Inflow

Inflow's mission is to equip people with ADHD with the skills and support they need to reach their full potential.

I coach a number of folks across the org in their leadership development and in expanding their thinking to better cope with the complexity of day to day work.

Resident Leadership Coach

My role as Fractional CTO was focused on helping set Inflow up for success as the company grows: coaching and mentoring talented people, and to setup scalable processes across recruiting, software development process, and continuous improvement.

Fractional CTO

PA Leadership Coaching

I help Tech executives and leaders in Engineering and Product upgrade themselves, how they work, serve others, and create value in the world.

Leadership Coach

Hotjar

Hotjar is the Product Experience Insights software of choice for small and medium businesses.

I coach a number of engineering, product and UX leaders across the organization to be at their best when their best is needed.

Sharpist

Sharpist is the outcome-driven digital platform for people development that pays in on your KPIs by growing your employees with the power of coaching and personalized learning plans.

VP of Engineering

TourRadar

Reporting to the CEO, responsible for growing and nurturing the Engineering organization, along with its budget planning. Scaling up the company on the back of its series C round.

Doubled the team size within a year, to ~50 engineers, through a systematic, scalable and predictable hiring process, while increasing development and deployment velocity/frequency 3x.

Setting a clear direction and objectives for the team, communicating these effectively, and facilitating collaboration with different stakeholders across departments.

For a period of 4 months, led the Product org in addition to Engineering adopting a more structured, predictable and experimentation-based product development process.

VP of Engineering & Interim VP of Product

HelloFresh

(IPO: Frankfurt Stock Exchange 2017)

Responsible for driving and helping accomplish a long-term technical vision for a number of customer-facing teams. Aligning with the business and product vision of the company, empowering a fantastic and ever-growing group of engineers, and removing impediments to flow.

Heavily involved in engineering hiring, helping teams efficiently onboard new engineers, and coaching engineering managers in growing and nurturing their respective teams and individuals.

Director Of Engineering

Tasked with building a team for supporting and developing internal CRM technology. Being essentially a greenfield space at HelloFresh at the time, it led to the development of a modern event-driven architecture enabling us to tap real-time data fed into our CRM platform.

Engineering Manager

Architecting and develop a new Data Warehousing solution for the growing business. Hadoop, Apache Spark, etc.

Data Engineer

Architecting and developing the payments backend and integration with external payment service providers.

Senior Software Engineer

Sports Interactive

Portuguese localization of the market-leading football management simulation game Football Manager (formerly known as Championship Manager)

Translator

Universidade de Évora

- Backend development and maintenance of the University's Online Information System; 
- Design and implementation of integration mechanisms between the University's Online Information System and its counterpart Financial application;
- Design and implementation of public access APIs to the University's Online Information System, for use by external apps (kiosks, mobile platforms, etc) in different contexts.

Software Developer

LOUD! Magazine

Interviews, feature articles and album reviews for a leading Portuguese widespread metal music magazine.

Writer

InfluAds

Front and backend development of a PHP/Zend Framework based, MySQL/MongoDB driven, web app for use by the Influads network of publishers and advertisers.

Developer

Former VP Eng • Leadership Coach • I help you get in control of your work so it doesn’t control you.

🚀 Coach for tech leaders at all levels looking to step it up, and do well while doing good. If that's you, and you feel like someone who can expand your thinking could be handy, DM me. Let's chat!

🧠 Former engineering executive, manager and software developer, manager. Leadership, management and organizations through the lenses of complexity, systems, and how the brain works.

👹 The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world it’s either people or profit.

I'm not sure more "traditional" enterprises realize the opportunity they have currently. The market is filled with qualified people. Many of those people aren't interested in working at roller coaster tech companies. They are actively seeking out more supportive, less dogmatic, and more mission-oriented environments. 

The changes required to foster supportive environments for these people—a bit more autonomy, and empowerment—aren't major in the grand scheme of things. Totally doable.

It is an incredible opportunity to set in motion a decade of great work. 

Paulo André

If you want to win the product game, you gotta make make the “I” in ROI unquestionable. Do you want the simplest trick of them all?

