Lena Sesardic

Etsy Store Owner & Artist

Baddie Women's Circle

A bi-weekly virtual circle for the women who are letting go of a life, relationship, career or version of themselves that “makes sense” on paper for something that’s unorthodox but feels fully aligned.

Founder & Facilitator

The Authentic Advantage

AI & ChatGPT Business Coach

Tulum Girlies Group 👯‍♀️

Founder, Community Manager & In-Person Events Host

TikTok

I create funny & educational TikTok videos about the "casual" side of LinkedIn (handle: @contently_lena.)

My TikTok wins:
- Went from 0 to 100k likes and 13k followers in 14 days
- 15M+ views to date on TikTok
-50+ viral videos
-2000+ downloads of my free LinkedIn Profile Scorecard in 2 months from TikTok
- Collaboration with LinkedIn Marketing Partner, Transmission agency


Want me to create an engaging TikTok video for your brand? Email me at hello[at]lenasesardic[dot]com. 💌

Content Creator & Influencer

GrowthMentor

I'm a GrowthMentor helping product managers, marketers & founders with product management, content marketing, LinkedIn marketing, customer discovery & idea validation.

𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗺𝘆 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵𝗠𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗲 & 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗜 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗳𝘂𝗹. 💜

Growth Mentor

Medium

I contribute my writing on lenasesardic.com to two Medium publications:

Start it Up - the largest Medium publication in the world
Product Coalition - the largest Medium publication for product management

I'm also part of the Medium Partner Program.

Contributing Writer

Aviso Wealth

Managing the new NEI Investments website to make sure all content is up-to-date, on brand, and driving key metrics.

Using my PM mindset to run experiments and find new growth opportunities for the new website.

Senior Content Publisher

Product Owner

Transparent Media Studio

Product management can be a little nebulous if you've never been a PM before. Which is why tech companies hire a PM veteran like me to help them write about the craft in a credible way that converts leads to clients.

With 4+ years experience in the industry, I know the PM principles & concepts like the back of my hand and am familiar with the key thought leaders and schools of thought in the space.

You can hire me to do the following:

◆ SEO-optimized blog posts
◆ Newsletters
◆ Emails
◆ Ebooks
◆ Social media posts
◆ White papers

I also offer ghostwriting services for executives in the PM space.

If you want to work with me, send me an email at hello@lenasesardic.com 💌

--

My clients have included companies like Userpilot.com and Arc.dev. You can check out my writing samples attached here.

Freelance Writer / Ghostwriter

-Mentored/advised venture teams in idea validation, customer discovery and mindset.
-Mentored/advised aspiring product managers in how to break into product management.
-Collaborated with individuals & teams on various startup-related projects or side projects.

Mentor, Advisor & Collaborator

Be your unapologetic self & create epic LinkedIn content that converts 😈 //They call me "the LinkedIn Therapist"

Ready to build your Second Brain? 🧠

The Second Brain Project is a 4-week live cohort to help coaches, creatives, and business owners build a high-functioning network of GPTs that automate their workflows, multiply their time & use AI the way it was meant to be used: as your second brain.

By the end of the 4 weeks, you’ll walk away with:
✅ 5–15 GPTs that think like you
✅ A plug-and-play GPT Playground to use instantly
✅ Systems that actually run without your brain being the bottleneck
✅ Confidence to keep building GPTs that save time, increase capacity, and sound just like you


📌 WHAT'S INCLUDED:

- 4 x live weekly trainings (with replays)
- GPT Builder Pro (your personal GPT-building assistant)
- Playground of plug-and-play GPTs (e.g. Sales Call Decoder, Content Sculptor)
- My 6-Step GPT Your Brain Method
- Second Brain Architecture Template (Google Sheet + Notion)
- Bonus GPT Naming Guide

⏰ FAST PASS BONUS:
If you sign up within 48 hours (by Thursday at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 7pm CEST), you’ll also get:

🔓 Early Access to the GPT Library (April 28)
📞 Bonus Live Q&A Call with Me (May 6)


You're already paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus, but you're using 5% of what it's actually capable of.

This isn’t just about ChatGPT. This is about you building a real system that:

- Thinks like you
- Speaks in your voice
- Handles work you don’t want to do

A system that scales your business & gives you your brain back.

Join The Second Brain Project: https://natural-temple-f15.notion.site/The-Second-Brain-Project-1d9921c15bdc80d09cb8ef9e0607f1fa?pvs=4

Founder & LinkedIn "Baddie" Business Coach 😈

I can help you confidently sell your 4- or 5- figure offers on LinkedIn and get high-calibre clients so you can generate more revenue for your biz, raise your prices and work less!

Emilia Korczynska

Passionate about SaaS product growth, and both the pre-sign up and post-sign up marketing. Talk to me about improving your acquisition, activation and retention strategy. 


