Senka Hadzimuratovic on Tackling Crises Without Losing Your Humanity

Mixing Board Studio Session

Most recently, Senka Hadzimuratovic was the Head of Brand & Communications at Grammarly, where she shepherded Grammarly to decacorn status, 10x org growth, and multiple positioning shifts over six years. Prior to that, she spent over a decade in biotech and pharma comms, including multiple roles at Novartis. She is now a consultant specializing in corporate positioning, strategic communications planning, change management, and crisis preparedness.

In this Studio Session, Senka and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about making yourself indispensable, doing the important — and not just the shiny — things, managing comms during the war in Ukraine, 24-hour Zoom calls, and why you should never lose your humanity.

SG: What are you up to these days and how'd you get here?

SH: I ventured out on my own quite recently after a long stint in the biotech healthcare space and then at Grammarly for the last six years. I've been doing corporate comms for 18 years. Over the last few months I've been establishing myself on my own and seeing if the consulting world is one for me. One of the things that's always been true in my career, is I’ve got to believe in the thing that I'm doing. You can look at my resume and see that I have long tenures at every place I've worked. When I'm in it, I'm really in it, and I'm really dedicated. Right now, I want to see what's out there. Let's see what I fall in love with next. Ultimately I do see myself going back in-house.

SG: At this particular time in 2025, moving from being a head of comms to becoming a consultant is, for better or for worse, not a totally unique thing. Do you have a sense of why there's so many people who are really great at their jobs, who mostly have worked in-house, who are now dabbling in consulting and trying to figure out if the shoe fits or not?

SH: I can't purport to speak for others. I'll start with myself, and maybe this is a trend. As I mentioned, when I'm in it, I'm really in it. I go deep and have had those longer tenures. I've really lucked out with the types of people I've worked with, the types of leadership teams I've been a part of.

I've never taken a career break in my life, which felt like a luxury to be able to do for several months. I took care of a lot of personal things. In thinking about where my expertise is now, there are so many different ways I feel like I can contribute. When you stop for a second to think about what it is that you do, you realize just how much knowledge you've amassed in this time when you've gone deep. Now, thinking about taking that next step, it doesn't feel like something you should do lightly. It feels like you've been married for a couple of decades and you just got a divorce. It was amicable, it was great, but now you're like, well, I'm not going to go get married again right away. I actually have a lot to bring to the table as an individual. Let me try some things out.

In terms of why we're seeing it in the market, there are probably a number of things that aren't necessarily positive but have been an instigator. One is tech layoffs — the last few years we've seen so many shifts. I imagine many folks went into consulting reluctantly. The other is, perhaps realizing they were in a bad situation all around and that it wasn’t a fit. It could be a sign of the times.

It could also be that, as more seasoned comms leaders, we’re eager to chart our own path. Now what even is a comms leader these days? It's this human of all trades. What I find exciting about consulting is you get to lean into the thing that you are really good at. You finally start figuring out how to spend 90% of your time on that. That also means turning down work that you know doesn’t make sense strategically. I've had prospective clients that want to work with me on getting a “big PR splash.” I have talked myself out of so many clients who are looking for that very thing because I quickly realize it’s not actually what the client needs — and I have to tell them that! [*laughs at loss of potential income*]

SG: You said, "I haven't really had a career break." I wish I could say that that was also a unique thing, but it’s not. I talk to people all the time about their careers and many say, "Oh, I've never actually taken more than two weeks off before.” What did you find on your time away?

SH: Well, for one, I realized that I'm a glutton for punishment. I can talk about crisis comms all day every day. In all seriousness: When you're defining who you are as a comms and brand expert person, you have to reflect, which is the hardest exercise I've ever done. You have to think about, “What am I good at and what am I putting out there?” Even once you figure out that you might want to focus more on this area and not in this area of comms — how do I even express that? What does that even look like? One of the things that I realized is true about me — and is advice that I would give to anyone in comms in-house — is I look to do the most important thing, even if it's not the shiny thing. Especially if it's not the shiny thing.