🛑 Stop acting like a ZIRP-PM (zero-interest-rate product manager).

Companies don't need "Google-style" PMs. They need PRODUCERS.

Producers are productivity machines. They create. They build. They make things happen. They shake the team into shipping.

Want to know what really kills your PRODUCTION flow?

   Everytime you refresh JIRA to see if the board changed.
   Everytime you pull your email, to see if that stakeholder answered.
   Everytime You check Slack, to see if the team replied.  
   Everytime you look at your calendar, and worship your “busy-ness”.

Suddenly the day is done.

You repeat this 5 times.

Boom, now your week is gone.

   What have you done?
   What has your team delivered?
   What have you actually produced?

Companies are done with large teams, full of specialists, each carrying a small piece or a puzzle in this "holy ritual" we call shipping software.

You either produce, every day, every week, every month, or you won’t be worth the “R” in ROI.

   Stop re-checking JIRA.
   Stop pulling your email.
   Stop reloading your Slack notifications.
   Stop glancing over your busy calendar.

Get your team moving. Get them producing. Every - Single - Day. 

Make the “I” in ROI unquestionable.

#productmanagement

We designed every single Bootcamp at One Month PM to train you on being a producing empowered PM. Join more than 2000 people at onemonthpm.com

My engineering leadership team (aka staff) meetings were fun. More than that, they were real. I prided myself in them. And I miss having them.

Sometimes we dealt with difficult topics. Sometimes my direct reports picked me up from a bad day. And we laughed, frequently.

I hate the formality in meetings. People become stiff, not allowed to be themselves. How can we expect to arrive at good decisions that way?

And with meetings all the time, how does all of this add up? It’s a good example of a Really Important Thing(tm) that can’t really be measured (e.g. impact on the bottom line, on motivation, and even health of people).

Reject the bullshit that work needs to be serious all the time, that there is a gravity to it. Knowledge work hinges on creativity, and great ideas popping up, which can only happen when people are relaxed, yet excited. When they’re allowed to be themselves.

Take things seriously. But don’t be too serious.


Let me tell you about one of the biggest traps of inexperienced engineering leaders.

It's not difficult to avoid it, but almost everyone falls for it.

It's what I call "strong negativity bias" in the relationship with their manager. Especially dangerous if you're a VP of Engineering or CTO reporting to a non-technical CEO in a startup.

What I mean by this is that if you don't intentionally tailor what, how, and when you communicate to your boss, conversations are reactive and default 90%+ of the time to be about issues, problems, challenges, incidents.

No bueno.

Over time, subconsciously, your CEO (who naturally understands little of how engineering works) starts questioning whether they have the right person at the helm. Rightfully so.

That might even be true. But what I've seen over and over, and in many of my clients, is that they don't intentionally bring up what's going well: the good progress that's been made, the small wins, the learnings, the ambitious plans for the future.

If that's you, then good news: it's entirely within your control.

Take some time to reflect on how you're communicating up. Be proactive and pragmatic. Include the good, the bad, and the ugly as a matter of fact. Celebrate wins, and be direct about how you're handling the losses. And never, ever forget to relate the tech with the business.

Show your CEO they're right in trusting you.

Easter book haul.

Here’s why I got these:

“Slow Productity” by Cal Newport - Cal is an author I will always read any new book, regardless. Loved everything so far and his thinking on how work happens deeply resonated with my own personal mission.

“The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt - I often ruminate on the feeling I can’t shake that smart phones and social media might be silently killing us. After the super interesting “The Righteous Mind”, definitely looking to read Haidt’s always well researched exploration of the topic.

“Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” and “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky - To join “Behave” in my bookshelf, because Sapolsky’s depth of knowledge is incredible and because neuroscience is my favorite lens for the coaching and leadership I do.

