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July 27, 2020
How chasing his passion changed Bartosz Kostrzewski’s career path for the better
Bartosz Kostrzewski is someone who doesn’t like to sit still. From his start as an intern to his most recent roles this has been a defining fact and strong motivator for him.
Initially, he had a job in Market Intelligence. A job he was good at and was comfortable doing. And for him, that became a problem.
“70% of questions that came to me I could answer easily. It was great, but it wasn’t really exciting for me anymore. I'm this type of person that likes uncharted territories,” he explains.
He initially spent three years in the Central and Eastern Europe market, sourcing knowledge that would help colleagues in sales and marketing perform better. However, he was looking for more.
Bartosz asked his manager for more responsibility. “I said to her: after three years in my role, I would like to move on, do more, have more complex things to do.”
The Head of Marketing Excellence, Emil Adigyozalov, noticed him working with End User roles and saw an opportunity for Bartosz to fulfill that desire – and add more value to the team. From there it was decided: a stretch assignment would be his next move, with Emil as his manager."
The stretch assignment put Bartosz in contact with colleagues around world, finding solutions to their problems. One running theme was a lack of consistency across roles in different markets.
Sensing an opportunity to clarify things, Bartosz used his research and intelligence background to help standardize the ways of working within the role, so that no matter what region, all End User Marketeers knew what was expected from their role, and were enabled to take their marketing to the next level.
Aside from the stretch assignment that gave him the chance to experience this role, Bartosz credits his previous managers as helping him grow within the company. “There was big trust put in me to work in a non-standard way, particularly in the beginning – as an intern I had the possibility to work fully remotely from a foreign country!”
The stretch assignment unlocked the next stage in his career path. “In life you have a rational frame, but experience makes you feel certain things. It’s one thing to have a rational frame and a completely different thing to actually experience it! Life experience is like a painting; the rational thought is the frame and the actual experience is the paint!”
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