Breaking
David Pereira: 10 million readers. One rule - no BS. "Backlog items age like milk, not wine." Highest audience rating at Productized 2025 Untrapping Product Teams - now in print from Pearson Munich-based. Brazilian-born. Globally unimpressed by roadmap theater. 23,000+ weekly newsletter subscribers and counting Co-author of the Agile Product Manifesto 15,000+ course students across 120 countries David Pereira: 10 million readers. One rule - no BS. "Backlog items age like milk, not wine." Highest audience rating at Productized 2025 Untrapping Product Teams - now in print from Pearson Munich-based. Brazilian-born. Globally unimpressed by roadmap theater. 23,000+ weekly newsletter subscribers and counting Co-author of the Agile Product Manifesto 15,000+ course students across 120 countries
David Pereira - Product Coach and Author
Product Rebel Profile / Munich Edition

DavidPereira

The Man Who Added "Trash" to the Roadmap - and Won

From a failed Booking.com interview to 10 million readers - the product world's most useful contrarian.

Product Coach Book Author Keynote Speaker Anti-BS Crusader
10M+ Readers Reached
23K+ Newsletter Subs
88K+ LinkedIn Followers

He coaches the teams that ship the things you actually use.

There is a version of product management where every quarter looks like a PowerPoint — colorful, confident, and completely detached from what customers need. David Pereira spent years watching that version win internal politics while killing real value. He decided to do something about it.

Today, Pereira is one of the most-read voices in product management anywhere on the internet. His weekly newsletter, Untrapping Product Teams, lands in 23,000+ inboxes every week with the kind of clarity that comes from someone who has worked in the trenches across Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Germany. He does not theorize. He has run the meetings. He has sat through the standups where nothing moved. He knows exactly where the time goes.

His clients are global. His coaching calendar is full. His message is simple to state and genuinely hard to practice: cut the theater, create the value, ship the thing.

Based in Munich since leaving Brazil six-plus years ago, Pereira brings the kind of cultural fluency that makes him effective with distributed, international teams. He left on curiosity alone. "My curiosity was stronger than my fear," he has said. That line is not a slogan. It is a decision he made on a specific day about a specific flight.

Backlog items age like milk, not wine.

- David Pereira, the line that 10,000 PMs screenshot every year

Before product coaching became his full-time work, Pereira served as CEO and CPO at Omoqo GmbH, a Munich-based maritime software company, where he came in as a consultant and stayed to run the place. Before that, he led product teams at Virtual Identity, a product development agency, where colleagues called him Craftmaster - a title that sounds invented but apparently stuck.

He ran two businesses in Brazil before any of this. One of them moved $200 million USD per year. He does not lead with this fact. He leads with what he got wrong.

17+ Years in tech & product
300+ Articles published
15K+ Course students
120+ Countries reached

He reached 10 million readers before publishing his first traditional book. Most authors do it the other way around.

The Rejection That Built a Philosophy

In product circles, the Booking.com interview is the thing people know about David Pereira before they know anything else. He applied for a Product Manager role at one of Europe's most rigorous product organizations. He failed.

What he took from that failure was not wounded pride. It was clarity. He realized that his Product Owner role had been fundamentally misunderstood - by him, by his organization, by the whole ecosystem of Scrum ceremonies that had given everyone a sense of motion without any real direction.

He was not a product manager. He was a project manager with a different title and a backlog. The distinction sounds pedantic until you sit with what it means: he had been optimizing for the wrong things, measuring the wrong outcomes, and running the wrong conversations with his teams.

Most people quietly update their LinkedIn and move on. Pereira wrote about it. Then he kept writing. And writing. Until 10 million people had read something he put out.

The anti-BS stance that now defines his brand did not emerge from some workshop on authentic communication. It came from the specific embarrassment of realizing, through a failed job interview, that he had been doing it wrong - and then deciding to make that realization useful to everyone else who was also doing it wrong but had not yet noticed.

Bullshit Management, Defined

Pereira coined the term "Bullshit Management" not as a provocation but as a diagnostic:

  • Doing things that create no value but drain energy
  • Optimizing for roadmap completion instead of outcomes
  • Running features through a pipeline instead of solving problems
  • Confusing motion with progress
  • Treating the backlog as a sacred document instead of a working hypothesis
  • Measuring story points when you should measure customer change

Bullshit Management is the art of doing things that create no value but drain your energy. The more bullshit you handle, the less value you can create.

