Making enterprise software sound like something humans actually want - for 15 years, across four of tech's biggest platforms.
Somewhere between Twilio's 2025 SIGNAL conference and the launch of an "agentic era" communications platform, Disha Rustogi is doing the thing she has done at every stop on a 15-year career: translating what engineers built into something a buyer can believe in. At Twilio, that means making the case that a platform best known for SMS verification codes is actually the infrastructure layer on which the next generation of AI-powered customer experiences will run.
She joined Twilio in January 2025, stepping into the VP of Product Marketing role. Her remit covers global Product Marketing and Go-To-Market Enablement - the unglamorous machinery that determines whether a product launch lands or disappears into a press release graveyard.
The resume before Twilio reads like a guided tour of the enterprise software stack. Microsoft for over a decade. Adobe for nine months of disciplined repositioning. Atlassian for three and a half years during which she helped drive one of the largest forced cloud migration campaigns in SaaS history, steering customers off on-premise Server products before Atlassian flipped the switch on support in February 2024.
"Customers at SIGNAL are already reacting positively to the shared experience being demonstrated on stage."
- Disha Rustogi, Twilio SIGNAL 2025That cloud migration work at Atlassian was not polite nudging. Atlassian gave customers a hard deadline. Rustogi's team had to write the countdown posts - the 100-day warning, the 30-day warning - without making customers feel cornered. It required the rare marketing skill of making urgency feel like helpfulness.
"Colleagues describe her as having the ability to release the pressure with a well-timed one-liner even during the most intense product launches."
Disha Rustogi began in India, studied Information Technology at Delhi University, then sharpened her business instincts with an MBA at the Indian School of Business - one of Asia's most selective programs - graduating in 2007. Within a year, she was at Microsoft.
Microsoft was a decade-long education. She started in business planning, moved to partner marketing, then landed on Office 365 - which in 2017 was still establishing itself as the enterprise productivity default. She left in 2019 after eleven years, a tenure that covered the full arc of Microsoft's pivot from packaged software to cloud services.
A brief, intentional stop at Adobe as Director of Product Marketing for Creative Cloud Services gave her a look at how a legacy creative suite navigates subscription transformation - a challenge that, at scale, rhymes with what every on-prem software company was facing. Nine months later, Atlassian called.
At Atlassian, she helped execute one of enterprise SaaS's most audacious marketing challenges: convincing tens of thousands of organizations to abandon on-premise software they had already paid for and move to the cloud - on a public deadline.
The Atlassian Server End of Life campaign ran from 2021 through February 2024. Rustogi's team authored the countdowns, the urgency messaging, the enterprise reassurance copy - all calibrated to move cautious IT buyers without triggering the resistance that enterprise migrations typically provoke. By most measures, it worked: Atlassian's cloud revenue grew substantially during this period.
In December 2024, she posted her departure on LinkedIn. "Today is my last day at Atlassian and it's bittersweet." In January 2025, she arrived at Twilio.
Twilio's challenge in 2025 is not a product problem. It is a narrative problem. The company has spent years acquiring and building complementary capabilities - Segment for customer data, SendGrid for email, Flex for contact center, and the core Programmable Communications platform for voice and messaging. Each product made sense individually. Together, they had the messiness of a toolbox assembled over two decades of M&A.
Rustogi's job is to turn that toolbox into a platform story. The pitch she is building around: Twilio is the conversation layer for the agentic AI era. Not just SMS. Not just APIs. The infrastructure that lets businesses deploy AI agents that can actually talk to customers - across channels, with context, at scale.
"Infrastructure for the agentic era requires a new conversation layer for the Twilio Platform."
- Disha Rustogi, Twilio Blog, 2025At Twilio SIGNAL 2025, she reported that customers in the room were reacting positively to the unified experience being demonstrated on stage - the first time Segment, SendGrid, and Flex appeared as a coherent system rather than three separate purchases. That reaction matters. Enterprise buyers need to see the whole before they trust the parts.
The HIMSS 2025 healthcare conference appearance, representing Twilio Segment, points to another dimension of the role: vertical market credibility. Healthcare is a category where generic "customer engagement" language fails immediately. Rustogi's team has to speak the language of the CISO, the CTO, and the VP of Patient Experience simultaneously.
Colleagues have called her "the single most extraordinary manager with whom I've worked." In the compressed, high-stakes world of product launches - where a missed embargo can crater a quarter and a vague positioning statement can cost millions in sales cycles - that matters. She has built a reputation for steadying teams through chaos without pretending the chaos does not exist.
The tell: the well-timed one-liner. When a launch is coming apart at 11 PM, the leader who can name the absurdity and give the team permission to laugh tends to be the one who gets the launch across the finish line.
In December 2022, Rustogi recorded a testimonial for an Extreme Presentation course. The detail is small and revealing. Most VP-level marketers consider themselves already skilled at communication. Enrolling in a structured presentation program at that stage of a career signals something specific: she treats communication as a craft, not a credential.
The Extreme Presentation methodology is built around making complex information clear to decision-makers who have limited time. That is, essentially, the entire job description of a product marketer at an enterprise SaaS company.
In Redmond, she lives with her husband, two sons, and a French bulldog named Stitch. She cycles around Seattle and cooks - described as experimenting with new recipes rather than following them.
The cooking detail is the right metaphor. Product marketing at its best is not recipe-following either. You have ingredients - a product, a market, a competitive landscape, a set of buyer anxieties - and you have to figure out what they become together.
MBA in Marketing
Bachelor's in Information Technology
The Indian School of Business (ISB) consistently ranks among the top business schools in Asia and is one of the most selective MBA programs on the continent. Admission requires significant professional experience; the program is designed to fast-track mid-career professionals into leadership roles.
The combination of an IT technical foundation and a marketing MBA gives her fluency in both the engineering teams building products and the revenue teams selling them - an unusual bridge that defines the best product marketers in enterprise tech.
Has a French bulldog named Stitch living in Redmond, Washington.
Cycles around Seattle - a city with weather that tests the commitment of any cyclist.
Experiments with new recipes - a cook who improvises rather than follows instructions to the letter.
Took an Extreme Presentation course as a VP-level executive - because great communicators never stop practicing.
MBA from Indian School of Business, one of Asia's most selective programs, graduating in 2007.
Managed Atlassian's three-year countdown campaign that ended Server support in February 2024 - one of enterprise SaaS's largest forced migrations.