What that looked like for me in-house at Grammarly and even back at Novartis is usually related to an issue that no one's thinking about. Something that’s nine steps ahead but something that would impact your business in a massive way. Now when I think about it, how do I translate that into a skillset that someone wants in a consultant? It really comes back to: what's this thing that's actually important for your business but no one wants to work on it? I'll do that part.

It's often something like, “We have this vision to be XYZ, but what are all the scenarios we've not planned out that could really get in the way of getting to that vision?” It goes way beyond comms. It’s been interesting for me to figure out how I'm positioning myself as an advisor and consultant when so much of the work that I've done in-house, someone who knows nothing about what we can bring to the table might not even recognize as a core skill and competency of my job.

SG: You say it's "not comms.” But, is it not comms?

SH: I'll go a little deeper into the crisis work because it's an area that, unfortunately, I have quite a bit of experience in. To me there are "crises,” and then there are crises. To someone who might not know how to best work with a comms partner, a crisis is a reputational PR issue that’s already kind of blown up. There's a bad article written, which is usually due to misunderstanding — someone misinterprets a thing someone said or your company did or whatnot. That's a PR crisis. That’s often like, "Hey, comms person, can you go talk to this reporter and fix this thing?” Or, “this headline is bad, do something about it." That's one type of crisis and issue, and it’s where comms people can earn their stripes.

But then there's a real crisis, the lives-are-at-stake type of crisis. For example, a major global product recall that could really, really hurt people if they ingested the wrong over-the-counter Excedrin. Or the war in Ukraine — Grammarly is a Ukraine-founded company. If you fuck those up, people can get really hurt. I've been fortunate that I have been in the room in those situations and have had a seat at the table. But if you haven't established that trust with whoever it is that you're working with, they might not even see what your role is in that, other than the downstream, well, “we’ve got to communicate about it.” Versus actually being part of the decision-making team that says, "What should we be doing as a business?"

This is something that I push for so often. If you're only in it at the downstream level, the PR crisis level, there's so much that you miss out on. To be a good comms person, you're already thinking about all of those different scenarios, which means that being part of the decision-making team on what you should even do as a business helps downstream. That more strategic seat at the table, unfortunately, isn’t always viewed as the role of comms.

SG: So for the record, Grammarly was a client of mine at Pramana, that's how we got to know each other. And no one at Grammarly would dispute the fact that when we first started working with them, their comms sophistication was ‘early’. Then you came in and did a lot of great work. I saw the “before” photo, how did you get into the “after” photo? How did their acknowledgement and understanding of the complexity of your role also evolve?

SH: First of all, you make yourself indispensable. What is the most important thing that needs doing that isn't the shiny thing? Interestingly enough, my first day there, we had a PR crisis, so I was right in the thick of working on a very important, not shiny thing on day one. But certainly working through an issue, any sort of crisis, is the quickest way to build trust and get that seat in the room.

On the first day I came in, there's a ton of media coverage around an alleged data leak, full of misinformation and headlines that were damaging to the company’s reputation. Most importantly, they were totally false.

The reality was, our engineering team was working with a white hat hacker who’d informed our team that there’s this bug that could lead to some exploitation of certain user documents. To be very clear, it had not been exploited. This is an ethical hacker, and he's giving us advanced notice. It’s standard, like what many companies do with HackerOne. The team fixes the bug within four hours, which is just an incredible response time. They tell the hacker on a Friday afternoon, "We fixed it." But there wasn't a comms plan beyond that, so there was no clear communication on what would happen next.

What happens with these things is there's a public disclosure. The hacker disclosed the report that shows that Grammarly had this bug and that they fixed the bug. This happened over the weekend before my first day. Reporters jumped on that because when you look through the disclosure, it was written in a way that left some things open to interpretation — and reporters took it and ran with it. This resulted in some extremely damning, false headlines that drove clicks. On top of that, apparently our press inbox was disconnected, so reporters were contacting us and it was going nowhere. In all these articles you’re seeing, “The company could not be reached for comment.” Oops.

I'm supposed to be at my welcome lunch on day one, and Max, the co-founder of Grammarly, pulls me into a room and literally goes, "All right, should we proceed with our onboarding day as planned or should you help with the worst PR crisis we've faced?" I was like, "I should do the latter. The latter is what I should do."

