra and Anshuman Singh of ReTiSense, with Titan’s Somprabh Singh moderating. It was a design setting, where the questions extended beyond the existence of a gadget to what people could make of the things it recorded.
Sharma’s argument emphasised interpretation and the value of developing a surrounding platform. A number can be precisely measured and still leave its recipient wondering what to do with it. Precision and understanding are different accomplishments. Giving a user more information does not, by itself, settle the question of whether the experience has become more useful.
Read as a product argument, it fits his wider interest in the relationship after the purchase. A company can celebrate what an object captures. The customer still has to live with the result. Interpretation is part of the work that happens after the demonstration, when the audience has become an individual and the presenter is no longer standing helpfully beside the screen.
Conceptual illustration of the service model Sharma describes, rather than a measure of company performance.
The spreadsheet joins the conversation
By 2020, Sharma was participating in a marketing panel as GOQii’s co-founder and COO. His contribution turned towards the delivery of value through digital services. The distinction was between technology used to attract an audience and technology used to fulfil the proposition itself. Marketing could bring people to the door; the organisation needed to have something ready when they entered.
That is a useful distinction for an executive whose responsibilities have included both presenting a business and helping to run it. Promotion has a deadline. Delivery has a calendar. There is always another day on which a customer may need something, and another occasion on which the company’s account of itself will be tested against an ordinary interaction.
The later investor discussion added the financial question. Profitability asks whether the arrangement can pay its way. Durability asks whether it can keep doing so. Neither has the theatrical appeal of a launch, but both determine whether there will be a company around to answer the next request. The spreadsheet, having waited patiently through the presentation, is entitled to its turn.
London, with other roads in view
Sharma’s current role gives this career a specific centre of responsibility: co-founder and CEO of GOQii UK. He is based in London. GOQii’s present leadership listing pairs his name with brand and marketing experience and the UK market, joining the earlier commercial work to the country operation he now leads.
Colleagues offer another perspective on his working style. Atul Ujagar highlights his ability to build relationships while keeping sight of core objectives. Sophie Ribereau describes productive relationships with factories and the transparency they made possible. Together, those assessments put some practical substance behind a broad executive word: relationships. In this setting, the word involves knowing how to work with other people when a product, a deadline or an expectation is at stake.
There is a small lesson in the difference between those recommendations and a list of titles. A title tells a reader where responsibility sits. A colleague describes how someone behaves while carrying it. Both belong in a professional portrait. The former is the line printed on a conference programme; the latter is closer to the experience of sitting across the table. A product business brings together people with different tasks and different pressures. The ability to maintain a shared understanding has practical value: it helps the next conversation begin with something already agreed, rather than another round of introductions. For a career that has included consumers, brands and operations, the people doing the describing have a useful seat in the room.
There is also a life outside those titles. He enjoys football, travel photography and long motorcycle road trips. These are welcome details in a professional portrait. They give the eye somewhere to go beyond the job description: a match, a camera, a road with no slide deck waiting at the next junction.
Sharma’s business remarks keep bringing attention back to what follows the obvious moment. After the purchase comes use. After the measurement comes understanding. After the pitch comes the arithmetic. His career, from international product work to GOQii UK, provides several settings for that question. An object can get somebody to look. Earning the next look remains a daily piece of work.