Celebrating 2 years in Kentico

Two years. That’s the anniversary I celebrate today. Two years in Kentico as a VP of Marketing. Originally hired to re-build and lead the team for Kentico Xperience division. Now leading the Kentico’s Marketing team since we carved out our little brother Kontent.ai into a separate entity. How were these two years, and what’s ahead of us?

Scaling the team

When I started, there were four people in the team. My first job was to start building the new team - think about the structure, the roles, about the important stakeholders in other departments who have needs that Marketing fulfills. Right now, we have new people coming to our team in the upcoming weeks, and at the beginning of October, we should be a team of 14 people, including myself. We also will have three wonderful colleagues on maternity leave at that time, and we are looking forward to having them back when they feel ready for it.

By the way, if you know about a good candidate for a Channel Marketing role in the US, preferably Boston Great Area or New Hampshire, let me know. ;-)

The important part of scaling the team was also changing the structure from time to time and introducing the leaders' roles. In the beginning, everyone was reporting to me. When I hired member #8, I introduced the Director roles for Yvette Hastings and Karel Figlar . And they helped me a lot to keep moving forward, managing the team, staying on top of our focus areas, and more. Thank you both, you really grew with your team, and you are indispensable to me.

And thanks to all members of great team: Ondrej Vasil , Hana Weaver , Hana McCulloch , Nikolas Jenč , Iveta Pari , Eva Palbuchtova , Veronika Matoušková , Iveta Hostašová , Peter Mojzisek , Nela Urbančok (Patschová) .

Breaking the silos

There were a lot of silos in the company. Silos between the departments, silos between the teams within the department. The management team was mostly new, so we were working hard on breaking these silos. And for me, the most important cooperation to restart was with the Sales team.

I truly believe that there are three main ingredients of the improvements between Marketing and Sales (one Commercial team, as we call it) in Kentico.

Antonín Moravec 's constant push to work only on things that are important and that Sales and Marketing cooperation is important as hell. Tonda was the one who was hiring the management team and to whom I was reporting for almost two years. My experience in managing Sales in DATAWEPS . Thank you, Honza Mayer , for that opportunity, and Richard Brulik and Jaroslav Salva for all the advice as my mentors. It really helped me to open the discussions with Kentico's Sales people, understand their needs, and build a Marketing team that truly cooperates with Sales.

Petr Klouda was promoted to the role of VP of Global Sales after my first five months in the company. He is the most cooperative Sales leader I have ever worked with. He's my bold blood-brother in our Executive management team. We can discuss any commercial topic and even topics that are not commercial ones. With him as a counterpart, building truly one Commercial team is much easier. Even Petr's hiring to his Sales team, so if you want to experience this Marketing & Sales cooperation, leave him a message.

Exciting future

As you probably know, we have recently carved out our second division into a separate company called Kontent.ai, we have received the investment, and we are entering a new stage in Kentico's life. Thank you, Expedition Growth Capital . Read more about that in Dominik Pinter 's blog post: www.kentico.com/discover/blog/welcome-to-the-next-stage-of-your-dxp-journey-kentico.

We are transforming our business to cloud and subscription. We are growing our teams. We want to scale our ARR significantly in the next five years. And I'm looking forward to being part of that.

We have a great partner network, and I want to thank all of you, our partners, whom I met in these two years.

So there is really an exciting future for Kentico. Wanna Love Your Job? Wanna be part of that future? Let us know.