Gabriel AbreuHow I could provide ROI right away
The biggest problem for most teams today is not the lack of features. It's an excess of steps.
And please don't confuse "more features" with "more steps." Users don't need more features to click on. They need fewer things to think about. (Honestly, so do most of us.)
Here're two questions I'd start within' in my first 30 days.
- What does the development team have that the marketing team doesn’t (i.e. how did they ship so much dev while the marketing team can’t keep up)?
- What are the biggest pain points in terms of where users get stuck and what they wish they were building?
Intro
Hi, I'm Gabe! Lately I've been doing a lot of agentic plumbing to design clear & tasteful AI products & workflows.
For 15 years, I've worked somewhere between how things work and why they matter: product marketer, growth manager, social lead, and all things marketing.
Now I get to apply that marketing vertical as an AI Applied Software Engineer. I design, create, and manage complex systems, apps & products that people can easily understand & love.
A barbecue in Rio
Picture this: a nice BBQ with my childhood friend Gabriel Paz. Beer, Picanha, and farofinha (the traditional side dish to Picanha here in Brazil, if you've never had it).
Gabriel is a painter and drawing teacher who lives in Botafogo. He had no website to speak of.
So the problem was that people only found him through word of mouth: his neighbors and friends told their friends, who told students at other places, month to month.
To solve this puzzle, I approached it like I would any software engineering system. First, the thinking loop. Then the plumbing.
So, I first started by implementing a simple one-page site for Gabriel with the colors used for the site based on his paintings.
Then there’s the SEO. The plan:
→ Find older, well-linked pages on the web, write a better version, and try to swap links and references from those sites.
→ Then unblock & fix stuck LocalBusiness structured data / meta tags.
→ To only then, adapt all of it for Gabriel’s new websit & tweak the whole flow to target the experimental WhatsApp-based trial class CTA.
A few weeks later it had grown so much that he wanted me to put him on a waiting list as he couldn’t take on any more students lol.
The Work Form Test
I took the Parallel WorkForm test to see where my current skills and experience map to practical ROI.
Apparently, I'm a "Scientist." And ngl, I loved this framing!
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A few notes in that report that I loved & can totally relate to:
→ "Show me the data, and I'll change my mind in a minute."
→ "The interesting part is the anomaly."
→ "I don't guess. I test."
That's SOO accurate. 🎯
Honestly, the wires were plugged in years ago, from testing things in public and failing (L) & learning (W) along the way.
Check the full Parallel WorkForm result here if you're curious.
What happens in the first month after hiring me?
It starts with you. Outline one task your team does every week and hates. I'll help identify the decisions being made at each step, and I'll come with a few questions. For example: is there a field that never changes for the call? If so, why is it there?
This is usually where most marketing, sales & data (MSD) teams stop handing off work between functions. Instead, they spend hours copying and pasting from different data sources to build reports they could have built in a spreadsheet.
And that's exactly where applied AI software engineering helps. By connecting the dots.
Because a message from marketing that isn't relevant to the salespeople using it is worthless. Salespeople without data are guessing. And data that only describes the past won't help a company make strategic calls about future growth.
I've seen a lot of companies invest heavily in AI to speed up growth. Very few have designed how marketing, sales, and data should work together to create better narratives, more effective & on-brand content, and, in turn, sharper positioning & messaging.
That's where the biggest bottleneck in B2B growth still lives: the people who understand AI don't understand the business, and the people who understand the business don't understand AI.
Conclusion
So, why is someone like me a valuable asset for your team, and how could I provide ROI right away? It's as simple as this:
- Building a full diagnosis, mapping the critical points, and presenting a detailed improvement plan
- Identifying the problem, presenting the solution, and suggesting the fix (or the ask)
- Always asking, "What decision does the user need to make here?"
- Removing everything that doesn't help that decision
- Making the positioning so sharp that the CTA is impossible to miss
- Designing new creative ideas around your product or services
- Checking that a new user would understand the product in under 5 seconds
And the list goes upwards and onwards...
And ofc, the most important part: before any agentic plumbing gets built, there's always a human gate in the loop as the final eval for anything that comes down to taste & judgment.
The reviewer always has one place (Linear tickets, for example) to follow the project end to end: every gate where a decision is needed, and every source behind it.
This is no magic, fren. It's all about:
- Being the bridge between marketing and engineering.
- Between clear and complex.
- Between a working system anyone can manage and use, and one that breaks in production after the handoff.
Aaand... that's exactly where I could provide ROI right away by connecting those dots for you. 🤝
Liked this? Find out what I'm building here. Follow me on X at @gabe_onchain.