He started as one of two people in support. Twenty years later, Marko Kuusela leads a team of nearly a hundred
In 2005, a newspaper job ad Marko Kuusela saw set him on a path that would take him from Customer Support Engineer to VP of Customer Success, leading close to 100 people across the globe.
Twenty years, four roles, one company, and every step built on the work itself.
A newspaper job ad and an instant fit at Cadmatic
At the time, he was studying multimedia and IT technology at Turku University of Applied Sciences. He was drawn to engineering and to helping the people around him with their tech problems on the side, without quite knowing where that combination could lead. Then a newspaper ad landed in front of him: 3D design, customer service, based in Turku, travel required.
“It hit me immediately. The customer, helping others, computers, 3D, real design work, it was all connected for me,” Marko says. “I applied, and it’s ended up being the only company I’ve ever applied to for an actual job since.”
He got the role, and the fit he felt reading that ad has held for twenty years.
Twenty years at Cadmatic, four different roles, each one earned
“What motivated me was seeing that other people could succeed because of what I did, not chasing a title for its own sake,” Marko says.
That focus, on the customer and on the people around him rather than on his own advancement, is exactly what built the track record behind every step of his career: Senior Application Specialist in 2013, Technical Manager in 2016, and in 2023, VP of Customer Success, when Matti Siltanen, his manager of 17 years, retired and put his full backing behind Marko taking over.
Growing into that role wasn’t automatic, and Marko doesn’t pretend it was. He carried deep respect toward Matti, who had set a high bar, and it took real, deliberate work to grow from technical expert into someone who could lead people with the same confidence. Over time, he learned that leading his own way, rather than simply copying what he’d admired in Matti, was where his strength as a leader came from.
Leading with the same instinct that got him hired at Cadmatic in the first place
That same instinct of people first, technical second, but never absent, still shapes how Marko leads Customer Success at Cadmatic today.
“Our team makes sure our customers are happy and always get the help they need,” is how Marko explains the job of a VP of Customer Success in one sentence.
In practice, that means constantly bringing people along through change:
“Technically, almost anything can be planned, but whether it actually gets done always comes down to people,” he says.
He also hasn’t let go of the technical grounding that first earned his team’s trust. He’s still the one pulled into major cases that need real judgment calls, guiding sales and project teams on what’s realistic to build, train, and deliver. It’s the same instinct that helps him see where his teams, each specialized in a different product, need to pull together for a customer who simply bought the whole package.
What Marko looks for, and how he holds a global team together
That combination, technical credibility and a desire to help, is exactly what Marko looks for when he hires, and he has personally interviewed and hired much of his own team. He values a “let’s figure this out together” attitude over someone who gives up when things get hard. It’s a lesson he says he learned from his own former manager, Matti, who sometimes made an interview a little harder than necessary on purpose, not because he expected a correct answer, but because he wanted to see how someone reacted when they didn’t have one: did they try to work through it, or give up?
Holding that mindset together across a team spread over dozens of countries takes more than good intentions, though. Marko leans on frequent team meetings, projects that deliberately cross team lines, and a constant reminder that no team sits in just one country.
“It’s not us versus them,” he says. “When everyone sees that everyone helps each other, that’s what people rally around.”
Where the work in Customer Success at Cadmatic is heading, and Marko’s advice for anyone starting out
The work itself keeps shifting under his team’s feet, and Marko sees that as an opportunity rather than a threat. The biggest change right now is self-service: customers increasingly try to solve a problem themselves first, through AI or a quick search, before ever picking up the phone. For his team, that frees up time for development support, customizations, and training, the parts of the job that made him fall for it in the first place.
It’s also why his advice to anyone starting out in customer-facing or technical work sounds a lot like his own story:
“It leads wherever you want it to go.”
Under the same title, Application Specialist, Cadmatic’s people do very different work: some code, some train customers, some build e-learning or documentation, most do a mix of everything. Marko wouldn’t have wanted to do just one of those things for twenty years, but the mix made almost every day worth showing up for, and many of Cadmatic’s other teams, developers included, trace their roots back to the same customer support team he joined in 2005.
Why Marko has stayed with Cadmatic for over 20 years, and what it looks like to work for him
Twenty years on, what’s kept Marko at Cadmatic is simple: a genuinely good atmosphere, close relationships across sales and development, and enough variety that he’s never had to sit and wonder where to go next.
It shows in how he leads.
“I want my people to shine,” he says.
When three people on his team recently wanted to relocate rather than stay in their current country, he found a strong new placement for each of them: one moved to Vancouver, two to Turku, opening up new careers and, for their families, a new place to build a future. Two decades in, Marko has climbed from an entry-level support role to VP, but he’ll tell you the real measure of that success was never the title. It was making sure the people around him could succeed too.
Curious what it’s like to build a career on a team like this? Take a look at Cadmatic’s open roles, and follow along as we keep growing.