Invisible but everywhere: Marija Sivački’s product career story at Infobip
What does it take to go from Senior Product Manager to Products Director and help build a platform used by almost anyone on the planet? Marija Sivački’s story is about curiosity, breadth, and learning to trust the process before you feel ready.
There’s a theory, Marija Sivački will tell you, that everything in life moves in cycles of seven to eight years. She’s lived it twice over at Infobip, and she’s only halfway through the second one.
In 2018, Marija joined the company as a Senior Product Manager, bringing with her nearly a decade of experience across cloud services, TV and OTT products, and digital customer experience. Today, she’s Products Director, leading one of Infobip’s most ambitious launches to date, Agent OS, a platform designed to reshape how companies communicate with their customers.
She’s also a mother to a five-year-old. “Which, honestly,” she says, “is the best preparation for product leadership anyone could have.”
Education
Before joining Infobip, Marija spent years moving across industries and disciplines such as cloud, telecoms, digital products, quality assurance, sales. To an outside observer it might look like a winding road. To Marija, it was the curriculum.
“Every role gave me a different vantage point on the same problem: how do you build something people actually need?” she explains. “I started in sales, which taught me that a product has to earn its place in a conversation. Then quality assurance, which taught me that details compound. Then product management across different industries, which showed me that the fundamentals don’t change, only the context does.”
After seven years in structured corporate environments, Marija was ready for something different. Infobip offered the right mix: global enough for worldwide exposure, close enough to stay in Croatia, and big enough to matter without losing the instinct that makes ideas actually move.
“By the time I got to leadership, I wasn’t just managing products, I was pattern-matching across everything I’d seen. The breadth wasn’t a detour. It was the education.”
The balcony conversation
A few weeks into her role as PM for Email, something happened that Marija still talks about.
Adrian Benić, Infobip’s CPO, gathered a small group on the balcony of Infobip’s old office in Zagreb and floated an idea. They should build a contact center.
Marija recalls her first reaction: „Are you serious? Do you know how much investment that would take? Do you really think we can compete with hyperscalers like Genesys?‘
His answer was simple. “Don’t worry about the investment but focus on the market opportunity we have.”
Two weeks later, there was a team. Engineers. Architects. No endless approvals, no death by PowerPoint, no one asking how they’d monetize it. Just a small group pointed at a problem and told to get it in front of customers.
“I was hooked,” Marija says. “Finally, an environment where opportunity speaks louder than challenges.”
Global scale, local roots
Ask Marija what keeps her at Infobip after more than seven years, and she doesn’t reach for perks or titles. She talks about scale. A particular kind that’s easy to miss.
“The product you build reaches almost any person on the planet,” she says. “Then you look at the client list: companies that are part of people’s daily lives. And you realize you helped build something invisible but everywhere. All of that from Zagreb, the city where I was born. Not many people get to say that.”
That invisible infrastructure is now expanding into new territory. Agent OS is Infobip’s answer to AI-powered customer communications, and it’s a platform Marija helped bring to life. Not a chatbot reading from a script, but an intelligent system that understands context, acts on it, and makes the interaction feel effortless.
For the future of the industry, she doesn’t cite a trend report. She cites David Bowie. “I think about that 1999 interview where he told a journalist the internet was going to completely change the entertainment business,” she says. “Not tweak it. Change it. And the journalist just didn’t get it yet. That’s where we are with agentic AI and communications.”
“We’re not adapting to where the industry is going. We’re deciding where it goes.”
How she leads
The move from Group Product Manager to Products Director brought a shift Marija hadn’t fully anticipated.
“You move from leading by example to leading by question. You can tell people, but you rarely have time to show them anymore. For anyone coming from an individual contributor background, that transition is the real challenge and it takes longer than you’d expect to make peace with it.”
What she looks for when building a team reflects how she thinks about product itself.
She builds every team around a triangle: a builder who takes things from zero to launch, a thinker who anchors quality and strategy, and a connector curious enough to bridge gaps others don’t notice. But when she’s hiring, it’s the soft skills she watches most carefully. Those, she says, you can’t train in.
“Knowledge and expertise can be developed. The ability to listen, to navigate ambiguity, to bring people with you is harder to teach and more important than people realize.”
The growth happens after
Some of Marija’s most direct words are reserved for women in product and tech who are aiming higher but aren’t sure the path is open to them.
“Your work deserves to be seen, so let it be seen,” she says. “Not because you’re selling yourself, but because the people who can open doors for you genuinely cannot open them if they don’t know what you’re doing. Share your wins, even the small ones. It’s not bragging. It’s context.”
She comes back to perfectionism more than once, and every time she’s just as direct.
“Perfectionism and progress are enemies, and progress always has to win. I spent a long time waiting to feel certain before moving, which is exactly the wrong instinct in product work. The market doesn’t wait for perfect.”
The diagnosis she offers for imposter syndrome is just as blunt.
“That’s really what imposter syndrome is. It’s perfectionism with a costume on. You don’t have to remove the doubt. You just have to stop letting it make decisions for you.”
The same logic applies to knowing when you’re ready.
“Nobody is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you you’re ready. Put your hand up before you feel certain. The growth happens after.”
In Marija’s words
More than seven years in, Marija describes working at Infobip with the specificity that only comes from having actually lived it.
“Working at Infobip is like catching a wave you weren’t sure you were ready for, and then realizing that’s exactly the point. You’ll be stretched, you’ll sometimes feel out of your depth, and then you’ll look back and see how far you’ve ridden.”
What makes it rare, she says, is that the people who built this place from nothing are still here. Still building, even after 20 years.
“There’s something special about being able to learn from the originals, the people who figured it out before there was a playbook. I hope one day someone says that about me too.”
The title doesn’t carry you. You carry it.