What was your latest purchase, and why did you pick that? 👀

I don't take fashion advice from Paul Graham (evidence below), but here's 10 important things I learned from him about writing and ideas:

1. A lot of what you write will be ideas that you had while writing, not before you started.

2. Writing creates new ideas and new connections between ideas.

3. Writing unearths things that were hitherto unconscious until you had to explain them.

4. Writing allow you to focus on an idea in a way that merely talking about it with someone doesn't.

5. You can only have fully formed ideas about a topic once you write about it.

6. Be a stranger while reading what you write. Is it correct and complete? Satisfy the stranger.

7. You learn from exploring ideas in other ways, but you'll still learn new things from writing about them.

8. Someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything non-trivial.

9. If you don't write about your ideas, they won't ever be fully formed and you won't realize it.

10. Writing about ideas doesn't make them right. While not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one.

Question for you:

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩, 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘸, 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺?

We often find ourselves in the "in-betweens" of life.

Career transitions, mid-life crisis, black swans... they all have the potential of rocking us while we try to walk the path between order and chaos.

As I found myself in one such chapter of my own life, I reflected a bit on what can be the anchor to keep me centered, looking ahead, and being OK with whatever ends up happening.

Maybe it'll help you, too.

hagakure.substack.com • 4 min read

The Hagakure #78: Win-Win

💡How to define value, productivity, and effectiveness in the fast-paced tech world? 

One thing is certain, it’s not as easy as it may seem.

Listen to Paulo André sharing his insights on the topic during our #BetterTechLeadership talk 🎙️

#LeadershipInsights #TechLeadership #Productivity

Leaders listen for what is not being said. Most of the real talk is hiding in plain sight.

Real leaders (carefully) surface it and create the space where it can be held.

"𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸, 𝘐 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴, 𝘺𝘦𝘵 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯'𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘦?"

That's one of the deepest signs of respect and care you can offer someone in your team.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world it’s either people or profit.

You don't think so?

Then how come we nod in agreement when someone says building relationships and trust is so important... and then there's so little of it that's intentionally done?

How come job interviews are so much about technical skills... and so little about getting to really know the person across the table?

How come most HR "systems" are all about boiling people down to a number that fits a spreadsheet... and forcing everyone to conform to the same template?

Nobody denies the quest for profit (which is fine). But these examples (among many others) show it's definitely not about the people.

Why is that?

Deep down, in the "collective unconscious" of leadership and management everywhere in tech, success is not ultimately rooted in people being their best selves, but rather in:

• The brilliance of a few, who are supposed to know better, be "smarter", "strategize", and have the best ideas.

• The compliance of the many, who are supposed to execute, factory-like, and ask as few questions as possible.

The sad part?

Most people don't even want to be this way. It's not intentional. They would do better if they could and/or would know how.

The good news?

Knowledge—of psychology, how the brain works, complexity, etc—is abundant. It's just the desire to learn that's scarce.

PS - Sorry for being a bummer today. 😎 

Sir Michael Moritz was a journalist before becoming one of the best venture capitalists ever. He backed companies like Google, Yahoo, and PayPal through his work at Sequoia Capital.

He's also one of the most inspiring people I know.

A few things I learned from Sir Michael Moritz:

1. Investing is not unlike journalism.

You collect a large number of facts about a topic you know little about; you distill all those facts; you form a cogent opinion and make a decision.

2. The best investments are often the ones that don't fit in a convenient bucket

Example: Airbnb. In which bucket would you have put three couchsurfers offering their apartments for short stays back in 2008? Other examples: early Uber, drone companies early on.

3. Leadership traits to build enduring companies.

One of the factors explaining the success of Sequoia is being able to think and work in 20-year increments. Never lose sight of where you want to be, make decisions accordingly.

Also, identify high potential when they’re still early or young, and help them develop. It’s low risk and high reward. Those will grow to be massive assets and incredibly loyal.

4. What is obsession?

Moritz talks about Apoorva Mehta, founder of Instacart, who picked that business model over others because it was the one that was consistently the last thing he thought about before going to bed, and the first one upon waking up.

He also tells the story of being chauffeured to the airport by Bill Gates back in the 80s, and noticing Gates’ car radio was gone. As it turns out, Gates had ripped it off himself, lest he be distracted from thinking about Microsoft every minute of every drive.

5. The most underrated skill in a leader?

Listening.

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