- David Pereira

The book that named the problem.

Untrapping Product Teams
Simplify the Complexity of Creating Digital Products
David Pereira
Pearson / Addison-Wesley Professional
Untrapping Product Teams

Three parts. One argument. Product teams are not failing because they lack talent or frameworks - they are failing because they are trapped by the wrong habits, incentives, and metrics. Part one names the traps. Part two shows the exits. Part three explains how to stay out once you are free. Pearson gave it a cover. 23,000 newsletter subscribers had already pre-tested every chapter.

Buy on Amazon -> Read on O'Reilly ->

The lines product teams screenshot.

Product development isn't about exhaustive planning or rigid frameworks. It's about adaptability, small wins, and making meaningful progress.

The art of uncovering what drives value, enabling teams to create solutions that improve customers' lives and benefit the business.

A 17-year run from code to coach.

Pereira started as a software developer - six years across the auto industry and public sector, working in Brazil, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. He learned how systems break. He learned how requirements get lost in translation between the people who need things and the people who build them.

That gap became his career. He crossed over to product management and spent the next decade working through automotive, trade marketing, e-commerce, and marketplace environments. He taught at two Brazilian universities. He co-founded businesses. He moved to Munich.

The newsletter launched in 2022. The book followed. The coaching practice grew. The conference invitations multiplied - and his keynotes started earning the kind of perfect scores that conference organizers frame and hang.

Writing / Content10M+ Readers
Keynote SpeakingGlobal Stages
Coaching / AdvisoryFull Calendar
Online Education15K+ Students
Newsletter Growth23K Subscribers
Early Career
Software developer - 6 years in auto industry and public sector across Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic
Mid-Career
Transitioned to product management across automotive, e-commerce, marketplace sectors; lectures at FIAP and Universidade Anhembi Morumbi
~2017-2019
Head of Product Management at Virtual Identity (Munich); recognized as Craftmaster
~2019-2023
CEO & CPO at Omoqo GmbH - maritime software company, Munich
2020
Begins writing prolifically on Medium. Reaches 10M+ readers. Named Top Writer in Product Management and Agile
2021
Co-authors the Agile Product Manifesto. Emerges as a keynote speaker
2022
Launches Untrapping Product Teams newsletter on Substack. Becomes Miroverse Ambassador
2024
Publishes Untrapping Product Teams with Pearson/Addison-Wesley. Keynote at Productized Conference earns highest audience rating
2025
Global coaching, keynote speaking, newsletter at 23K+ subscribers

What the scoreboard looks like.

On Stage

  • Productized Conference 2025 - Keynote - Highest audience rating of event
  • Product Camp - Opening keynote - 1,800+ attendees
  • Digital Products Conference, Vilnius - Closing keynote - Perfect 6/6 score
  • Just Product 2024 - "Are You Doing Product Management or Bullshit Management?"
  • Product Drive 2024 - Featured speaker
  • Impact Conf 2021 - "Agile Manifesto is Outdated! We Need a Product Manifesto!"
  • Serious Scrum UnConference 2022 - "Product Owner Beyond Scrum"
  • Rocket Day - Talk on the Agile Product Manifesto

The details that explain everything.

His signature Miro template is "Now, Next, Later, Trash." Every other version of this template stops at three columns. Pereira added "Trash." It became one of Miroverse's most-used templates. The fourth column matters more than the first three.

He loves math since childhood - still works through crosswords and logic puzzles in his spare time. He came to product management as a developer. The rigor shows in how he frames problems: measurable outcomes, clear hypotheses, falsifiable assumptions.

He left Brazil on curiosity, not a job offer. Six years later, he is coaching product teams from Munich for clients across four continents. The curiosity paid out.

Six things that do not fit anywhere else.

01

He reached 10 million readers before publishing his first traditional book. Most authors do it the other way around.

02

"Backlog items age like milk, not wine." - six words that circulate product management Twitter every three months, sometimes without attribution.

03

He co-wrote the Agile Product Manifesto with a global group of product professionals - a document designed to update the 2001 original for the reality of digital product work.

04

His product courses have reached students in 120+ countries. That is most of the countries that exist on Earth.

05

He coined "Anti-BS Product Management" as a rallying cry - not a brand play. He had a word for what he saw teams doing wrong and he named it directly.

06

Before product management, he ran a Brazilian business generating $200 million USD per year. He does not put this in his bio. He talks about the Booking.com interview he failed instead.