Dusan Kolenovic

To go from 10% to 10X product growth, I help teams build agentic systems that automate intelligently by identifying where data abundance meets manual effort. In telco, research, and hospitality, I audit the data, assess readiness, and align it with high-impact ROI use cases. This evolves products from static tools into adaptive platforms that anticipate behavior and solve emerging problems at scale.

As the paradigm shifted and investment money became scarce, Product-Led-Growth rose as the perfect response for this climate. In my work with pre-seed (until Series A) startups in mental health and longevity industries, I've equipped founders and their products with tools and processes that position the product itself - as the main driver of growth (compared to Sales in the previous paradigm). I feel this area always brings the best out of my product work and am always excited to work on it.

Small teams move faster. Data trumps opinion. Each person is unique. The only way to scale is via trust in your colleagues’ authority. Focus is key. The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist. Whether I was staffing for a large initiative in my organization, a quick-n-dirty PoC, or scouting the next prodigy in our talent pool, following listed principles has brought me success in building team which go above and beyond in the past 12 years of my work.

I have successfully transitioned between roles and pay grades and know that a career can bring lots of dead-ends, rookie mistakes and a sense of loneliness. No one needs to go through this. If you are looking to elevate your role and paygrade or make the transition to a new role I can help you with: - promotion approach - mock interviews - CV feedback - interview approach. I have hands-on, successfully transitioned 8 people, from point 0 to new career paths and am excited to do it again 🚀

I build internal Product communities and steering committees by identifying key drivers and establishing common units of exchange. Each community has a commercial aspect and so far we've unlocked a $2M one time and $1.5M per quarter, in 9 expansion revenue opportunities. Our KPIs are: - Meetups / month - # of seats per meetup - Contributions from cross-functional division members / non-division members - % of community members in mentoring. I'm also the chief editor @Serbian Product Community.

I lead initiatives to design, extend, and scale GTM solutions across retail, fintech, and risk management. These efforts often involve embedding AI-driven automation into core sales and growth motions — helping teams do more with less. I architect and manage the right mix of positioning, messaging, channels, automation, and USP optimization, all tailored to specific product segments and customer profiles.

I unlock expansion revenue by embedding product-led principles into Sales workflows and augmenting them with AI-powered automation and agentic systems. This approach recently delivered $2M in one-time revenue and $1.5M per quarter recurring across 9 expansion opportunities. I design field-tested playbooks and AI-augmented processes that enable everyone — not just Sales — to engage in high-leverage upselling with precision and speed.

Through online surveys, in-depth customer interviews, observational studies, and contextual willingness-to-pay research - I've validated ideas towards USP in HR, mhealth, Risk management and banking industries. I develop and validate personas & customer segments as well as product offerings tailored by combining qualitative research, usage, go-to-market, and willingness-to-pay data per each value stream.

Having a business background and working in a deep-tech company for more than a decade I've successfully overcome the imposter syndrome by: - understanding my value and adopting an assertive presence - learning to acquire buy-ins for relevant stakeholders - providing development teams a wider context of their work and empowering them to contribute to product decisions - building and leveraging a strong executive though-leader presence over time Learn from my experience - not your mistakes.

Part of my job as Head of Product is being called to run interventions in complex product scenarios. There, I regularly remove obstacles, restore trust, introduce new processes to drive upsell and increase transparency. This enables me to lay the groundwork towards radical transformative shifts in business approaches and, on my side - it requires strong communication and vision as well as locking focus on value drivers and avoiding wasted efforts.

Balancing between flexibility and resilience is the pinnacle of mental endurance. By following these principles through my mentoring: Perspective / Ambition / Data / Autonomy / Focus - I can teach you how to navigate the complex space of modern business and leverage a strong executive presence which enabled me to foster small teams and initiatives which then evolved into thriving organizations and landed me a Head role in a deep tech organization which scaled from 12 → 2,400 employees.

Product delivery can feel like death by a thousand papercuts — unless you weaponize AI to cut through the noise. I led a 22-person team to drive a 50% increase in retention for a B2B product used by 1,500+ customers in 179 countries, across 50 languages, with 30k DAUs. I built agentic AI systems to automate cross-functional operations, compress decision cycles, and remove recurring bottlenecks. The result: scalable delivery, radical OPEX reduction, and faster value to users.

