Welcome to the latest installation of our Voices of Acoustic blog series! Throughout this series, we’re highlighting members of our team from different backgrounds, geographies, and parts of Acoustic to give our audience a closer look at who we are and what we believe in.

Today, we’re excited to introduce you to Karolina Domelow, Director of Product for Data Management. Karolina is based in our Gdańsk, Poland office and has been an integral part of the latest update to Acoustic Connect, which now includes real-time customer data management capabilities. Let’s dive in!

1. What inspired you to pursue a career in MarTech?

 

I studied sociology of sport and exercise, which focused on the influence and impact of sports on society. When you look at the MarTech industry, the core is very similar: marketing has been influencing society for a very long time now. This attracted me to the industry.

Additionally, I was always fairly technically minded, which made MarTech feel like a natural fit because I could continue pursuing the skills I learned from sociology and my interest in technology at the same time. I enjoy assessing the impact of marketing on society, analyzing behaviors, and thinking through complex problems.

Although I initially started as a marketer, I moved into product management because I realized I was more interested in building products that solved marketing challenges. Problem solving comes naturally to me and when I started going deeper into marketing solutions and all the processes connected with it, I decided it was an area I wanted to explore further.

2. How have you seen the industry change?

 

Change has been fascinating to watch. When I first started in the industry, many marketers used a “batch and blast” approach where we used to focus on sending as many emails as possible and tried to get as many contacts into our database as possible without even worrying if they were really interested in the product.

Now, it’s all about focusing on quality – not only finding the right customers to engage with, but ensuring the content you share is relevant to them. It’s critical to trust the data you gather and spend time analyzing it to make sure that customers receive what is relevant to them, even if they don’t know that they may want or need the product or service you’re marketing. I know this may raise a couple of eyebrows, but when you look at the history of change and innovation, the most disruptions came when the innovator provided products that consumers didn’t even know they would need so much.

As is said in a quote that is often attributed to Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether or not Henry Ford really did say this, the sentiment is true not only when marketing a product, but also when developing the product itself.

3. What is your proudest professional accomplishment?

 

I’ve been very fortunate in my professional life to work with teams who have delivered fantastic results. However, I am by far most proud of being part of Acoustic Connect and playing a substantial part in the platform by shaping data management and how our users will interact with our platform through data. I am immensely proud of all the teams and everyone I have worked with over the past year and a half.

Throughout this time, I have seen Acoustic Connect developing from a seed of an idea to a product that is ready to be used by our customers. Hours of discussion, problem solving, and negotiations have brought us together, working very closely and supporting each other every step of the way.

4. As a Director of Product at Acoustic, can you tell us more about your role and how Acoustic designs its products to meet the needs of modern marketers?

 

We follow product management best practices, which starts with a discovery phase where you explore the problem, research potential solutions, and evaluate them. Next you move to planning, which includes uncovering all internal and external dependencies and negotiating with others to determine when it makes sense to develop together and what can be done independently. Finally, you move into execution – scoping the product and then building it. After all the quality checks, you ship it to the clients and evaluate.

Sounds simple, right? But the Acoustic Connect product is a very complex and layered tool, so in each step, it’s important to assess the impact on other areas of the product and constantly negotiate with other Product Managers to make sure that it will all work together. To design products that meet the needs of modern marketers, support and cooperation are key. We have brilliant people in Acoustic from the Product team to Engineering, all the way to Marketing. Each of us has a different background and a different set of knowledge and experience. In the whole process of building a product and updating it, we use each other’s expertise and creative thinking.

As a Director of Product for Data Managment, my role is to be the negotiator and the advocate for what we are implementing. To plan our internal roadmap, I need to negotiate, cooperate, and brainstorm with other Product Managers. Acoustic Connect takes a lot of complex planning and careful decision-making to ensure it meets our customers’ needs.

I’m also fortunate to lead a very talented and well-organized team of product managers in Poland. Together, we go through each cycle of product development and build data management solutions for our customers.

5. What are you most excited about when thinking about the future of Acoustic and the industry as a whole?

 

I’m most excited to be part of the team that builds a differentiated product that will help marketers redefine how they approach multichannel marketing and to see how they will rethink their marketing strategies with the new possibilities our solution provides. It’s every product manager’s dream to work on innovative products that change the end user’s perspective. We started to do that with Acoustic Connect and we will continue to do it. It excites me to be part of a team that defines and disrupts the market and in the future, who knows? Maybe we’ll be able to shape the next change within the MarTech industry.

 

Thank you for joining us and providing your insights, Karolina!

If you’d like to connect with Karolina, you can find her spending time with the family somewhere in Pomerania, scuba diving, or online playing PC. You can also connect with her on LinkedIn.

This is the fourth installation in a multi-part series focused on the people at Acoustic. You can check out previous installations below:

• Scott Opiela, CMO
• John Riewerts, SVP of Engineering
• Sofía Arrambide, VP & General Manager, Latin America

 

Keep an eye on the Acoustic Digital Experience Blog for future editions!