Leila Yelemessova

Leila YelemessovaJul 16, 2026

At Personio, we had a problem hiding in plain sight. People signed up for our trial, poked around, and went silent. Meanwhile our sales team spent hours manually chasing small accounts the product should have converted on its own, and Customer Success teams was at capacity manually onboarding new customers. I pitched a different path: make the product itself the growth engine. Wrote the PLG plan, restructured the teams, and ran the first experiments. Here's what came out of it: → Import (key action during activation) fail rate dropped from 48% to 10% → Import time went from 5 days to minutes → Companies completing the new setup showed 30% higher monthly active usage → We went from zero setup data to a full-funnel view of activation → Self-serve checkout went live, opening revenue without sales dependency The biggest lesson wasn't any single fix. It was this: the answers were already in our funnel. We just had to look at where users actually got stuck, instead of guessing or copying what worked elsewhere. Now I do this work fractionally for B2B SaaS companies that have product-market fit but still carry every deal on the backs of their sales team. If your trial signups go quiet and you don't know why, that silence is data. Start there.

Leila YelemessovaJun 10, 2026

Today I want to show you Alma — a reflection app designed for mothers going through identity transformation after having a child. Most products in the motherhood space focus on the baby and routines. Very little focuses on the woman herself. Especially high-achieving women who suddenly find themselves disconnected from their own thoughts, ambitions, identity, and inner life after becoming mothers. I built Alma to create space for that experience. The app combines guided reflection questions, journaling, and personalized insights to help mothers reconnect with themselves. Not by “getting back” to who they were before, but by understanding who they are becoming now. This was built during nap times, evenings, and every small window of time I could find. If you know mothers who may resonate with this, I’d deeply appreciate you sharing Alma with them. Link in the comments #product #app #womenintech #shebuilds #motherhoodapp #appformoms #matrescence

Leila YelemessovaJul 23, 2026

After building a product-led growth motion inside a fast-growing unicorn through its hypergrowth years, and building an entire product function from scratch as the sole PM through a company's early stage to acquisition, I noticed something. Most companies that need this work are Seed to Series A. They have paying customers and real traction, but growth still runs through sales because nobody senior owns the product side of the funnel. So now I work with a small number of companies at a time. Embedded enough to actually know the product and the team, not parachuting in with a slide deck. And I say no more than I say yes. If a company isn't post-PMF, or isn't suited to actually run a PLG motion, I'm not the right fit yet, and I'll tell them that. This is one of the most important parts when you go independent: clearly knowing which problems are actually yours to solve.