Monetization is the biggest revenue-affecting leaver, most products aren’t pulling. I help teams build their Pricing committee and conceptualize monetization strategies based on product maturity and market research findings. After this, we build an infrastructure to continually validate your Monetization strategy through user and market research by regularly revising your pricing based on LTV/CAC analysis and emerging market trends.

From discovering a hidden user segment with a strong willingness to pay, to de-coupling functionalities for a quicker time-to-market I use product analytics everyday in my decisions. Product analytics strategy is one of the first things I provide on a new Product. With this strategy, I have so far been able to give answers to the following questions: What exactly should we measure to support driving our business goals? How (technically) do we measure needed data? Who needs the data? For what?

For the past 8 years, I've grown to be a rock-solid PM, bringing peace and clarity into everyday work. My pillars are: DRIVE - I lay the groundwork to make radical transformative shifts in Product Strategy. AUTONOMY - The only way to scale is through trust 
and respect in for colleagues’ authority. FOCUS - The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist. Small teams move fast.

I've helped organizations ranging from Berlin-based AI startups to US corporate enterprise SaaS solutions, achieve a PM fit on feature, product and platform levels. Firstly by, understanding their market dynamics, executing on user research and rigorously prioritizing problems to solve. And secondly, by defining exactly what success looks like in terms of KPIs (i.e. lines in the sand for product adoption).

Within HTEC Group, I have 12 years of experience in productizing services like: - Innovation Strategy - Experience Design - Technical Strategy & Architecture - Product Engineering. In order to productize listed services, I have successfully achieved internal flexibility in terms of experts, processes, knowledge and external flexibility in terms of de-coupling and bundling of our offering.

In order to set the infrastructure for a true user-driven development I regularly lead the process of providing the strategy, content and execution of: - Online, continual customer surveys - Standardized scripts for deep-dive customer interviews - Observational research - powering rapid prototyping and user testing - Willingness to pay research - Relative feature preference analyses. This is sometimes a greenfield 🌱 effort, and sometimes I'm called in to fix the lack of the listed artifacts.

Staying on top is hard. The process of hitting the sweet-spot between professional goals and life passing by is asking of us to give answers to some tough questions. I have answered mine, and have helped my mentees answer theirs with calm and diligence. Now I want to extend my practice to everyone on growthmentor regardless of their role and seniority, empowering them to navigate their own journeys with confidence and clarity.

I witnessed the growth of this product-led organization and drew my first prototypes with Balsmiq. I've also been in contact with its leaders and appreciate this tool for its pre-made elements which allow rapid prototyping on the go. It has profiled itself as part of my toolbox when it comes to sketching functionalities and mobile apps with early stage startups (in mhealth, hospitality, mental health and sales industries). I use it, in almost real time, for live sketching during discussions.

I've mostly used Confluence when working with larger (15+) teams and supporting US corporate B2B SaaS enterprises. I would go for Confluence for initiatives closer to delivery and actual development. The synergy of Confluence with Jira is clear when I'm breaking down large items of work, where they start their life as a concept in Confluence and slowly move through Jira workflows towards production. I feel now, with different integrations, that Confluence is at its prime as a solution.

I use Figma (Design file) every day to quickly translate concepts into tangible artifacts. This could be while discussing a logical layout with an Architect or building quick-n-dirty PoCs to validate with customers. For prototyping, I used to use Balsamiq and InVision and have switched to Figma. I use Figma to collaborate with Design, make promotional pitches, establish user journeys, execute informational architecture and heuristic analysis exercises.

I've been using Loom regularly to capture and share the functionalities of a product. The purpose was mostly to provide a tutorial or highlight to a prospect or a new user. In terms of partnering with development teams: I use Loom for capturing asynchronous feedback, explaining technical issues and debugging. What I am always mindful of when using the tool (with both internal and external stakeholders) is never sharing any PII.

I've been using LucidChart regularly, to align with developers on product's architectural setup. Specifically, during the "Feasibility" phase of the Discovery, when I run workshops with the development team to lay out the development plan for our Roadmap. From LucidChart's web to desktop solution, this is my go-to tool for diagramming.