Head Of Marketing

Doing all it takes to get more Product People over the code barrier with our code-free Product Adoption, Marketing & Experimentation Platform:  
Designing, developing and implementing a marketing strategy that ensures higher visibility 
Leading our stellar content team 
Implementing and driving a paid ads strategy to diversify customer acquisition. 
Driving funnel growth
Implementing an email marketing strategy 
Identifing and testing new acquisition channels
Overseeing, training, and coaching team members

It’s been exactly 3 months since we launched our first ever ABM campaign, and the results are in: over $650,000 in pipeline in 90 days, with a nice $12 in pipeline per $ spend. If you‘re considering getting into ABM next year - I have a few learnings to share: 

1) It’s brutal. There are no playbooks. Most ABM resources are very high level (‘strategic’) - there’s a painful lack of tactical resources on how to set the campaigns up, from whom to target and which channels to choose, how to set up the campaigns stages and account scoring, how to pick the right goals and metrics (so you can evaluate how the campaigns are doing and if you are on the right track), set the right budgets, and how to monitor the results. There are to benchmarks to measure against (ad CTR/CPM benchmarks are a vague leading metrics, and are so industry-specific you’ll be comparing apples to oranges.) We had to come up with nearly everything ourselves. One thing that helped us at the beginning was Kyle Poyar’s article “Your guide to GTM metrics 2.0” featuring “ABX benchmarks” (link in the comments). We used them (and tweaked) to set up our stages, benchmarks of how many accounts we’re expecting to move from one stage to another, and then - by combining that with our historical qualification rates, close rates and expected ACV - we got our revenue goals per 1000 accounts. Then working out was from the top-down revenue goals - that gave us an idea how many accounts we need to target. And then - based on the CPMs for the target personas in those accounts - we are able to come up with a budget. That’s theory, of course - and we’re already seeing how ‘real data’ diverges from the benchmarks, esp. for some stages/conversion points. We may need to adjust our forecasts based on real data to make them more realistic. But you need start somewhere. 

2) Don’t start if you don’t have extremely strong MarketingOps (ideally - a dedicated MOps person). So far we’ve spent 80% on the campaign ops, and 20% on the creatives. SADLY. Even with ABM tools - there’s a ton of setup you need to do.  

3) You need some tech stack to score your accounts, but you don’t need these expensive “ABM tools”. After evaluating tons of ABM tools (with platform fees of $30k - $160k per annum 🤯) we realised we don’t want to use display as our main channel for reaching target accounts. We used only ZenABM (from $59 - for de-anonymizing LinkedIn ad engagements, getting intent based on those engagments, account scoring --> and pushing it all to the CRM + providing revenue attribution) + Hubspot Marketing (~$1700 in our case - for audience building and management).

TBC - I hit the character limit 😉

VP of Marketing @Userpilot. Author @ Product Rantz.

My husband has this conspiracy theory around enterprise software products that he calls “Salesforcification” - most of the API stuff flies right over my head, but TL;DR - that some companies make their products unnecessarily complicated so they can justify high prices. I feel the same way about a lot of the content published by consultants here - that sometimes they wrap things up in a way that makes the task at hand look so complicated and difficult, that is leaves the prospect with no doubt that they wouldn’t be able to handle it alone. I don’t know if it’s an intentional tactic, or a result of going ‘too deep’ into the rabbit hole. But a word of caution here: I’ve seen an inverse correlation between ‘cognitive load’ of the message and user engagement with paid social. If something sounds too difficult to comprehend at a glance (and a glance is all you get with paid social) - people don’t spend their precious time trying to figure out what you mean when mindlessly scrolling LinkedIn. Most of them aren’t in the market, and even those that are - aren’t in the ‘problem solving’ mode (like users landing on your website from cold search ads = actively searching for specific solutions). 

So to all agencies, consultants, SaaS companies launching Thought Leader Ads (as well as image ad) - keep it simple. Think of the words you’re using - can they be ‘dumbed down’ to reduce cognitive load? E.g. can you replace “without engineering dependencies” with “no code”?

"Almost everything I worked on a year ago is now irrelevant."  

I met up with an old friend yesterday, who happens to be working on one of the largest tech companies' proprietary Large Language Model - and we had an interesting conversation on where LLMs are going and if/when agents will replace certain roles.

The question is: what jobs? And maybe in the nearest future employers will not be hiring for specific jobs at all anymore - but will be hire the person that can bring most leverage with AI (as per Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️'s post I read a couple of days ago - featured below - thanks for the food for thought!) 

