About

It started with copywriting, at sixteen.

Teams bring me in when the CRM stack is already important enough to hurt, but not clean enough to scale. I sit close to the decisions: roadmap, lifecycle logic, measurement, vendor choices, governance, and the few technical fixes where senior hands matter.

I am not another campaign producer. I make sure the system has a calm senior owner: someone who can read customer behavior, go deep into the technical layer, and keep improving the operating model until it serves the business.

Oleksandr Kyryllov — portrait
Amsterdam, 2024.

In MarTech

12+ yrs

Fintech, retail, healthtech, edtech

Writing copy

20 yrs

Started at 16. Never stopped.

Largest scope

65M + 250K

Students at StuDocu (B2C) · merchants at Uber Eats (B2B)

The full story

Three countries. One line.

Twelve years of CRM systems — built in Ukraine, ruptured by the war, rebuilt across Europe. Tap any milestone to go deeper.

Ukraine2006 — 2022

Ten years building CRM and lifecycle from the ground up — from copywriter to MarTech leader, across some of the largest companies in the country.

2006–13
2013–16
2016–18
2018–19
2019–20
2020–22
24 Feb 2022

On 24 February 2022 the war took our home, our work, and the entire plan — in a single morning. We had to find somewhere safe to start over.

Netherlands2022 — 2026

Rebuilding a senior career in European tech — edtech, then Uber Eats, then Central Operations.

mid-2022

We landed in Amsterdam — two yellow suitcases, a twelve-month visa, and tourist-level English. The long rebuild began.

2022–23
2023–24

Two weeks in the Austrian mountains. First real laugh in a year. Got engaged, started a family. Started looking for the kind of company I could show up for now.

2024–25
2024–25

The year I rebuilt how I work — around life, not the other way around.

2025
2026

I spent three months looking for a role that could keep our Dutch visa intact and still give me enough space to rest and recover. The honest answer was uncomfortable: I did not need another full-time container right away. I needed a model where my senior judgment could stay useful without recreating the same stress.

Vietnam2026 →

A deliberately quieter model: no more than three retainers at a time, async by default, senior hands only.

2026 →

Behind the work

Where the range comes from.

Long before any of this was a job, I was the kid who spent a summer learning how to compress files — obsessed with fitting the most into the least. That instinct — for the cleanest, most efficient version of anything — never left. I’m still doing it now, with revenue systems instead of disk space.

At sixteen I started writing copy for whoever would pay me — selling ideas through words. The question that kept pulling me deeper was always the same: why do some words work and others don’t? It led to cognitive psychology, then analytics, then the systems underneath — data, CRM, automation. The mix it left behind is exactly what MarTech turned out to be.

Curiosity never let me pick one lane. It turned into something rarer instead — the range to read behavior, understand the economics, build the technical layer, and improve the operating model, in the same loop.

I treat every system as a game with rules. The work I enjoy most is studying those rules, finding the gaps in their logic, and scaling the version that wins — cleanly, by the rules. I studied business economics for the same reason: I wanted to understand how companies actually work before trying to move their numbers.

The combination

A combination rarer than it should be.

Most operators do one thing well — a strategist, or an analyst, or a builder. My leverage is that all the layers sit in one head, so the strategy already knows what the data and the technology can actually do. In conventional terms: an independent CRM and lifecycle consultant who still builds with his own hands.

Systems & strategy

RevOps and CRM systems design · lifecycle strategy end to end · omnichannel orchestration · P&L-focused KPI modeling.

Data, experimentation & AI

SQL and CRM data models · funnel and cohort analytics · LTV and incrementality · rigorous experiment design · applied LLMs for personalization.

Platforms & tooling

Salesforce Marketing Cloud · Braze-class platforms · Segment · Corezoid · APIs and webhooks · AMPscript and the technical CRM layer.

Ways of working

Cross-functional leadership · complexity reduction · senior IC ownership · clear technical writing that makes decisions legible.

“Oleks combines deep CRM systems expertise with a very pragmatic, business-first mindset — a rare and very valuable combination at our scale.”

Ricardo Zertuche · Director of Marketing Technology across Uber

How I operate

Less noise. More meaningful impact on revenue.

I optimize the system, not the send.

Sending one more email rarely moves a real metric. Restructuring the lifecycle architecture under it usually does.

I read humans, not segments.

Behind every cohort is a person who didn’t sleep last night, just got a promotion, or is about to churn. The data shows me where to look; the writer in me figures out what to say.

I don’t romanticize complexity.

If your stack has fourteen tools, my first instinct is to ask which four we can switch off. The best architecture is the one you almost can’t see, because it just works.

I show the thinking, not just the result.

