The PM Path Nobody Takes: A Conversation with Weronika Siatkowska

Most product managers come from engineering or design. Weronika Siatkowska came from customer success. She spent six years at GetResponse on the front lines as a customer success specialist, team coach, quality lead, and eventually a PM, training 210 employees along the way and handling product issues daily. Then she moved into product for real: three years as a PM at GetResponse, three at Unity Technologies building internal tools for engineers, and now at the LEGO Group building data platforms for the designers who create those iconic sets. Her whole career has been spent building the infrastructure nobody sees.

What makes Weronika's path valuable is that customer success gave her something engineering-first PMs often have to work to develop. This conversation is about the unfair advantage of a support background, why internal tools are their own discipline, how to measure success when revenue and churn do not apply, and why she treats process as a craft rather than bureaucracy.

The translator's advantage

Weronika describes herself as a product manager who translates, and it is more than a metaphor. She trained as a translator, and even started her career translating coal-mining articles, before online life pulled her elsewhere. The skill carried over directly: she translates business goals into technical deliverables, and technical constraints and risks into decision records that stakeholders have to approve. Moving fluidly between audiences with different terminology and levels of technical literacy is, she says, a skill that can make or break a PM.

The through-line of her career is curiosity, which she frames as something you have to actively exercise, especially at work. Onboarding is impossible without it, and the "well enough" point never really arrives, because there is always a new dependency, user group, or strategic shift to understand before you can keep delivering value. In product management, where you have to cater to constantly changing business requirements, user needs, and technology, curiosity is not optional. You fail without it.

Customer success as a superpower

Weronika is generous about PMs who come from engineering and design, insisting they miss nothing, but she is clear about what a support background uniquely guarantees: user-centricity. Having experienced the product from the point of view of a frustrated, sometimes furious user gives you an ability to spot flaws and feel the true gravity of them, which fuels you to be an honest advocate for users and opens up a much larger space of improvements. When you hire someone from customer success, she says, it is guaranteed they are experts in empathy.

She categorizes PMs into subject-matter experts and generalists, and places herself firmly in the generalist bucket. She would not apply for a role requiring deep supply-chain knowledge, but drop her into most industries and she will absorb the company and product context while bringing years of honed product skills. Her six years training 210 employees across every department, not just support, sharpened two things: relationships, which let her assume good intentions and keep allies when hard decisions came, and the ability to adjust a complex message to whatever audience was in the room. That is the translation skill again, showing up as the core of the job.

Internal tools are their own discipline

Weronika calls building internal tools both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that internal products are often built to satisfy a compliance or security requirement, or to digitize a specific business process, which means you are frequently handed a feature to build rather than a problem to solve. That is demotivating for a product team, so the challenge is to collaborate with stakeholders in a way where they do not treat you as a subcontractor. You have to choose your battles, gradually negotiating more room for genuine product discovery while still delivering the value that keeps the business running.

The blessing is access. With internal products, assessing user segment size, setting up consistent feedback, and scheduling discovery are all far easier. But there is a catch she names precisely: when a tool is mandated by leadership, adoption becomes a vanity metric, because people are simply obligated to use it. Your users will not be enthusiastic, so your mission is not to make their lives more miserable but to offer something delightful, automated, and genuinely helpful. When she moved from tooling for engineers to tooling for LEGO's creatives, the lesson sharpened: the digital solution should be an extension of the creative process, minimizing admin so the designer can spend their energy on what they were actually hired to do.

Metrics that tell a story

For internal tools, Weronika throws out revenue and churn as irrelevant and works backward from intent. What was the essential reason this team was assembled? If the goal was to streamline a process, measure the number of steps or the time to complete a task, and aim to minimize it, or analyze logs to find the most error-prone, automation-worthy steps. If it was to strengthen code quality, analyze test failures and their root causes, since some may come from infrastructure instabilities your own team should fix so code owners get actionable results.

Her sharpest point is that KPIs, internal or external, have to tell a story your stakeholders actually value, and you cannot define that in isolation. Her example: an infrastructure team might pick uptime as its KPI, but business stakeholders may not grasp what value that represents. Reframe it as "high uptime means zero interruptions to the shopping experience," and suddenly the real KPI becomes the number of production interruptions, because that is the angle stakeholders care about. The craft is asking the people who influence decisions what data actually clicks for them.

