Driving Product: Lessons and Wins Along the Way
Building great products and strong teams isn’t just about processes or tools—it’s about fostering an environment where people are motivated, aligned, and empowered to contribute. This article reflects on key milestones from my career in team leadership and product development, focusing on how shared ownership, feedback-driven improvements, and cross-functional collaboration drive success.
1) Building High-Impact Teams
Creating Feedback Loops That Drive Change
Customer insights are invaluable, but only if they lead to action. By facilitating user feedback sessions and tracking pain points in a live document, we enabled faster issue resolution. This approach contributed to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 86 for Portuguese customers, showing how closing the feedback loop strengthens both product quality and user trust.
Onboarding as a Strategic Advantage
A seamless onboarding experience accelerates a team’s ability to make an impact. Developing a structured onboarding toolkit reduced new hire ramp-up time by a third, allowing them to become project-ready in just two weeks. Small improvements here make a significant difference in long-term engagement and retention.
Tailored Planning for Better Accountability
Not all teams function the same way, and their planning processes shouldn’t either. By implementing a sprint-like planning system customized for pedagogical and illustration teams, we increased alignment and accountability while ensuring flexibility to meet unique team needs, which is what we did at ubbu.
Strengthening Stakeholder Engagement
Stakeholders are an integral part of product success. Through Product Roadshows - internal or through Ops and Sales - we increased transparency and collaboration, making stakeholders feel more connected to the product vision and progress. This engagement fostered a sense of shared responsibility for outcomes and an overall alignment
2) A Reflection on Team Culture, Global Satisfaction Survey 2024
Creating a workplace where people feel supported is the ultimate goal. As one of two managers overseeing this effort, I’m proud that we achieved the following scores:
Managerial support: 9.00
Team motivation: 8.75
Workplace recommendation: 8.88
These numbers reflect a culture of trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
3) Leading Through Collaboration
Cross-Functional Leadership: Bringing Teams Together
Leading diverse teams—including design, development, pedagogy, and illustration—has reinforced my belief in the power of collaboration. With over nine years of experience in cross-functional leadership, I’ve learned that the most effective teams are those that build on each other's strengths, challenge assumptions, and work toward a shared purpose.
Facilitating Design Work Sessions for Strategic Alignment
Strategic alignment is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. By leading design sprints, workshops, and service design activities, I helped drive alignment across an 80+ member team. These sessions ensured that everyone—from engineers to designers—had a shared understanding of goals and user needs.
Introducing Research Foundations for Better Decision-Making
Data and insights should inform every decision. Establishing research best practices at Talkdesk—including training teams on qualitative and quantitative methods—helped embed user research into our process. This shift empowered teams to uncover deeper user insights and make informed design choices. Something I promised myself to implement on every team I lead.
