Maite
Telleria

Truora's first product was not a dashboard. It was a chat. Maite and her co-founders - CEO Daniel Bilbao, CTO David Cuadrado (ex-Twilio), and Cesar Pino (also ex-Twilio) - built a WhatsApp bot that ran criminal and background checks for exactly two customers in Colombia. No website. No branding. Just a chat thread that returned data from official government sources.

The insight was geographic and pragmatic. In Latin America, WhatsApp is not a social app - it is infrastructure. It is how businesses communicate, how gig workers receive job offers, how banks send alerts. Building a verification product that lived inside WhatsApp meant zero download friction, zero onboarding friction, zero UX learning curve.

Y Combinator saw the bet and backed it. Truora entered the accelerator and used the momentum to expand beyond Colombia into Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Chile. Each new country brought new data sources, new compliance requirements, and new definitions of what "verified" means.

Maite's role during this expansion was to keep the product coherent across all of it - to resist the gravitational pull of bespoke client requests and build generalizable solutions instead. She describes the shift as moving from "saying yes to everything" to a TAM-first analysis of which features actually move the market.

Maite has a phrase for the tension every product leader faces: "We have the perfect plan, the perfect roadmap, the perfect idea, and the perfect strategy. And we change them constantly."

At Truora, the discipline is not about rigidity - it is about who has the authority to override the roadmap. Senior PMs set direction within company objectives. If someone wants to make a major pivot, they need the roadmap owner's sign-off. Monthly reviews, bi-weekly check-ins, and clear ownership layers let the company move fast without fragmenting the product.

She describes the early days as a necessary phase of saying yes to everything - building custom features for whoever would pay - then consciously shifting to a model where customer requests get translated into generalizable solutions. The discipline to stop solving one customer's problem and start solving the market's problem is, by her account, one of the hardest transitions in scaling a SaaS company.

On short-term vs. long-term prioritization, she is direct: "Sometimes, depending if you're raising a round or thinking about winning one big customer, you prioritize for the short-term. But you always need to have someone thinking about prioritizing for the next five years."

The move from sole PM to CPO required building a product organization from scratch - hiring senior PMs, defining ownership boundaries, setting review cadences, and learning to enable rather than execute. It is a transition she has documented publicly, most notably in her Latitud podcast appearance and her February 2024 session on The Frye Show.

The anti-perfectionism is not carelessness - it is a shipping philosophy. Truora's early advantage in Latin America came from being first and fast, not from being polished. Maite credits the culture of launching imperfect products and iterating as a core competitive asset.