# Witek Socha (@witek.ink)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/witek.ink
Headline: Senior Product Manager

## About

Doing product work like in this movie: Everything Everywhere All at Once.

## Experience

- **Product Manager at Lano** (2022 – 2023)
  Creating a new global payroll product!
- **Product Manager at Brainly** (2021 – 2022)
  Product Management
  \- ownership of a platform CMS product with internal and external international stakeholders
  \- automation efforts to speed up the content creation processes.
  \- leading a team of developers, analyst and designers to achieve a business goals.
  \- conducting discovery, research and analysis, and preparation of a roadmap and managing projects.
  
  Additionally I serve as a People Manager and help grow my team members.
- **Senior Technical Product Manager at CKEditor** (2024 – present)
  As a Senior Technical Product Manager at CKEditor, I lead the product vision, strategy, and execution for CKEditor 5 editor, ensuring it meets the needs of developers, content creators, and enterprise clients. I collaborate with cross-functional teams including engineering, design, and QA to deliver high-quality features and improvements, while staying aligned with business goals and user feedback. My responsibilities also include conducting market analysis, defining the product roadmap, and prioritizing initiatives to drive innovation and maintain CKEditor’s leadership in the market.
- **Technical Product Owner at CKEditor** (2023 – 2024)
- **IT Documentation Manager at Ringier Axel Springer Tech** (2017 – 2019)
  As a member of a process team I helped with creation of documentation processes, standards and tools, and spread them across multiple software teams.
  
  Key Achievements:
  \- Evangelized ‘docs as code’ mindset in several teams and helped implement it.
  \- Helped in content creation for the new product
  \- Ring Publishing.
  \- Create documentation products roadmap.
  \- Introduced Jira Service Desk tool for 50+ teams.
  
  Technology: Python, Git, Confluence, Jira Methodologies: Docs as code, Kanban, DevOps
- **Content Process Manager at Brainly** (2020 – 2021)
  Worked in a Content Center of Excellence team.
  \- Collaboration with Specialists and Market Leaders (30+ people) to elicit business requirements
  \- Automation and integration with APIs and spreadsheet tooling.
  \- Report creation: Metabase and SQLs
  \- Process Optimisation and Improvement actions across multiple markets.
  \- Organising internal workshops and knowledge sharing activities.
  \- Product Management
  \- serve as a business analyst to deliver requirements to the software engineers and a product teams.
- **Service Desk Manager at Ringier Axel Springer Tech** (2019 – 2019)
  Manager of a help desk team supporting 2000+ employees and external clients. Tailoring processes to satisfy business and products needs. Main areas of activity:  PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
  \- Responsible for key internal tools, e.g. Jira, VictorOps, and their development.
  \- Planning roadmaps, budgets in cooperation with multiple stakeholders.
  \- Project management and introduction of changes internally and with external vendors.
  
  PROCESSES AND AUTOMATIONS
  \- Responsible for Incident Management and Request Fulfilment processes.
  \- Creation of tools and automations to speed up operations.
  \- Measuring, defining and redefining stages of processes according do stakeholders’ and organization’s needs.
  \- Actively participating in processes e.g. as an Incident Manager.
  
  TEAM
  \- Managing a team of 12 in two locations: Kraków and Warsaw.
  \- People development and recruitment.
  \- Team plannings and roadmap development.
- **Developer at Picodi.com** (2016 – 2017)
  I maintained and developed features for a system which handles traffic from 25 countries. Also, in my daily work, I helped my teammates embrace XP and Agile practices, and I run scrum events for one team.
  
  Key Achievements:
  \- Introduced documentation, unit testing, TDD processes across the company.
  \- Refactored key app’s components to the newest technology and standards.
  \- Started using   Technology: PHP, Python, MySQL, MongoDB, Jenkins.
- **Team Leader in Community Team at Estimote, Inc.** (2015 – 2016)
  As a part of a group of team leaders at Estimote, I helped a team of Community Managers in their daily activities. The team varied in size from 3 to 6 members.
  
  Key Achievements:
  \- Organized and coordinated a few global product launches.
  \- Launched new channels for content distribution, e.g, forum.
  \- Successfully planned daily, weekly, monthly goals.
  \- Recruited a few valuable team members.
- **Community Manager at Estimote, Inc.** (2014 – 2015)
  The Community Team is the eyes, ears and voice of Estimote. My main responsibility was to engage with our tens of thousands of developers and clients to resolve and escalate their issues, as well as to build lasting relationships.
  
  Key Achievements:
  \- Created meaningful pieces of content for community
  \- blog posts, how-tos, case studies.
  \- Solved over 10k support tickets.
  \- With my colleagues we managed to drop median response time from 7h to 1h.
  \- Maintained social media with several thousands of followers.
- **Cofounder at emonit.pl** (2013 – 2014)
  The idea was simple
  \- help companies receive overdue receivables. In Poland approx. 25% of receivables are not paid within due time and average waiting time is 4 months.
  
  We created a SaaS product which automated the process of contacting with debtors. The platform was able to send emails, text messages, voice messages and the whole thing could be integrated with an ERP system.
  
  Why have we failed? We didn't have a clear product vision. We were focused on building new (unnecessary) features without talking to potential customers.

## Education

- **AGH University of Science and Technology** — Postgradute Education (2016 – 2017)
- **Coders Lab** (2015 – 2016)
- **Jagiellonian University** — Bachelor’s Degree (2011 – 2015)

## Skills

- Web Analytics
- Content Marketing
- Product Management
- Large Language Models (LLM)
- PHP
- Web Content Management
- Google Analytics
- Start-ups
- Product Development
- Community Management
- JavaScript
- Lean Operations
- Continuous Process Improvement

## Certifications

- Professional Scrum Master I — Scrum.org (https://www.scrum.org/Assessments/Certification-Lists?AssessmentName=PSM%20I&l=Socha)
- Lean Foundations — LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/certificates/968abdd3c34346e297da62c497f313528453878bf79e20279d2d85c965bc06a9?trk=backfilled_certificate)
- Process Improvement Foundations — LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/certificates/7403834a226259b3b26c971892a6c4f754ec6759b27560cd7dc083032f2eafe6?trk=backfilled_certificate)
- Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age — Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/account/accomplishments/certificate/NK8HUHAGA5ZS)
- Six Sigma Green Belt — Lynsky Solutions
- AI For Everyone — Coursera (https://coursera.org/verify/FZAHTX3228DM)
- Scaling Product Delivery — Reforge
- Generative AI with Large Language Models — Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/account/accomplishments/verify/PD6Y7DZDJJTJ)
- Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals — Coursera (https://coursera.org/share/31b47db207395b6691a51323cea8c477)
- JSNation 2023 Workshop — GitNation (https://portal.gitnation.org/person/witek_socha/certificates/15092)
- Improving Your Product Sense — Maven (https://maven.com/certificate/gckLzCcJ)

## Publications

- Bubbles pop when no one is looking — witek.ink (https://witek.ink/writing/bubbles-pop-when-no-one-is-looking/)
- Crowdfunding as a new method of acquiring financing

## Honors and awards

- Scholarship for the best academic performance
- Scholarship for the best academic performance
- Graduation with honors
- Brainly Impact Award
- Most Valuable Professional

## Languages

- Polish (native)
- English (professional_working)