Download CV

About

Cinema, then code, then product. The order matters.

I’m a Portuguese product leader based in Madrid. I studied film, learned to build the web, and found that the interesting problems live where the two meet: making things that work and mean something to the person using them.

Eight years at Nestlé Nespresso, Danone and JTI taught me what scale actually means. It’s not the number of users. It’s the number of decisions you make without knowing the outcome, across 46 markets, four squads and a dozen stakeholders who each have a good reason to want something else.

José Pedro Massena
Madrid, 2026

The longer version

  1. 2016 — 2017Lisbon

    Film school, then a front-end job

    A degree in cinema, video and multimedia. Then I learned to code and worked as a UI designer and front-end developer. Building taught me that shipping is the only thing that matters, and that you learn a product by watching people use it and being wrong about why.

  2. 2017 — 2023Lisbon → Barcelona

    Six years at Nespresso, four jobs

    B2B eCommerce in Portugal, then global eCommerce operations across 72 sites and 46 markets, then Product Owner for web and mobile, then Tribe Lead for IoT with four squads. I went from running storefronts to owning the roadmap for machines that talk to phones. Every step was the same lesson at a bigger scale: standardise the boring parts so the interesting ones can move.

  3. 2023 — 2024Barcelona

    Danone and composable commerce

    Recruited to lead the move from a monolith to MACH across brands and markets. Set a two-year platform vision, led a team of PMs, cut manual operations by 70%. The best product decisions I made there sat at the intersection of technical constraint and commercial reality; the worst ignored one of the two.

  4. 2024 — nowMadrid

    JTI, and a device that has to pair the first time

    I own the global Ploom App end to end: iOS, Android, PWA, BLE pairing, OTA firmware, compliance in 30+ markets. On the side I write on ProductPulse, founded urbanrace.io, and am finishing an Executive MBA at EAE; until 2024 I also taught at UIC Barcelona. Doing the job is one thing. Teaching it forces you to understand it; writing about it forces you to defend it; building your own forces you to live with your decisions.

How I work

Six things I keep coming back to.

Products that move metrics, not products that win design awards.

The redesign only counts if the number moved. If it didn’t, we learned something, and that’s the write-up.

Specs short. Conversations frequent. Demos every Friday.

A long PRD is usually a substitute for a decision nobody wanted to make out loud.

Roadmaps are bets. Frame them as bets.

Confidence levels, kill criteria, and a date to revisit. A roadmap without those is a wish list.

Most “AI features” are solutions looking for problems.

The ones that aren’t are usually invisible to the user. I use GenAI daily in PM workflows; I ship it in products rarely, deliberately.

Hire people smarter than you. Then trust them.

Directly managed 2–3 POs/BAs, led 20+ engineers and designers. The job is to remove ambiguity, not to add opinions.

Teaching is the fastest way to find out what you don’t understand.

If a framework doesn’t survive a room of 25 graduate students, it isn’t ready for a boardroom either.

Teaching

UIC Barcelona, graduate level, 2023–2024

Advanced and Digital Marketing, with labs in analytics. Hands-on labs over slides, capstone projects with real briefs and budgets, 1:1 coaching on pitching and hard trade-offs. Today I’m available for corporate workshops (1–3 days) and guest lectures.

Teaching and workshops →

Writing

ProductPulse, every 2–3 weeks

Essays on product management, AI and teams, written from inside global organisations.

Recent essays →

Building

urbanrace.io

Gift a race to a runner without picking the date for them. It exists because I run, and because I like shipping things nobody asked me to.

See the project →

Now

Updated July 2026

Work
Leading the Ploom App roadmap at JTI. Focus this quarter: the pairing flow and the OTA firmware update experience across iOS and Android.
Studying
Executive MBA at EAE / Universidad de Barcelona. Currently deep in the strategy module.
Reading
The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen · Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal
Building
urbanrace: expanding the race catalogue across new markets.
Outside work
Training for an autumn half marathon. Last city visited: Lisbon. Cooking obsession of the month: bacalhau à brás.