It will be still hard to replace that systems thinking (some are trying, though) - and a whole lot of other intrinsically "human" skills: 

Taste & judgment - Knowing what shouldn’t be built or said.
Emotional intelligence - Reading the room, sensing tension, building trust.
Moral reasoning - Deciding what’s responsible, not just what’s possible.
Creative synthesis - Connecting unrelated dots into something new.
Leadership under uncertainty - Making decisions without perfect data.
Conflict resolution - Navigating ego, politics, and misalignment.
Cultural intuition - Understanding context, nuance, and subtext.
Relationship-building - Long-term trust over transactional output.

What about Product Management? Will it turn into "Agent Management"? 🤔 👇

Hey folks, I met up with an old friend yesterday, who happens to be working on one of the largest tech companies' proprietary Large Language Model - a

Open article: From Product Manager to Agent Manager? 🤔 by Emilia Korczynska • 3 min read

From Product Manager to Agent Manager? 🤔

Ironically, we're too busy to stop being so busy. “If we stopped the clock and didn’t have to generate pipeline, and didn’t have any time pressure, and you had all the engineering resources you need - how would your team change after we restarted the clock?” - I was asked today - and it’s a subversive question that I’ve been also thinking about. My team is really lean, but it’s been on everyone’s mind of course - that the only reason why a lot of tasks, and a lot of jobs, haven’t been automated out by e.g. Claude code yet is that we…are too busy to implement it properly. And we’re too busy because we can’t afford (or so it seems - perhaps very wrongly) to “stop the clock”. 

Then there is the security pushback, especially in enterprises. Pushback that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are surely going to capitalise on - and likewise, SOC2 certified agencies. 

And then there’s the completely natural resistance to change. Things are tedious, but they are familiar and comfortable. Revamping the process completely requires learning completely new ways of working, redefining processes and roles. 

And then there are the job security concerns. Some people may be (consciously or unconsciously) pushing back to preserve their jobs. 

If it involves “dumpster-diving” content production or mindless number crunching or basic research or building marketing collateral with obsolete solutions and technologies - your concerns about your job are very, very real. 

The reason why we haven’t automated a lot of these jobs yet is not that that the technology isn’t ready - we aren’t ready.

Aazar Ali Shad shad recently wrote something here that is so *against* conventional wisdom that it stopped me in my tracks: 

What if being “on brand” is actually hurting you? 

This goes against everything we’ve been told in “marketing best practices” and by “advertising gurus” - I remember being told off by a consultant that our ads weren’t consistent enough = weren't contributing to “brand recall”. 

But think about most Enterprise brands you know. What is their “brand identity”? Vague, tall claims written in Open Sans on a dark gradient background? 

“Disrupt the future of AI with Acme Inc”. 

Stock photos of smiley AI-generated ladies dressed in casual smart in an office environment.

We scroll past those on social media without even registering their existence. 

So when my team did a “Competitor check” on LinkedIn’s Ads Library… I was like…“let’s not”. 

Remember: the fact that your competitor is 10x bigger doesn’t mean that whatever they are doing works 10x better. 

You don’t know their results. 

In fact - larger companies have more marketing dollars to waste - so they tend to be more forgiving of underperforming campaigns. 

AKA: publishing boring, bland, corporate pulp that can’t possibly move anyone’s finger, let alone the needle. 

Because “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” (Btw. It never fails to amaze me how far one can be carried by the sheer power of the established brand.) 

What Gartner said about you in their latest report? 

Great. I couldn’t care less. 

Remember that Linkedin is paid *social*. You pay to play, but you play on social media - and it only recently dawned on me…

…or actually it only dawned on me when we published this vide, and it got 1.1% CTR - the median CTR benchmark for SaaS* for Linkedin video ads is 0.24% CTR 

Why did it work? 

It was real. It was personal. It tapped into the TikTok trend “Come to work with me as XYZ”. It was pattern-interrupting. 

What if we just..used content that looks like it was posted by some? A real photo, a real selfie? 

Meanwhile: most of “on-brand” ads can’t do that. 

We may be winning brand recall. 

But what are we losing?

“Not on *my* wifi. Not on any device that connects to my wifi”. 

It was made very clear to me that I'm not getting the wifi in the event of divorce, so guess what - I’m still posting this manually, while all my friends’ OpenClaw agents are doing their work while they sip pinacoladas on a beach. Or getting their passwords changed and API keys stolen. Oh well. TL;DR - if you stepped away from the Internet for a couple of weeks, you probably missed the news that autonomous AI agents have launched their own social network, language, and religion (well, this was a prompt-prank, but sent strong cues of a looming AI apocalypse). 

The crux (or perhaps Claw) of the issue: OpenClaw’s architecture poses serious security threats. It's open-source, relies on community-contributed “skills” (plugins) for functionality. And it requires broad permissions on the host system.
 
Recent analyses by cybersecurity experts have highlighted multiple risk factors - from unvetted plugin code and prompt injection attacks, to misconfigured deployments exposing sensitive data.
  
