Senior Product Manager & Fractional Head of Product
Marlena
Kowieska
Building products that matter.
Leading teams that ship.
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Senior Product Manager & Fractional Head of Product
Building products that matter.
Leading teams that ship.
01
Most startups don't need a full-time CPO. They need someone who's done it before, integrates fast, and doesn't require hand-holding. I embed as your product lead — owning strategy, roadmap, and the hard prioritisation conversations — without the full-time overhead or the 3-month ramp-up.
This is for you if: your team is building fast but you've lost confidence in what you're building toward.
02
Sometimes you need a senior product mind for a defined window — a leadership gap, a critical inflection point, a parental leave cover. I step in, get up to speed fast, and leave the system in better shape than I found it.
This is for you if: you need experience on demand, not a long-term commitment.
03
A product team is only as good as the habits and conversations it runs on. I help you hire the right PMs, structure how the team operates, and coach individuals through the stakeholder dynamics and prioritisation decisions that derail most product careers.
This is for you if: your team has potential but keeps getting stuck in the same places.
04
Most roadmaps are just a backlog with dates on them. I help companies build a product strategy that's actually connected to where the business is going — so that every quarter, the team is solving the right problems instead of shipping the next thing someone asked for. The goal is to get you out of feature factory mode permanently, not patch it for a sprint.
This is for you if: your roadmap is busy but you've quietly lost confidence it's pointing in the right direction.
05
Before you scale, you need to know what's actually broken. I conduct a structured outside-in review of your product organisation: where the roadmap is drifting from reality, where the team is stuck, and where the highest-leverage intervention is hiding. You get a clear picture and a concrete action plan — not a 60-slide deck of observations.
This is for you if: something feels off but nobody can name it.
06
When engineering has stopped trusting the business, the problem is almost never the engineers. It's the environment: shifting priorities, decisions made without context, and a process that treats the tech team as an order window. I redesign the operating model — the rituals, documentation, and decision flows — so that both sides work from the same reality.
This is for you if: your engineers are talented but disengaged, and your business team can't understand why.
I've embedded with companies mid-chaos — post-Series A, pre-product-market fit, or somewhere in the messy valley between a bold roadmap and a team that's stopped believing in it.
I've also been on the other side: I tried to build my own product. It didn't work. That failure taught me more about founder psychology, resource constraint, and the cost of misalignment than any client engagement ever could.
I grew up watching my parents build businesses from scratch. That shaped something that no MBA or certification program can install: the instinct to treat every organisation's problem as if the money were mine to lose.
My background spans E-Commerce, Fintech, FMCG, Real Estate, Retail, and Telecom — across teams in Madrid, New York, Dubai, and Berlin. That range isn't a résumé quirk. It's pattern recognition: I've seen the same misalignments, the same stakeholder standoffs, the same "we'll figure out the roadmap later" spirals play out across enough contexts to know exactly where they break — and how to stop them before they do.
I hold a background in Mechanical Engineering, a Master's in Marketing and Sales Management, a Data Science certification and a Full Stack Web Development certification. In practice, that means I can sit with your CTO in the morning, your CFO in the afternoon, and make both conversations move forward.
Based in Berlin. Fluent in English, Spanish, and the language of "we need to kill this feature before it kills us."
I take on two to three engagements per quarter. If the timing and scope are right, I'd love to hear about what you're building.