The process from there is the typical things — you gather all the information and find out what actually happened. I sat in a room with our Head of Product, Head of Engineering, and our CEO and said, “Tell me everything that happened.” From there you build a plan, you contact the reporters with corrections, you celebrate every time you see an updated headline. It’s wild to think that what was actually an engineering success story of fixing a non-exploited bug in record time became a trust-damaging situation that haunted us for some time. I mean, Grammarly’s security measures and engineering team are top-notch, so you can also imagine how this made folks feel internally. The shortcut to convincing folks that comms has value is to work through an issue and fix it, like I had to do with Grammarly.

When you don’t have that shortcut, instead you look at what really needs to be done. Often it is related to some kind of preparedness on the way to your vision where you say, "I'm going to take that on." Another thing that I took on beyond the security bug was, if this happened, it seems like we need to do some basic internal education around what to do when an issue like this occurs. I’m a huge fan of templates and playbooks. Get all of those things in place as early as possible. Because when shit hits the fan, you want to be at the ready, versus figuring out step one. It can feel boring to even utter the term “process” at a high-growth start-up — but it’ll save you time and time again.

A big project I took on very early was to look at all the potential skeletons in the closet. Will it break our business if scenario A or B or C happens? And what's the likelihood of that scenario? Then you go all the way down — interviewing the entire leadership team, middle management, some individual contributors, and seeing where the disconnect is.

When you're working in our space, you're surrounded by tech optimists who see a bright future, and then you come in and say, "Hmmm, it might be dark here. We have to zoom in on this before it compromises our vision. Let’s make sure that nothing disrupts that.”

I want to make something super clear, though: A common misconception of crisis-minded folks is that we tend to be more risk-averse, that we're the naysayers and killjoys — “don't tell Senka we're working on this thing because she'll shut it down.” This is an assumption that's been made about me, and I laugh about it now. Because it’s honestly the opposite! If something’s going to derail our chances of getting to this place we're trying to go, let's make sure we have the stuff in place for that not to happen. We're not risk-averse. We are the most curious and the most thorough folks to work with, though.

SG: Before we move on from Grammarly, a thing happened where a large country invaded another country, Russia, into Ukraine, and there's a significant number of Grammarly employees working in Ukraine. You gave insight on what that was like as it was happening, and then what happened afterwards, and obviously the situation's still very much happening now, unfortunately. How did you get pulled into what was probably a pretty unique situation?

SH: Yeah, it is still happening. People have been working in a war zone for three years now. People coding out of bathtubs and basements and God knows where. People who certainly know somebody who's died or been injured. That's really important to keep in mind when thinking about working with anyone from Ukraine or talking to somebody from Ukraine.

Grammarly was founded by Ukrainians and still has an office in Kyiv, and a number of our team members were based there. Prior to the full-scale invasion of Kyiv, which happened in February 2022, the Grammarly team was preparing for if things escalate in the country, what would we do? I was part of a team with People, Legal, Finance, and Ukraine-based leaders. We had this tiger team, similar to what some companies had to manage pandemic response. Grammarly’s then-CEO oversaw it but genuinely empowered us to move quickly and with a massive amount of authority. We called it the contingency planning team. Overnight, we switched the name to war response team because that was more appropriate language.

Prior to the invasion, a few months before, we started looking at what precautions do we need to take as a business? This is why I feel so strongly about the “seat at the table” piece because if I were told, "Hey, we need to get comms out that this is what we're doing," versus what should we be doing in the first place — it's much harder to understand and communicate something this sensitive and delicate if you aren't in the room helping to determine what that thing should be.

As an example, we had a base in Kyiv and we knew that Kyiv was a target. If there was going to be an invasion, it was going to be toward Kyiv. We started talking about incentives. Do we incentivize our team to leave Kyiv and how do we do that? At this point, we were still remote with no requirement to be in office. But over time we incentivized people and gave them stipends to move west to Lviv, really close to the Polish border, in order to be out of harm's way. We also gave folks an option to move to Poland. Many did take us up on that, and the reasons for that were the comms. We were extremely deliberate about explaining the risk and explaining the incentives, and what we're willing to do for families. We were really lucky that we made some of the right calls with the incentives because we did have families and folks leave, mostly to Western Ukraine.