I would rather walk you through how I reached a recommendation than hand you a polished conclusion to trust on faith. The reasoning is the part you can challenge, reuse, and check against your own context — and a number with its working shown beats a confident story every time.

I write the way I think — briefly, in that order.

Every recommendation I send follows the same spine: what I propose, why it matters to the P&L, the backstory if you want it, and the one decision I need from you. No fifteen-slide warm-ups. Senior judgment is usually sharper in writing, and respecting your attention is part of the job.

I give your team the sandbox I was handed.

Early on, a bank executive gave me a hard problem and one instruction: “Here’s your sandbox — make something happen.” That trust is the reason any of the rest exists. So I work with your team the same way: clear the path, hand over real ownership, and stay out of the way of people who can ship.

One witness, on the record

Skilled at tackling complex, cross-functional challenges — and turning them into practical, automated solutions. Work that consistently raises the bar for our team.

Kylee Smailes

Kylee Smailes

EMEA CRM Lead · Uber · my manager

Verify on LinkedIn

More from people I’ve worked with →

The person behind it

That is the work. This is the person.

I’m Ukrainian, born in a small industrial town on the Dnipro — the kind of place you grow up wanting to build a way out of. I built mine with words, one freelance text at a time.

I don’t treat resilience as a slogan; I’ve had to practice it.

In 2022 the war took the home, the jobs, and the plan in a single morning. We rebuilt from two suitcases and a twelve-month visa. Today I’m choosing the next chapter deliberately, not reactively.

What I will not negotiate

Fairness and freedom.

They’re the two things that still make me genuinely angry when they’re missing — and the two I work hardest to protect, at work and outside it.

It’s why the wartime work mattered to me as much as any client. The same lifecycle systems I had spent a decade building for paying customers, re-pointed at displaced Ukrainians who needed medical help in their own language — 8,710 free consultations, and an AI-powered Telegram study bot I built to keep Ukrainian schoolchildren learning through the disruption of the war. Less noise, more meaningful impact isn’t a tagline. It’s the part of this profession I find most worth doing.

How I work now

You get the senior layer close to your decisions without buying my entire calendar. I get to stay useful while protecting the operating conditions I need right now.

And if you are reading this with a serious long-term role in mind, I am not closed to that. Before long, my family and I will likely return to one of the countries where we want to build our future. If you can offer the kind of conditions I need now — meaningful ownership, trust, a sane operating rhythm, and work worth caring about — let’s talk.

Off the clock

Things that probably matter to you, but not enough to put in a CV.

  • ·Ukrainian by birth, European by work. A husband and a father. Native Ukrainian speaker, fluent in English, basic Dutch.
  • ·Ukraine is still the emotional center of the story. Europe is where most of the work, ambition, and the next long-term chapter still point.
  • ·For now, Vietnam is the operating base: quieter days, stricter boundaries, and a narrow European-hours window designed to protect the quality of my thinking.
  • ·I work async-first across European hours because senior judgment is usually sharper in writing, with fewer meetings and clearer decisions.
  • ·Outside work: family, books, long walks, science fiction, economics, music, and small AI tools I build because curiosity needs a workshop.
  • ·I would rather sound like a person than a brand — my decks still tend to end with a thank-you and a small joke. Warmth isn’t unprofessional.

The model, six years in

What do years two through six of keeping me actually look like?

DOC.UA — one of Ukraine’s largest healthtech platforms — has kept me on retainer since 2020. It’s the clearest proof this model isn’t a pitch: it survived a continent move and a war, and it’s still how I work today.

The intense start

I’d co-owned apteka24 and run it as a manager — the whole business, not a function. And I found out what I actually wanted: not to oversee the work, but to do it. That choice is why I’m fractional and hands-on today, and not a CMO somewhere.

So I joined DOC.UA to rebuild lifecycle and CRM from the operating rhythm up: two months on-site in Kyiv (I was living in Dnipro) to audit and stand up the team, then four months remote from Asia — with a full-time move to Kyiv to follow.

I built the messaging stack by hand: Corezoid wired to SMS gateways.

The years since

The full-time move never came. In early 2022 the war took the plan — the team, the office, the city.

The work pivoted to getting displaced Ukrainians free medical care, and then settled into what it’s been ever since: low-touch, high-trust advisory — the judgment calls and the roadmap pressure-tests.

Exactly the quiet retainer this model promises.

Still active. Relationship verified Q2 2026 · references available before any retainer starts.

Want to talk?

30 minutes, video, no agenda template. If we’re a fit, we’ll know on the call.

Max three clients · €2,900 Diagnostic · retainers from €2,500/mo — see the model →