Aditya Sharma — Head of Design & Marketing at Armory

About

I grew up in Bombay and studied computers. Back in college, I taught myself to illustrate, draw, and paint from books. Got a job at a call center where I wrote thousands of emails turning angry customers into friendly ones. That knack for writing grew into a massive Twitter following — 25,000 by 2013 — which got me my first design-adjacent hire. Every job since has been the same trade: bring marketing horsepower, ask to be let into product.

At HolidayIQ with no budget, I DM’d two thousand historians on Twitter, one at a time, asking which forgotten heritage site they’d want saved. It won us Kerala Tourism. At upGrad, a line I wrote — “Machines are learning, are you?” — sold ₹2 crore of data science courses. At Slice, I told the CEO I’d fix marketing first if he handed me design after. He agreed. The first product call I pushed was killing the envelope the credit card shipped in — 500 test units in iPhone-style unboxing, YouTube coverage that’s still up, and Slice never went back. I left as design manager: eight reports, one million installs.

Prodigy and VIDA kept the same pattern. These days I’m building Armory — India’s best homegrown counter-drone company — where I lead design and marketing from day one. I also build things on my own time.

Experience

2024–now

Head of Marketing and Design

Armory

First employee. Built the design, marketing, and hiring foundation — brand identity, positioning, product UX, website, marketing assets across every touchpoint, and content systems. Led field-level product evangelism at defence expos for senior Army and defence officials, contributing to ₹150Cr ($18M+) in procurement contracts. Helped scale the company from 0 to 10 employees and shaped early product direction.

2022–2024

Lead Product Designer

VIDA

Led overall design of a self-serve platform that generated over USD $20M in revenue. Built the design system from the ground up and established the UX tone of voice across products.

2020–2022

Senior Product Designer

Prodigy Game

Designed the company’s first international-market mobile app and redesigned the teacher assignment workflow — NPS from 52% → 90%, assignments from ~2/week to 15+ per teacher. Established a design system and rebuilt the internal math-question authoring tool, increasing output from 12 to 50+ questions per week. Led UX research that informed 15+ revenue-impacting features.

2018–2020

Product Designer → Design Lead

Slice

Led a complete redesign of the Android and web apps, contributing to 1M+ total installs. Managed a team of 6 designers across product and marketing — online and offline campaigns, Instagram 0 → 12,000 in five months. Designed and prototyped product features in 2019 that shipped in 2023, shaping the long-term roadmap.

2017–2018

Content Design Manager

upGrad

Supported sales and marketing contributing to 2,000+ lead conversions and ₹150M ($1.8M+) in revenue. Scaled digital audience to 300K+ combined followers — Instagram to 50K, YouTube to 2.5M+ views. Wrote high-performing ad copy used as campaign assets for 3–4 years after launch.

2015–2017

Social Media Designer

HolidayIQ

Design and social for travel discovery. Ran a zero-budget historian outreach campaign that won Kerala Tourism.

2013–2015

Visual Designer

Allure

Visual design across brand and digital surfaces.

2010–2013

Web Solutions Specialist

Directi

Web solutions and early product work that started the path.

Selected Works

A few projects that show how product, brand, and growth pull the same rope.

Writings

Notes on craft, management, and building.

The best managers never stop being ICs The best managers I’ve worked with never really stopped being individual contributors — and that changes how you lead. Design and Marketing will always be Sisyphus's boulder Camus, the absurd, and why design and marketing never get a clean 0 or 1. Zero-Budget Brand Building Playbook How to build trust and inbound without paid spend — narrative, consistency, and clarity. Defence Expo Outreach Playbook A system for finding decision-makers on a chaotic expo floor — and turning conversations into contracts.

How I Work

I design for the buyer and the audience, and they’re almost never the same person. The defence procurement officer and the defence enjoyer on Twitter both matter to Armory, and they need different design. Founders often pick one and lose the other. I’ve spent a career refusing to.

Marketing and product design are the same function pretending to be two. How someone hears about a product shapes what they expect from it, which shapes what it needs to be. Splitting the two into different orgs is how you get brands that feel like the product lied to you. I’ve run both because I don’t think they should be run separately.

Product design End-to-end product UX for complex buyers — systems, flows, and the craft that makes enterprises actually use what you ship.

Brand & narrative Positioning, identity, and copy that hold up in a procurement room and on a timeline.

Growth & marketing Zero-to-one marketing engines, field evangelism, and organic moments that compound without paid spend.

Team & craft Building design + marketing foundations as a founding hire — hiring, systems, and the tone of voice a company grows into.

Interested? Let's chat.

Side Projects

Things I build when the day job isn’t enough.

Mondplan Completely redesigned how dentists and patients interact. One of the fastest-growing Dutch healthcare–patient platforms. Hosting quiz Irregularly run an online quiz group comprising of nerd friends from Twitter. मानिंद Building a database from a book club I run — every recommendation and debate summary.

Reading

Books I’m reading right now. Drag the shelf to browse, click a book to pick it up.

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