I started at WinDifferent, a BairesDev group company, as a PM for a martech product aimed at managing digital acquisition campaigns.
Just as in Red Ventures, I was reporting to a Director who in turn was reporting to the CEO of WinDifferent. To understand what I was doing there, it is necessary to share some context first.
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WinDifferent began its operations by providing lead acquisition for multiple clients, BairesDev being one of them. It was so successful that at a certain point in history, WinDifferent was responsible for a significant part of Baires' revenue, a move that led to its acquisition with the aim of making WinDifferent focus exclusively on Baires.
After a few years, the Baires partners came up with the idea of ​​doing the opposite: unplugging WinDifferent. After all, if WD generates millions via leads for Baires, could it generate millions for other companies too?
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BDevVentures was created as a venture capital investment fund, with the objective of acquiring equity in companies that were successful after testing the WinDifferent product for a period of time free of charge. Sort of a B2B SaaS, but with the difference they were not paying in cash to use the software, but would pay in equity in case it worked.
I was hired at a very recent stage of this plan to create an internal product that would be used by the team that took care of the campaigns for the startups to prototype with the fund, so they could create and manage campaigns for these startups.
At that point, this "campaign managers team" was made up of one person only, who was dealing with something like 10 startups (I was surprised by how fast we would be working with more than 500 customers, and the team responsible for operating campaigns quickly grow from 1 to 20 people).
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I focused my first few weeks on interviewing people and drawing maps of the AS IS x TO BE processes in Miro. In addition to this, I got my hands on the databases to understand how the tables were structured and related to each of the mapped processes.
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When the first developers were hired for my team - so far made of me alone, we made an initial prototype using low-code tools like AppSmith, in order to quickly deliver something for the campaign management team that was starting to grow.
In the meantime, we started developing a proprietary product moving away from the basics CRUD functionalities and working on more complex functionalities that required greater depth of discovery. This was what we called the "Campaign Manager App Team".
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The cool thing is that while the first team was assembled, a second team, was formed in parallel to focus on customer integrations. This is because we got so many leads for our clients using the WinDifferent tool that it made sense to develop integrations with multiple CRMs, in order to allow us to write all leads directly into the partner's database, and also pull some information from CRMs for strategic optimization purposes.
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Finally, at some point, data needs started to appear, but there was no data team. I took advantage of my personal interest and previous experiences to take the lead on this and found the data team, but this is a story that I tell better in the Data Analytics section.
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As a PM, getting a product completely off the ground and formally leading a team from scratch were the coolest challenges I experienced at Baires. After all, it is a unique experience to participate in something from 0 and be able to exercise great influence on the culture, processes, and people from day 1.
As a manager, I had the opportunity to fully implement my philosophy of work, and the collective feedback of the group was that the team worked in great sync, high performance, and happy which made me very proud.