Product & Innovation Leadership

In mid-2019 and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil faced severe challenges in monitoring healthcare system capacity, particularly hospital bed availability. At the state level, the São Paulo government implemented the Plano São Paulo, a regulatory framework that classified regions based on critical indicators — one of the most important being hospital and ICU bed occupancy rates. These classifications directly influenced mobility restrictions and economic activity.

Given my background and interest in innovation applied to public sector management, I was invited to join a Grupo BILD initiative as Product Manager for a public-interest project developed on a pro bono basis.

The result was LeitosCOVID.org, a digital platform designed to centralize and standardize real-time data on hospital bed occupancy — including regular and ICU beds — across all hospitals in Ribeirão Preto, a city of over 700,000 inhabitants and headquarters of Grupo BILD.

During the pandemic, hospital bed occupancy data was:

• Fragmented across multiple hospitals and systems
• Difficult to consolidate in real time
• Not easily accessible to public decision-makers
• Lacking a unified, reliable source for regional monitoring

This created a critical gap for the municipality:

• The city's classification under the Plano São Paulo depended directly on accurate occupancy data
• Inaccurate or delayed information could lead to misguided public health decisions or unnecessary economic restrictions
• The local government needed a single, trusted platform to monitor capacity and inform policy actions

As Product Manager, I was responsible for leading the product definition and coordination across technical, institutional, and public stakeholders.

My role included:

• Defining the product vision and scope for a city-wide hospital bed monitoring platform
• Coordinating the integration of data from all public and private hospitals in the region
• Structuring a standardized data model for regular and ICU bed occupancy
• Working closely with engineering teams to ensure reliability, clarity, and usability
• Leading engagement with municipal stakeholders to align the platform with public health and policy needs

The project required fast execution, high data accuracy, and continuous alignment with public-sector requirements under crisis conditions.

After joining Grupo BILD in 2019, I consistently expressed interest in taking on leadership responsibilities within the organization. Alongside my day-to-day product work, I invested in my professional development by completing a specialization in digital product management, launching the group's digital product ecosystem across additional regions, and engaging in a structured mentorship process with my direct manager.

As a result, I was selected to participate in the group's internal leadership and management development program. Following this trajectory, I was invited to temporarily assume a Product Operations–focused role, supporting the growing Innovation area and its multiple product squads.

At that stage, the Innovation team faced a common scaling challenge:

product teams were operating with inconsistent documentation, workflows, and performance visibility, making it difficult to align execution, onboard new members, and assess team capacity.

As the number of squads and Product Managers increased, the lack of standardized processes created friction across the organization:

• Inconsistent documentation formats across squads
• Variability in how product requirements were translated into delivery tasks
• Limited visibility into squad capacity and performance
• High dependency on individual working styles rather than shared standards

Without intervention, this fragmentation risked slowing delivery, reducing clarity for designers and engineers, and limiting leadership's ability to make informed decisions.

In a Product Operations capacity, I worked closely with other Product Managers to standardize product management practices across all innovation squads.

My responsibilities included:

• Designing and implementing standard documentation templates using Notion, including:
  • One-on-one meeting structures
  • Project kickoff and discovery documentation
  • Product scope and initiative tracking
• Establishing a consistent task and delivery structure in ClickUp, standardizing:
  • Card creation and hierarchy
  • Information handoff from Product to Design and Engineering
  • Naming conventions and workflow stages
• Defining performance and capacity indicators to measure squad throughput and utilization
• Acting as a reference point for tooling best practices across the Product team

Through this work, I became recognized internally as a ClickUp power user, which led to direct interaction with the ClickUp team.