A recent post by Fernando Liberato, CRO of Vela LatAm, caught my attention because it summarized very well the moment we’re living through:

AI amplifies efficiency, and customer focus creates durable advantage.

Knowing your customer deeply has always been important. With AI leveling the execution capacity of every company, it has become critical.

The cost of not knowing your customer

In my latest book, Digital Transformation and Product Culture, I tell the story of Tok&Stok, a Brazilian furniture retailer that illustrates well the cost of not knowing your customer. Between 2020 and 2022, the company decided to remove the two-price display from their e-commerce, a price including delivery and assembly, and a price without those services, and started offering them as add-ons. The goal was to increase revenue by showing customers that these services were affordable and worth adding. The result never came.

When the Group Product Manager for B2C channels went to talk to customers who weren’t buying the assembly service, he discovered that most of them didn’t want it, not because they found it expensive, but because they considered assembling furniture a hobby or already had someone they trusted for the job. The right question had never been asked before the decision was made.

What increases the odds of success?

In a world where any company can scale with AI, from software development to customer support and sales, those with the highest odds of success will be the ones constantly seeking to better understand their customers, the problems they have, and their motivation to solve them.

The challenge is that talking to customers has always been hard to scale. It requires time, scheduling, interviews, manual tabulation, and effort. In practice, it happens less than it should.

I’ve always recommended that the PMs at the companies I work with talk to their users. Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test is mandatory reading for anyone working with products. I do this myself frequently, and I’m always surprised by what these conversations reveal. As WhatsApp has grown, I’ve been recommending it for these conversations — it’s less intrusive than a formal interview.

When I had questions about AstroLumi, a conversational astrology product I’m building with Anderson Borges, I did the same: I collected names and phone numbers from some users and started talking to them over WhatsApp.
That’s when the idea came. Could we build an agent that conducted this research autonomously, without me needing to run each conversation manually?

Anderson and I started building ReveLumi.

Knowing your customer: the advantage that can’t be copied

You define the hypothesis or topic you want to investigate. ReveLumi conducts the conversations with your users via WhatsApp and returns insights that are already organized and actionable. No interview scheduling. No manual tabulation. No bottlenecks from depending on a researcher’s availability.

We applied ReveLumi to AstroLumi itself to understand why users who had shown interest weren’t purchasing the paid deepening. Our hypothesis was that it was a usability problem. The report pointed to the real issue: lack of clarity about the value of the paid service compared to the free experience. We made changes based on that finding, and sales grew.

Watching the first conversations happen in real time, with organized insights arriving without manual effort, feels like magic. It’s ReveLumi in action.

In a world where execution is leveled, deep knowledge of your customer is the only asset your competitor can’t copy.

That’s what ReveLumi is about.

ReveLumi currently operates in Portuguese. If you have a use case that requires another language, get in touch, and we’ll evaluate how to support you.

If you work with products: https://revelumi.com

Masterclass: Why Strategy Doesn’t Reach the Product

In this 3-hour masterclass, Paulo Caroli and I will present a practical model to connect product vision, strategy, OKRs, and discovery to the real work of product teams.

The goal is to understand how to translate strategic direction into real product decisions.

The Masterclass will be in Portuguese.

More information and registration:

https://gyaco.com/masterclass

Workshops, coaching, and advisory services

I’ve been helping companies and their leaders (CPOs, heads of product, CTOs, CEOs, tech founders, and heads of digital transformation) bridge the gap between business and technology through workshops, coaching, and advisory services on product management and digital transformation.

Gyaco Podcasts

At Gyaco, we believe in the power of conversations to spark reflection and learning. That’s why we have “Product in Focus” (Produto em Pauta in Portuguese), a podcast that explores the world of product management from different angles:

• Mentoring Sessions: In this series, I share real mentoring conversations with product people. One person’s questions are often the questions of many. Together, we explore concrete challenges and turn experience into practical insights you can apply to your own context.
• No Filters: In this series of episodes, Fabio Duarte, Paulo Caroli and I have candid conversations about product, technology and the real tensions we are seeing inside organizations.
• Beyond the Buzzwords: In this series, Felipe Castro and I demystify product terms with real examples from our clients.

Available on YouTube and Spotify. Recorded in Portuguese, with English subtitles on YouTube.

Product Management Books

Do you work with digital products? Do you want to know more about managing a digital product to increase its chances of success, solve its user’s problems, and achieve the company objectives? Check out my Digital Product Management books, where I share what I learned during my 30+ years of experience in creating and managing digital products:

• Digital transformation and product culture: How to put technology at the center of your company’s strategy
• Leading Product Development: The art and science of managing product teams
• Product Management: How to increase the chances of success of your digital product
• Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products