From Junior to CMO: How to Build a Career in Marketing Mindfully

Zhanar Makhambetova, CMO Yandex Cloud

About Me

I have been serving as the CMO of Yandex Cloud in Kazakhstan and Central Asia for about five years. I have over eight years of experience promoting IT brands in international and CIS markets. I earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree with a specialization in finance in Calgary, Canada, and later obtained a Master's degree from the University of International Business in Almaty.

Education not only teaches you to think systematically but also provides networking opportunities. International experience makes you multi-faceted: you understand the culture, language, and tone of voice of different countries, which is incredibly helpful in creative professions and marketing, especially when you are trusted with the marketing strategy for a new country. Therefore, I would recommend everyone try to gain international experience—both academic and professional—if you have the opportunity.

I have worked in both international and Kazakhstani companies, including startups and quasi-government sectors, and I see the difference.

In international companies, processes are well-structured. Especially in non-managerial roles, it is super important to be an effective cog in the machine—performing the area of work entrusted to you according to established processes. Here, excellence of execution is valued.

In Kazakhstani companies, especially small ones and startups, you can advance faster if you are agile, propose many initiatives, step outside your zone of responsibility, and see the business as a whole. You can both build and support processes and start a new business line or launch a new category.

The Path from Specialist to Manager

The transition to people management is not a mandatory path for everyone: it largely depends on the person and how they prefer to build their career. There are people who are excellent deep experts in a specific niche and develop long and fruitfully without moving into people management. I had a crossroads because I enjoy both.

I realized this when I started handing over even routine tasks to colleagues before I had a formal managerial role, and the most common comment was: "You hand this over like a teacher, but in a good way"—clear instructions, understandable context, clear goals, and a clear image of the future result. People seemed to naturally seek me out for advice or support, and I understood that if this is the case, it makes sense to consciously move into people management.

The second point is more pragmatic; I took it from a speech by speaker Anna Znamenskaya: at middle and head-of-department positions, there is a lot of operational routine, and salaries grow slowly there. But when you move to top management, to the C-level, you are less operationally involved—you are responsible for strategy, people management, and resources. At the same time, your resources, compensation, and influence grow, even though you are no longer the "hands" that translate strategy into operations.

When you are a junior, you won't be immediately put in charge of managing or doing projects at the intersection of several marketing functions. But a junior aiming to become a CMO should already understand what functions make up this role.

I would advise first drawing a competency map in front of you: which functions within marketing does a CMO usually oversee—SMM, digital marketing, paid advertising, website, sometimes PR, positioning, brand, and so on.

It is important to understand at a high level what a specialist does within each function on a regular workday and what results they are accountable for. Next, choose one or two areas in which you want to specialize, the ones for which you will be paid, and start taking on projects within these areas, gaining expertise through hands-on experience. At the same time, it is important to show curiosity about adjacent departments: understand how to write a brief for a targetologist, with what package of creatives and texts they usually come. And if possible, immerse yourself in an adjacent department for at least a quarter and take on some tasks there.

In a year or two, you can build a portfolio of projects that says: "I am now a 360-degree marketer." A smart junior who thinks ahead about their career should build such a portfolio of skills in each domain of marketing.

And one more point: I work very closely with the sales team and partners because B2B marketing is primarily sales-driven—without sales consultation, a small percentage of leads become paying customers. Therefore, if you have the goal of becoming a CMO, experience in sales and partnerships can play in your favor in the future—it is a superpower.

How Not to Get Stuck in Middle Management

A middle manager is probably the most viscous part of the corporate track; you can stay there for a long time. I also read and heard about this: when you are a great middle manager and do your tasks with an A+, management doesn't even want to touch you—because if you leave or get promoted, it won't be easy to replace you.

If you have reached the middle level, there are no questions about your hard skills—you know how to do things within your area. Next, soft skills come to the forefront.

It is important not to stay only within your zone of responsibility and say: "This is not my zone, pay me and leave me alone." This is a direct path to staying in middle management for a long time. Instead, I advise saying: "Here I saw inefficiency, here we can fix a little, and if we launch such-and-such initiative, we can improve such-and-such metrics."

You come to management with something new, often outside your zone of responsibility, and communicate it in a language understandable to the C-level.

Such middle managers, in my practice, get promoted very quickly. And here people skills are important: the ability to negotiate with adjacent departments, sell them the value of what you are proposing, and convince them of a result that is not guaranteed in advance.

About Delegation

I found delegation difficult, especially at the beginning, especially with tasks I loved—I love working with texts, creatives, and positioning, and giving them up was hard.

I tell myself this: if you want to grow, if you want the scale of your projects to grow? You won't be able to grow exponentially on your own. If you want great specialists to want to work with you? And great specialists hate micromanagement. So, you will have to let go.

Delegation is not "letting everything slide." When delegating, you need to define the scope: what you expect to receive, by when, in what format, and what the image of the final result should be. And agree on checkpoints—for example: "I will come to you at the end of the second week to see how you have planned everything."

But how exactly a person will do the task—morning, evening, over coffee—is their personal decision, especially if you are delegating to an expert in their field. Here you need to make a leap of faith: the person is not stupid, they cost a lot of money in the market, and you selected them for that.

My role as a leader is to remove barriers and blockers from the path of the person to whom I entrusted the task: escalate a lack of budget, negotiate with an adjacent department that does not want to cooperate, and so on.

And it is also important to fully acknowledge someone else's contribution: if a person did a task well, I say so directly—that result is theirs, not mine. Here you need to tame your ego a little.

Specifics of B2B Marketing in Kazakhstan and the CIS

Our market loves offline. Clients like to be led by the hand, taught, invited somewhere—therefore, large IT products usually have a large sales force.

In the classic understanding of B2B marketing, a client watches a webinar, opens a lead magnet, reads cases and reports—and decides to buy. But in Central Asian realities, they still need to be taken to a conference, entertained a bit, and given a custom consultation in the office—often together with the sales team and our architects.

This is a cultural feature—a kind of hospitality—that is not written in B2B marketing encyclopedias, but in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, these are the realities.