peachmouse21

I was born in Poland but moved to France where I spent most of my life. I was a pro athlete, not good enough to make an international career, but good enough to land a full athletic scholarship at the University of Arizona (NCAA Div I), where I studied Business, Entrepreneurship and CS.

After graduation, I moved back to France where I landed a job in finance. Hated every minute of it, which resulted in creating my first business (software translation/localization services). The company evolved into a small software house mostly specializing in eLearning development and implementation. 

I moved back to Poland where I started the toughest startup of all, a family. And another software agency. The software house was successful as we went from 7 to 72 people in 2017, turning a profit year on year. Among many hats I had to wear, that of a product manager was the one I’d been wearing the most. Probably to the detriment of my role as the CEO. We built a few successful products (ranging from Learning Management Systems to more or less exciting and properly executed mobile apps), and a few that failed miserably. I was involved in all of them as the product lead. 

Long story short, two events brought me here today, an unfortunate one and a very lucky one. Indeed, in 2018, I had to lay off 35 people in the course of a few weeks as we had suddenly lost a major customer. It was an excruciating experience: I had strong relationships with all those people and mostly, they were all competent. I told my business partner that I never want to go through such an experience again as I am probably not cut out to be CEO. I made it clear that if such an opportunity should arise, I would step down and devote myself to what I believe I do best: product management. This awaited opportunity presented itself in 2020 when one of our historical partners decided to buy a small stake in our company through an acquihire. This turned into a happy liquidity event that allowed me to de-risk as an entrepreneur and start making career choices out of desire, not out of fear. I then launched into a series of product management gigs that eventually led me to my current position. 

In my current role as the Group Product Manager, I perform most of the status quo tasks and efforts that you would expect from a product manager: i) I work cross-functionally (sweat a lot fighting to align all stakeholders), ii) I improve products to meet user needs, iii) I harden the product vision and strategy based on sound discoveries, iv) and I drive business outcomes. Please see my CV for more details.

Over the course of my experience, I taught how myself to code (vanilla JS, React, React Native), which I love doing in my spare time. It helped me gain the required appreciation of engineers’ value, as well as their quirks and challenges. I have learned to work with them harmoniously and how to bring the best out of them by building on mutual trust and respect. While one should probably never hire me a software developer, I am sure my product management skills and experience can pay off quickly.

It may or may not be relevant, but I am currently dabbling with solidity and Ethereum to build a small courseware marketplace. The “grant” vision is for it to grow into a DAO where “social status” is determined by your levels of knowledge and expertise in any given field. 

I credit the Internet as one of the most important influences on who I am today. I therefore feel entitled to critique its evolution and I am not sure I like what I’ve been seeing recently. Web3 allows me to entertain similar hopes to the ones web1 and 2 had sparked. Except this time, I want to feel I am actively shaping and accelerating the space.