Product and Go-To-Market Can't Live in Silos: A Conversation with Basia Derkowska and Wiktor Sobolak

This one is a two-guest conversation with the pair behind Growth Meetup in Rzeszów, one of the best B2B events in Poland. Basia Derkowska is a fractional CMO and growth advisor for early-stage B2B SaaS; Wiktor Sobolak is Head of Product at Text (formerly LiveChat). Both came up through marketing, and together they map the road from marketing to product, and the trap most companies fall into along the way.

Growth Meetup, and building it like a product

The event started in 2018 as a group of friends meeting to learn from each other and, as Wiktor puts it, "complain about what the hell isn't working." After COVID it restarted as a beer meetup, then they added structure: every speaker has to bring a case study with real numbers, and the audience is deliberately curated so it stays signal, not noise. Their first proper edition was 30 people in Surfer's kitchen. They've scaled slowly on purpose, Wiktor compares it to getting your first customers: you don't want too many too fast, you want enough to get real feedback and find product-market fit. And they're famous among speakers for being relentless with feedback, multiple rounds of "cut the self-promotion, sharpen the content", because it pushes the average keynote to an eight out of ten.

Two roads into B2B

Basia fell in love with the power of words early, a school blog, newspapers, then learned leadership through scouting and a global NGO before landing a Brand24 social-media job from a Facebook ad. She'd considered HR, but someone told her that if she wanted to break things and experiment, marketing was the place, because "nothing is true, everything changes," and from marketing you can grow into product and growth. Wiktor came to marketing out of anger, at an outdated, coal-focused energy-engineering degree, and a failed break-dancing career. Reasoning from first principles, he saw that every company needs marketing and that marketing was becoming number-driven, which suited a math person, so he went into PPC and analytics, then growth, then product five or six years ago.

The mistake: product and go-to-market in silos

Their sharpest shared insight is that too many companies treat product and go-to-market as separate things, and Wiktor argues that's backwards, especially now. Product should take the lead, because it's easier than ever to lose product-market fit if you don't ship fast enough, and marketing and sales have to build on top at the same pace. Product is your biggest growth enabler: what you build should be reflected in your go-to-market (build for a new vertical, that's where you go), and your go-to-market strategy, your total addressable market and target segments, should inform your product roadmap and who you build for. Without that synergy, marketing tries to sell value the product doesn't have, and product optimizes for a group that doesn't drive revenue.

His examples make it concrete. Geographic expansion is usually framed as go-to-market, but if you expand to Germany and don't localize the product, you'll never win a natively-working audience. Product maturity is cultural, what reads as polished and Apple-like in the US and Europe can be seen as unfinished in Japan. And something as technical as server placement matters: a voice bot needs low latency to feel natural, so serving Asian or US customers from European servers can quietly kill the experience. Basia's complement: amid the AI frenzy, come back to earth, authenticity and the customer's actual problem, because you can automate every campaign and build the best product and still get nothing if you're automating the wrong things.

If you cringe at old work, you started early

Asked about early missteps, both reframed cringe as evidence of an early start. Basia's line: if you're not ashamed of your MVP, you started too late, and she'd rather people find her embarrassing first blog posts and first-time-manager Slack messages, because those mistakes built who she is. Wiktor's greatest hits include the classic "Hello, first name" mail-merge fail where the personalization token prints literally (worse when it's in a client's name) and CC instead of BCC, but his most useful confession is strategic: he over-focused on big goals and big bets and under-invested in the incremental, compounding, needle-moving work that actually matters in a fast environment.

Pursue the fear

On getting discouraged, which both admit they do, Wiktor cites Ben Horowitz's advice to pursue your fear rather than run from it: reflect on where it's coming from, and if you want the big outcome, walk toward the fear, because the things that scared him years ago don't anymore. Basia adds a sharp litmus test: the gap between fear and excitement is small, and the sweet spot for a decision is when something both excites and scares you. If it only excites you, find something scarier; if it terrifies you into paralysis, wait. And when you're down, don't linger there, reflect briefly, then go do things again, ideally near someone with energy.

Leadership: umbrella, but no sugarcoating

Both landed on serving the team, not being served. Wiktor believes in allowing people to fail (his boss once ended a disagreement with "that's my opinion, prove me wrong") and in high ownership, giving people the context and guardrails, then letting them make their own judgment, which builds a team that ships and develops real product sense. Basia describes "umbrella leadership," shielding your team from the organizational rain so they can focus, but warns it isn't sustainable if you forget your own health, and first-time leaders in small companies often get left to figure it out alone. Wiktor's build on it is the crucial nuance: being an umbrella doesn't mean sugarcoating. Treat people as adults with real transparency ("we as a company are not in a good place, here's the market situation"), and instead of guessing why decisions come from the top, they start solving the problem with you, which bonds the team tighter and means you're not alone.

Key takeaways

Product and go-to-market can't live in silos. Product is your biggest growth enabler. What you build must inform where you sell, and vice versa, right down to localization and server placement.

If you cringe at old work, you started early. An MVP you're not ashamed of shipped too late. Mistakes are proof of progress.

Pursue the fear. The best decisions sit where excitement meets fear. Walk toward it; the things that scared you will stop scaring you.

Umbrella leadership, without sugarcoating. Shield the team so they can focus, but stay transparent and treat them as adults so they solve problems with you.

Automate the right things. Amid the AI rush, the customer's real problem still decides whether any of the automation is worth anything.

Frameworks worth stealing

Let go-to-market and product inform each other

Before building or expanding, check the two-way street: does your product reflect where you're going to market (the vertical, the geography, the segment), and does your go-to-market reflect what you can actually build and localize? A new market may demand a localized product, adjusted maturity, or even regional servers. When the two run in silos, marketing oversells and product mis-aims.

The fear-and-excitement test

When weighing a new role, bet, or experiment, notice how it makes you feel. If it only excites you, it probably won't stretch you, so find something scarier. If it paralyzes you, wait. The decisions worth making usually sit right in the middle, exciting and scary at once, and that's your signal to walk toward the fear.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines we wrote down.

Product, especially now, is your biggest growth enabler. What you build should be reflected in your go-to-market.

If you're not ashamed of your MVP, you probably started too late.

Being an umbrella doesn't mean sugarcoating the situation.

Rapid fire round

Same questions, two guests.

Best advice you've ever received? Basia: health comes first, a healthy you and a healthy team grow faster. Wiktor: don't ignore the "crappy" quick notes and calls you jot in twenty minutes, they can become a big feature or strategy.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Wiktor: "a good product sells itself," from a CTO who built the product. It's BS, a great product still needs marketing. Basia: "don't do it", do it, be ashamed, that's fine.

What would you tell your younger self? Wiktor: invest in Bitcoin and Nvidia, dream bigger, and yes, a European company can go public. Basia: don't worry so much about what could go wrong, embrace the fear.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Basia: learning to do marketing as a fractional partner rather than in-house, unlearning and relearning. Wiktor: how to be a leader who ships and cares about his people, building a team that ships fast with impact.

Favorite spot? Wiktor: ramen with beef tartare in Kraków. Basia: a not-yet-famous Italian spot in Rzeszów she's reluctant to name so she can keep getting a table.

Tool you can't live without? Both landed on the same answer: customer first, especially in the age of AI and building.

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Basia Derkowska is a fractional CMO and growth advisor for early-stage B2B SaaS, and a co-organizer of Growth Meetup. Wiktor Sobolak is the Head of Product at Text, formerly LiveChat, and a co-organizer of Growth Meetup. Find them both on LinkedIn, and their event on Growth Meetup's LinkedIn.