The Discovery plan is a key artefact I build, present and use to track progress of the business validation phase with the team. So far, when working on large initiatives, which involve external stakeholders, Miro has proven as the best tool for multi-layered planning and collaboration. It is simple and quick with lots of templates and a recent AI integration. I use it in the quick-and-dirty phase of product development and default to Figma for any high-fidelity premium-looking type of work.

Typeform is a tool that asks me and my team to think clearly in our research work. The accent is on the premium experience of the respondent where I combine questions logic and their beautiful visuals with my product's branding to not only get responses but start building a beta audience and ambassadors of my future solution. One more thing (aside from speed) I like Typeform for - are its integrations, especially with Eureka, which provides survey respondents promptly and at a fair price.

Through Udemy I achieved certification in two courses: "Statistical predictive modelling" and "AI Product manager" equipping me with the skills to leverage data insights for effective product development decisions. These have enabled me to go several layers deep in: - Understanding correlation of specific business metrics and their prolonged impact on recurring revenue - Crafting and validating AI Strategies (and accompanying tooling) at competitive speeds.

UserTesting has a niche respondents audience in their network pool like: asset managers, operations in gas, e-commerce founders, bank analysts, fleet managers etc. This is extremely useful for my work in validating B2B business ideas. Their pricing is fair, support helpful and responsive. What they lack, is flexibility in terms of every segment of user research having to take place in their environment. Still, this is a good tool, I rely on most of the time when it comes to validating B2B ideas.

Sometimes in product, there is an underserved customer segment, that is using the product but doesn't have its dedicated offering. Most of the time in my B2B work, these are the managers of end-users the product is servicing. In my experience - Amplitude is the best tool I've used to uncover these hidden user segments. The data derived from the tool helps shape product offering, pricing and G2M for this underserved segment - ultimately extending product's monetisation strategy.

From blog, startup landing pages to Fortune 500 organisations - the simplicity and versatility of Google Analytics has proven to me many times, why in the ecosystem of multiple challenger solutions it still remains the base layer of analytics and a standard part of my toolkit.

HotJar is another tool I've used since the beginning of my product career, their solutions have evolved and their organization is (like Balsamiq) a prime example of product-led-growth. HotJar falls into my standard toolkit.

I've been using Jira since the beginning of my career in IT and am an admin for a 2400 employees instance. It is a complicated tool that when used correctly and with clarity can be extremely powerful in conceptualising, planning and developing digital solutions.

During my work with greenfield startups in the B2C space I found that with a great user experience, versatile functionalities, integrations and whitelisting reputation Mailchimp is the perfect mailing solution for products building their first audience. The downside is that, once the product and its audience start growing, Mailchimp's steep pricing curb becomes a friction and at some point a need for replacement comes up.

Feature switching and gathering data from multiple sources into a single pool, while at the same time having a pleasant user experience is what always brought me back to Mixpanel. Depending on the complexity of the product and the breath of analytics I need to capture (from user behaviour to go-to-market) Mixpanel is a standard part of my repertoire. Their community, support staff, reports and seminars are also what keeps me coming back and reusing this tool.

When it comes to user metrics, and in order not to bother developers - I did an SQL course so that I can freely write queries to the db in order to obtain system and user behaviour data, which then informs my product decision-making.

From publishing webpages, offerings, planning campaigns and roadmaps - to writing articles and diaries, managing my life and collaborating on projects - you can say I am a very heavy Notion user and a strong brand advocate.

When it comes to feature switching and isolating effects variations of developed functionalities have on engagement, the data derived from Optimizely has been very useful to me in establishing relative feature preferences per customer segment. The only downside to the tool I've experienced, is that in its layout and user experience it is more suitable towards e-commerce B2C style of products which in terms of others - leaves a gap.

My work as Head of Product naturally uncovers opportunities interesting to Sales to pursue in terms of new or expansion revenue, upsell and spin-off potential. On the other hand, Sales, being in their field, is a useful source for market insights. So, Pipedrive is a place that marries both of these information streams and is my go-to tool for partnering with Sales.

I am an editor for a blog of a local Product Community so all articles are managed in WP. For my side project, where I write articles, I use WP and am happy to connect it with tools like HotJar or Ahrefs in order to power up my blogging experience.