Process is an enabler, not bureaucracy

Weronika sees agile ceremonies, backlog management, and process optimization not as bureaucracy but as an important enabler. Her personal mission is to organize the chaos around her so the team can make space for better conversations. When she joins a team she observes how leadership communicates direction, how decisions are documented, and how knowledge flows, and she almost always finds little transparency and a lot of silo work, a pattern that worsens in bigger companies like Unity and, even more so, LEGO. The fix is tools and processes that document and communicate progress and critical decisions, building the solid foundation of trust a team needs. Yes, it can mean more meetings at the start, but the ultimate purpose is delivering business value, and she does not know how you reach that without the basic building blocks.

Coordinating multiple teams without everyone resenting you, she says, comes down to rallying people around a shared goal rather than dropping requirements and deadlines on them. Communicate the goal and the business reasoning, then pause and give people real space to ask questions and raise concerns. Her time in Danish companies taught her they care about consensus, not just agreement, and consensus is only built when concerns and risks are surfaced. Once everyone shares the same knowledge, the real work begins, and when things are not working you acknowledge it transparently and change your approach for the benefit of the group.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

Customer success guarantees user-centricity. A support background means you have felt the product as a frustrated user, which makes you an honest advocate and a sharper spotter of real flaws.

Be the translator. The core PM skill is moving between business, engineering, and stakeholders, respecting each audience's terminology and adjusting the message. It is what makes or breaks the role.

Internal tools are a distinct craft. You are often handed features, not problems, so negotiate room for discovery, and remember that mandated adoption is a vanity metric. Aim for delight and automation instead.

Measure from intent. Drop revenue and churn for internal products. Work backward from why the team exists, and frame KPIs as the story stakeholders actually value.

Process is an enabler. Organizing chaos and documenting decisions is not bureaucracy. It is the foundation of trust that lets a team make better decisions and move faster.

Frameworks worth stealing

The PM as translator

Treat the job as continuous translation. Turn business goals into technical deliverables and technical risks into decision records, and adjust your language to each audience's terminology and technical literacy. Fluency across those groups is the skill that determines whether you succeed.

Internal-tool mindset

When building tools people are forced to use, do not chase adoption, which is guaranteed and therefore meaningless. Reduce their misery instead: automate the tedious parts, integrate fragmented tools into a cohesive experience, and let the magic happen under the hood so users can focus on their actual work.

Work backward from intent

To measure an internal product, start from the reason the team was created. Streamlining a process means measuring steps or time and minimizing them. Improving code quality means analyzing test failures and root causes. Then translate the KPI into the story your stakeholders value.

Rally, don't bulldoze

To lead a multi-team effort without resentment, communicate the shared goal and the business reasoning, then pause for real questions and concerns. Build consensus by surfacing risks, not by forcing agreement, and once everyone holds the same knowledge, the real work can begin.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

If you hire somebody with a customer success background, it is guaranteed that they are experts in user centricity.

Adoption doesn't tell you anything when people are obligated to use the tool.

I like organizing the chaos around me so my team can make space for better conversations.

And the advice that doubles as a life philosophy.

Don't be an asshole. That works.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Weronika handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Fake it till you make it, which she swears works, and "don't be an asshole," which she rates as a universal truth for work and life alike.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? She honestly could not recall one in the moment, and promised to send it over if a shower thought surfaced later.

What would you tell your younger self? Trust your gut. If a situation or interaction does not feel okay, it probably is not. Ignoring her intuition early in her career cost her, and honoring it now makes her a truer, more powerful version of herself at work.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Making sure her team is not treated as just a feature team, and doing it strategically, without antagonizing anyone, which takes a lot of careful thought.

Favorite spot? Reffen street food in Copenhagen, and specifically a West African stall whose peanut stew with rice is her comfort food.

Tool you can't live without? A paper notebook, plus a calendar and reminders. She is deliberately conservative with tools, and writing things down transfers them out of her head and into memory.

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Weronika Siatkowska is a product manager at the LEGO Group, building internal data platforms, after roles at Unity Technologies and GetResponse, where she moved from customer success into product. She is active in the Women in Product Nordics community in Copenhagen. Find her on LinkedIn.