Before Lada Leitsius had a C-suite title, her job was to decide what deserved a reader’s attention. The work was editorial: editing a food publication in 2016, reporting as a freelancer, then moving through communication strategy and brand consulting. The industries and titles would change. The central problem would not. Somebody has to look at a heap of information, find the consequential part, and give it a shape another person can understand.
Today the heap is unusually technical. Leitsius is Chief Marketing Officer at StartupSoft, a software engineering company whose teams work across Toronto, San Francisco, Krakow, Lviv, and Ternopil. Its vocabulary includes artificial intelligence, data engineering, custom software, cloud systems, and remote teams. For buyers, those phrases can blur into a thick fog of competence. A marketer’s task is to make the distinctions visible without sanding away the truth.
Leitsius arrived at that problem by way of journalism, a useful apprenticeship for anyone paid to make complexity legible. Her bachelor’s degree, earned at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv between 2014 and 2018, was in communication, journalism, and related programs. While still studying, she served as editor in chief of Foods.uzvar.info. In 2017, she worked as a freelance journalist at Radio Maximum and in brand and communication strategy. The sequence matters. She learned how to handle material before she learned how to market it.
A career built by widening the frame
The reporter in the marketing department
Journalism trains a few habits that survive almost any change of business card. Ask a question whose answer might surprise you. Separate a lively detail from a useful one. Be suspicious of sentences that make the subject sound impressive while leaving the reader none the wiser. Marketing often invites the opposite temptations, especially in technology, where one fashionable abbreviation can reproduce faster than a meeting invite.
Leitsius publicly describes her approach as “value-driven marketing,” focused on strategies that genuinely connect with people. It is a compact choice of words. Value has to exist for somebody, and connection requires knowing who that somebody is. The phrase places the audience before the campaign machinery. For a former journalist, that order feels familiar: begin with the person on the other side of the page.
The résumé’s through-line is editorial judgment: what belongs, what matters, and what the audience needs next.
In January 2019, Leitsius began consulting independently on brand awareness and digital marketing. By November of that year she was at Qubstudio, the Lviv-born digital product design and branding agency. Over the next three and a half years, her remit grew to include Marketing Team Lead and Creative Director. Agency life widened the range of subjects she had to comprehend, then explain. A product could be financial, educational, logistical, or something that sat stubbornly between categories. The audience still expected a coherent story.
One award night, two radically different products
The most visible evidence of that range arrived in 2022. Qubstudio received two Red Dot distinctions for projects that would make a strange pair on a conventional mood board. One was ila Bank, a mobile-only banking app serving the Middle East and North Africa. Leitsius was credited as Creative Director of the Product Film. The other was 44GROUP, a Ukrainian furniture company organized around an adaptable premise: one item, 44 possible configurations. On that corporate design project, she was credited as Creative Director of PR.
The ceremony took place in Berlin on October 28. Photographs show Leitsius onstage beside Qubstudio co-founder Victor Fedyuk and Red Dot representatives, the award held between the group. The visual is formal; the underlying work was collaborative. The 44GROUP credit list spans brand design, communications, art direction, project management, and Leitsius’s PR direction. The ila Bank list stretches across product design, motion, client partnership, copywriting, and creative direction for the film. Awards compress a team’s labor into a tidy object. The credits restore the crowded room behind it.
44GROUP received Red Dot: Best of the Best for corporate design. Its subject was a manufacturer of reusable and recyclable furniture for offices, schools, and homes. The communication challenge was unusually tactile: make adaptability easy to grasp and responsible consumption desirable without burying either idea under piety. ila Bank posed a different challenge. A banking app has to feel simple while carrying the gravity of money. Its product film had to turn an interface, a sequence of taps, and a promise of convenience into a watchable argument.
Those projects reveal the breadth of creative direction. The role is frequently mistaken for the final flourish, as if a creative director enters late to select a typeface and improve the lighting. Here, Leitsius’s credits sit in PR and film, two forms governed by sequence. What should the audience encounter first? Which idea earns the close-up? What can be left unsaid? These are editor’s questions wearing sharper clothes.
From a project’s story to a company’s story
In April 2023, Leitsius completed the University of London’s Fundamentals of Marketing Strategy course through Coursera. Two months later, she moved to StartupSoft as Chief Marketing Officer. The chronology suggests a clean hinge: formal strategy work in spring, executive responsibility in summer. Her earlier roles had asked her to bring coherence to campaigns and products. The new role enlarged the object. Now the brand was an entire company.
StartupSoft began in 2016 with brothers Andrew and Alex Vasylyk and a team of eight in Ternopil. The company describes its specialty as building remote engineering teams that fit a client technically and culturally. By its current account, it has worked with more than 100 clients and grown to 170 specialists. It reports a 90 percent employee retention rate and says referrals from employees and former colleagues produce 75 percent of hires.
StartupSoft’s public numbers describe a relationship business as much as an engineering one: more than 100 clients, 170 specialists, 90 percent employee retention, and three quarters of hires attributed to referrals.
Those numbers give a CMO useful raw material because they describe behavior rather than aspiration. A five-city company can say it values cohesion. Retention and referrals indicate whether people act as if that cohesion exists. A remote engineering partner can promise cultural fit. Long relationships offer the more interesting proof. Leitsius’s job sits in the conversion between the two: take operating facts and turn them into a credible public identity.
There is a geographic echo in the role. Leitsius is based in Toronto. Her university and Qubstudio years connect her to Lviv. StartupSoft’s own map joins those cities with San Francisco, Ternopil, and Krakow. This is a company whose story crosses borders before it reaches a prospect. The distance makes language more important. When colleagues cannot share a hallway, the brand has to carry more of the culture.
A distributed company has many addresses. Its marketing still needs one recognizable voice.
The discipline of making technical work human
Marketing engineering services is a peculiar assignment. The work often happens behind a screen, inside a repository, or in infrastructure a customer notices only when it fails. The output may be a recommendation system, a cloud migration, an analytics pipeline, or an application whose polish conceals the difficulty of building it. The better the engineering, the less theatrical it can appear.
That leaves the marketer with a choice. Inflate the language until every capability sounds revolutionary, or do the slower work of specificity. Leitsius’s path favors the second route. Journalism supplied the interview habit. Brand consulting supplied the discipline of positioning. Qubstudio supplied practice in coordinating words, images, films, and teams. Executive work asks her to apply all three across a business whose offerings range from custom software to AI and data services.
Her public record is refreshingly short on mythology. There is no operatic founder tale attached to her name, and no manufactured doctrine in seven steps. What exists is a sequence of increasingly broad editorial decisions. First, choose the story. Then shape the brand. Then direct the people who make the story visible. Finally, take responsibility for the narrative of the whole organization.
That may explain why the two Red Dot projects remain useful markers. They prove that a coherent creative voice can travel between categories without becoming generic. A modular furniture system and a mobile bank share almost nothing at the product level. They do share an audience that wants to understand, quickly, why the thing exists. The creative challenge begins there.
Leitsius now works farther from the magazine page where her career began, but the old constraint still applies. Attention is finite. Clarity has to be earned. And every ambitious technology company, however distributed or technically dense, eventually confronts the editor’s small, merciless question: what is this really about?