I Stepped Down to Get My Hands Dirty: A Conversation with Aleksandra Korczynska

Most marketing careers move in one direction: bigger team, bigger budget, further from the work. Aleksandra Korczynska deliberately went the other way.

She was CMO at GetResponse for five years, running a team of 40-plus and a budget in the millions. She launched Uber Eats in Poland, led marketing at Lifespace, and turned down offers from the likes of Revolut and Docplanner. Then she took a smaller CMO seat at Survicate, the customer feedback platform where her husband Daniel leads product, specifically so she could stay close to the work, ship, and keep her hands on the new AI tools rather than manage from a distance. Her background is quantitative, economics and statistics, and it shapes how she thinks about everything from A/B tests to hiring. She talked to me from Cape Town, where she's currently based, working remotely.

Why step down on purpose

The move looks backward on paper and forward in practice. Aleksandra had reached the point where the CMO job was mostly coordination, managing a large team, sitting in the strategy layer, further and further from the actual building. What she wanted, especially as AI reshaped what a single marketer can do, was to stay hands-on: prototype, ship, understand the tools deeply enough to have a real point of view. So she chose the smaller, more hands-on seat over the bigger, more removed one. It's a deliberate rejection of the idea that seniority has to mean distance from the craft.

A good CMO leads by example and is T-shaped

Her model of a strong marketing leader is someone who leads by example rather than from above, and who is T-shaped: broad across marketing with real depth somewhere specific. In her case the depth is analytical and technical, which she says makes her a better marketer today than the purely creative version of the role would have. Marketing has become far more technical over the last decade, and with vibe coding a marketer can now prototype and build without waiting on designers or developers. Her quant and statistics background, once something she almost hid because marketing was seen as "creative, not technical," turned out to be the edge: it's what let her run rigorous experiments at Uber Eats and read statistical significance properly instead of chasing noise.

Product is the most crucial partner

Marketers are trained to think their closest ally is sales. Aleksandra's view is that product is the most crucial partner, not sales. Marketing that isn't tightly coupled to product ends up promoting things customers don't want or can't reach. The tight loop between what's being built and how it's positioned is where growth actually comes from, which is also why she values working somewhere she's close to the product decisions rather than downstream of them.

PLG versus sales-led, and the one-way door

The sharpest strategic point is about sequencing. Whether you go product-led or sales-led depends on your ACV and how mature the product is. Her guidance: usually start PLG, then layer sales-led motions on as the product and deal complexity grow. The warning is the important part. Starting sales-led too early masks product gaps, because a good sales team can push a rough product out the door and hide the fact that it doesn't yet retain. And that choice is close to a one-way door: once you've built the org, comp plans, and habits around sales-led, unwinding it back toward self-serve is painful. So the default should be to earn your way into sales-led once the product has proven it can pull users through on its own.

ABM is awareness, not lead-gen

A common measurement mistake: treating account-based marketing as a lead-generation channel and then judging it by leads. Aleksandra's framing is that ABM is really about awareness and presence inside target accounts, and measuring it with a lead counter will make a working program look like a failure. There is no quick-return playbook hiding here either. Growth comes from consistency, genuinely good content, the right distribution, and measuring each channel by the thing it's actually good at.

Thought leadership needs real, unique expertise

She's skeptical of thought leadership as a tactic you can fake. It only works when there's genuine, unique expertise behind it. Her example is Daniel's first LinkedIn post going viral, tens of thousands of views, because it carried real, specific knowledge rather than recycled takes. The content engine only compounds when what you're putting out is something only you could have written.

The coordination tax and the ten-person team

At scale, Aleksandra points to a coordination tax: as teams grow, an increasing share of everyone's energy goes into alignment rather than output. Her instinct, amplified by AI, is that the ideal team can be small, around ten people, precisely because you keep the coordination overhead low and the ownership high. She hires for ownership, for people who are smart and curious enough to "surprise her," and for a design eye. And she never hires alone.

Global-first, and the Poland trap

On going international, her advice for software companies is to go English-first and global-first from the start, then localize market by market as a deliberate next step. The failure mode she calls the Poland trap: building for your home market first because it's comfortable, then discovering your product, positioning, and content are all shaped around a market too small to sustain the ambition. Software has no reason to be local-first. Attribution, she adds, is overrated, blend your sources, accept you'll never perfectly trace every dollar, and keep your eye on MRR growth rather than a tidy attribution model.

Key takeaways

Seniority doesn't have to mean distance. She stepped down from a 40-person seat to stay hands-on and close to the tools. Proximity to the work is a choice.

Product is the closest partner, not sales. Marketing decoupled from product promotes the wrong things. Keep the loop tight.

Start PLG, earn your way to sales-led. Sales-led too early hides product gaps, and it's close to a one-way door. Let the product prove it pulls users through first.

Measure each channel for what it does. ABM is awareness, not lead-gen. Judging it by leads makes a working program look broken.

Go global-first out of the gate. Software has no reason to be local-first. Avoid the Poland trap; localize as a deliberate second step.

Frameworks worth stealing

The PLG-to-sales-led sequence

Default to product-led, especially at lower ACV and early product maturity. Add sales-led motions only as deal complexity and product depth grow. Treat the switch as close to irreversible, so don't reach for it to paper over a product that can't yet retain on its own.

The ten-person, low-coordination team

Assume every added person raises the coordination tax. With modern tooling, aim for a small team of high-ownership people rather than a large one that spends its energy aligning. Hire for ownership, curiosity, and a design eye, screen by handing people real problems, and never make the hiring call alone.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

I stepped down on purpose. I wanted to stay hands-on, not manage from a distance.

If you go sales-led too early, you just hide the fact that your product isn't ready.

The cost of a bad hire is so much higher than people think.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Always be questioning yourself, and let others question you. However much you know, the market and the world keep changing, so staying open to being challenged is what keeps you sharp.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Never hire alone. Always have a second person in the loop, even asking the same questions, because a solo call can skip something that turns out fatal. She learned the hard way how high the cost of a bad hire really is.

What would you tell your younger self? Don't wait so long to have kids. Everyone warned her it would be the end of her career and her passions; nobody told her kids would make life genuinely better. It's harder in spots, but it comes down to project management and coordination, and the upside dwarfs the drawbacks.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Where AI is taking SaaS. She wonders which of today's SaaS businesses will still exist in five years, and whether her team is making the right bets, because she expects a lot of consolidation and a lot of products to disappear.

Favorite spot? Cape Town for the cuisine and value, where she lives now. In Poland, Tosh Kafka in Gdańsk, a favorite for anyone into drip or AeroPress coffee, plus Laba right next door.

Tool you can't live without? Todoist. She uses it to offload every small task, personal and professional, so her mind stays clear, and aims for "to-do zero" as a daily habit.

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Aleksandra Korczynska is the CMO of Survicate. Before that she spent five years as CMO of GetResponse, led the Uber Eats launch in Poland, and headed marketing at Lifespace. Find her on LinkedIn.