A piece that we did not calculate, which haunted many of us who were on the war response team, is that martial law would go into effect very quickly after the invasion and certain male team members would not be allowed to leave the country. We had a lot of people in western Ukraine, which was safe at the time, and we always thought if they need to leave the country, we'll get them out of the country. That is the piece that we miscalculated. We did have a significant number of people leave, but we still had employees in the country at a time when they no longer could leave.

Then came a related challenge. Outside of Ukraine, we needed an office — we needed somewhere else in Europe for folks to be able to live and work. Within two weeks we had opened an office in Berlin. We had been talking about opening an office in Europe for some time, but it was time to just do it. I was on a plane two weeks after the war started, touched down in Berlin with one of my incredible Ukrainian comms pro who speaks fluent German. I also speak fluent German. We get there and we start touring office spaces with a small group of displaced Grammarly employees, and then we start offering incentives for folks to come there.

On the external comms side, I had a stellar PR team who blocked and tackled reporters throughout all of this. They were just so on top of it. Meanwhile, on the internal side, I’m sending messages like, "Get on the bus at 7:00 AM at location XYZ." Didn't think I would ever be doing that. And by the way, I'm a war refugee myself from Bosnia, so all of a sudden six-year-old me is like, what would I have needed at this time? It becomes really emotional, it becomes really personal. But you start recognizing just how important what we do is.

It was by far the most meaningful work I've ever done in my life. In this hot period of the first couple of weeks and months, we were all learning a lot. I got so close to the other members of the war response team, I genuinely consider them family to this day. Over the years, the resiliency of the Ukrainian team members and their incredible grace and thankfulness about everything that our team did was worth every sleepless night a hundred times over. The outpouring of personal messages I received like, "Hey, your message convinced me to leave the country, and my daughter has never heard an air siren." It just makes you realize the importance of what we do in ways that I would've never otherwise experienced.

SG: One thing I enjoy about your time at Grammarly is obviously the impact you had, but also the poetry and the humanity to it. It’s an underrated part of our job — to be a good human. First and foremost to see what's happening on the inside, but also to be able to contextualize it to what's happening on the outside. In this industry you can find people who are dead inside, and I get it, it becomes very transactional. But you're never going to be able to find yourself in this situation you were in unless you’re open to it. You helped make all those things happen. If you go through this career not being able to be open to those things, what's the point?

SH: I know you and I both share a love of internal comms and the importance of internal comms. The reason that it is something that appeals to me so much is the same reason that Mixing Board appeals to me — we're just all out here people-ing and life-ing. If you can just find a way to recognize the humanity in others and see people for people, it can be a really powerful motivator. And it always has been for me.

Within our profession, internal comms is the closest you'll get to that. Because you see people for who they are and you learn their stories in a way that is a little harder to do with others. But it’s just as important to do with your customers. Don't lose your humanity.

SG: If someone was in university or just starting off working at a PR firm and they said, "Wow, Senka's story is really cool. To be able to go from biotech to Grammarly to do this thing in Ukraine and now be this sought-after consultant, wow, I want that career." What's your advice?

SH: Don't be so precious. Do the thing nobody else wants to do that needs to get done.

When I was interviewing and hiring for my team, you very quickly get a sense of what people are drawn to. What I look for is: are you curious and are you willing to do the hard stuff? Yes, everyone wants to work on that big shiny thing, you want a big budget, you want to do a big media event that's really cool, but will you also stay on a 24-hour Zoom call because you're trying to get people out of a war zone? Hopefully you'll never, ever have to do that. But always consider that there's somebody that does need to be willing to do the hard thing.

Maybe my most controversial statement is that I still take offense to someone assuming I'm a “PR girl” because it's been defined as this stereotype of someone who wants to do the big shiny thing — and that's certainly not how I built my career.

Interested in learning more about how to engage with the Mixing Board community of comms and brand marketing experts? Curious on how to become a member? Feel free to reach out via the “Get in Touch” button on our site.