Valentino Destefano

The call: decide what not to build.

Brought on to turn the country's dominant retail-BNPL into an ecommerce platform. The build was never the hard part. Saying no was, while a fast company wanted everything yesterday. I hold one rule: every feature defends why it exists. Fewer things, shipped right.

Product Manager. I own the long-term product vision and portfolio roadmap, lead ecommerce features and new digital sales channels, set quality standards across the department, and ground every decision in user research.

The call: build people, not just features.

Started as PO shipping tickets, ended running the team. The win wasn't the title. It was hiring people who outgrew me. By the end I was the least technical person in my own meetings, and the team still shipped the right thing. That's people first, in practice.

PO → Product Leader. Built a high-performance product team from scratch, opened new business opportunities from strategic leadership, and set delivery standards across the department, after two years driving features end to end as Product Owner.

The call: live with my own tickets.

PO in the morning, backend dev in the afternoon. Exhausting, and the most useful year of my career. Empathy is cheap until you've shipped a vague ticket at 11pm yourself. After that, I never wrote a vague one again.

Product Owner & Backend Developer. Worked directly with the CEO and CTO on product vision and roadmap, led the dev team's delivery cadence, and built the backend systems and APIs in NestJS.

The call: learn to build, first.

Before product, I wrote the code. Gálac Software (Backend Developer, C#), Universidad ISEP (Web Developer, Angular), and Shadees Digital Service (Web Developer, VueJS) the foundation that lets me scope what's real to this day.