Security researchers have discovered hundreds of malicious skills on ClawHub (OpenClaw's skill repository). Out of the 2,857 skills audited, they found 341 malicious skills (≈12%) across multiple campaigns. One large campaign (“ClawHavoc”) involved 335 skills that tricked users into installing a MacOS infostealer (Atomic Stealer) via fake prerequisites.
 
Attackers cloned popular tool names (e.g. “solana-wallet-tracker” or YouTube utilities), then embedded malicious install scripts in the skill instructions. Upon installation, these trojanized skills would fetch second-stage malware to steal API keys, credentials, crypto wallet secrets, and other sensitive data.
 
Notably, one of the top-downloaded skills on ClawHub was found to be part of such a malware campaign. A “Twitter integration” skill  instructed the agent to install a dependency via links that actually delivered a staged payload: an obfuscated shell command that downloaded a binary infostealer (a macOS trojan). Once executed, it raided the host for valuable data - browser sessions, saved logins, API tokens, SSH keys, cloud credentials - essentially anything the agent or user could access. 

These risks would naturally not be compatible with your SOC2 - particularly for enterprise and B2B environments (e.g. if OpenClaw is used for marketing or analytics on platforms handling customer data), which demand strict data governance, auditability, and compliance.

How can your organization have the (AI agent) cake and eat it? 

Read more to find out 👇

Hey folks, Two weeks is an eternity in tech - and since we last touched base, apparently AI agents have spawned their own social network, language and

Open article: ⛔ Strictly NOT for humans 🦞 - 🤖 Agentic security risks & how to address them  by Emilia Korczynska • 4 min read

⛔ Strictly NOT for humans 🦞 - 🤖 Agentic security risks & how to address them

We got hung up on listicles lately, but the “Self-promotional listicles” Google “penalty” has far more reaching implications - since producing content has become so much easier (if your uber driver is telling you about their Claude Code skills, it’s time to pause & reflect) - the number of pages to be indexed has ballooned - and more indexed pages means more storage space, more computing power to analyze, classify, and monitor them. This leads to increased operational costs (even if efficiency was improving). But not necessarily a better index. So there’s no upside either for Google or Search users to index all those pages. 

The question is - which ones should be prioritized. 

And here it gets tricky - in the past, there was a quite a big spread in page quality and signals between different pages. AI tool have become so much better that AI-produced content needn’t necessarily be of obviously worse quality at a glance. But if there’s little actual information gain - and everyone is just regurgitating the SERP with AI and plugging themselves in - Google needs to apply site-wide quality scores to judge which of the pages to index and which not. 

A 2024 Google exploit by Mark Williams-Cook Willams-Cook discovered a "site_quality" metric. The score determined at least whether your site would be eligible for showing in different SERP features. It’s a site wide weighted blend of multiple signals - from brand searches, through click probability, to topical focus & consistency (aka “domain relevance” - how topically aligned a domain is with a specific subject area) 

The crawl budget is already getting more limited (to 2 MB) and content freshness seems to play a stronger role (with pages not crawled in > 130 days more likely to be deindexed) 

And here’s the crux of the issue: most of us used the same SEO/organic traffic growth playbook for years: 

- Cover all the “BOFU” keywords - any KW indicating consideration, product awareness, high buying search intent “{{competitor}} alternatives”
- Cover all the KWs related to your product and use cases 
- Expand up-funnel to MOFU and TOFU keywords, targeting ones with higher SV first, plugging your product into more and more “far-fetched context” - whatever was vaguely relevant to your target audience. 

Now Google seems to be cracking down on that. It seems to be scoring your site first to evaluate whether you have the “license” to cover a specific topic in your content. 

But how is this license earned exactly? And won’t search become more monopolised by large brands? 

Organic traffic used to be this egalitarian space, this unlimited, renewable resource - now it’s gonna resemble performance marketing more and more, with limited slots, occupied by stronger brands.

I looked at the effective cost per click to landing page*  of our TLAs yesterday - and it was 5 x LOWER than that of Single Image Ads 🤯 (*NOT the CTR - look at the "Clicks to landing page" in the "Engagement" column view, and divide it by the number of impressions!) 

Should we replace our image ads with *only* TLAs though? 🤔

Not so fast...

Running ABM programs on Linkedin is like playing swings & roundabouts - I will be sharing my experience running them for the past 2 years at the meetup in London on Tuesday - alongside such ABM legends as Casper Emil Sciuto Rouchmann, Katya Tarapovskaia and Joana Petrova! 

Grab the last remaining seats from the link below! 👇

📅 Feb 24 | 6:30 PM | Shoreditch, London

taplio

The Battle

Lena Sesardic

Emilia Korczynska

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreEmilia Korczynska's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Lena Sesardic

Emilia Korczynska

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Emilia Korczynska's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreEmilia Korczynska's LinkedIn Performance