Romulo Braga had a favorite way to end an email. In late 2016, after a win by his teams, he began signing off with a hashtag: Always Be Shipping. It carried the pleasure of getting something into the world. Then, in a meeting several years later, he heard it interpreted as a repetitive sequence of coding, testing and deploying. A celebration had arrived as an instruction manual.
He changed the phrase. Always Be Building made room for the work he thought the old sign-off had failed to convey: forming a vision, making connections and giving people a shared understanding of what they were trying to do. The edit was small. The reason was worth an essay. A product leader had discovered a communication problem in his own communication, which is an admirably awkward place to find one.
Braga published the explanation in August 2020. He treated the misunderstanding as something to learn from. A phrase could feel perfectly clear to its author and carry a different meaning to everyone else. Anyone who has sent an email with absolute confidence and spent the afternoon explaining it will recognize the predicament.
A career across other people’s complicated work
His professional background crosses digital banking and payments, property software and legal technology. He describes work involving fintech and mobile at Capital One, embedded finance and payments at AppFolio, and legal technology and generative AI at Jusbrasil. His experience includes product management, director and vice-president roles, alongside an engineering background.
Those domains put software in contact with consequential, everyday tasks. A payment has to arrive. A banking experience has to make sense to the person using it. A professional tool has to fit into work that already has its own habits and obligations. The attraction of a new feature can wear off quickly when it creates one more thing to understand.
Across his public biography, Braga emphasizes learning unfamiliar domains and managing both teams and product portfolios. That helps explain the breadth of his writing. He moves between business models, team communication and individual career choices. A feature can become a business question; a business question can become a conversation about the people expected to answer it.
“Be interested in order to become interesting.”
Romulo Braga, Product Rumble, 2019
The half-hour offer
In September 2020, Braga introduced Product Mayday. The starting offer was practical: dedicate a portion of his workweek to short, one-to-one conversations with product managers and people hoping to become product managers. He would also interview others and publish the conversations. Experience would have an appointment time.
The larger idea involved connecting people across cultures, geographies and fields. Braga imagined a fintech founder learning from an experience far outside the usual American technology-company circuit. The first version could be much simpler: a person with a question and someone willing to listen.
His motivation included gratitude for people who had coached and mentored him. He also acknowledged his own interest in learning through these exchanges. Listening, processing a question and explaining a point of view could teach the mentor something. There is a pleasing lack of ceremony in that arrangement. Both people have a reason to turn up.
Three conversations, three different doors
The interview series began in October 2020 with Nick Norcross, a former colleague who had joined Tala as a product director. Braga used the career move as an opening to ask about evaluating opportunities, interviewing and entering a new role. The conversation allowed Norcross to explain how his priorities had changed over time.
One theme was understanding how a financial business actually makes money. Another was listening during an interview to decide whether the people and environment suited you. Braga’s questions created room for both the commercial detail and the personal decision. An offer letter can resolve a hiring process while leaving the more interesting questions open.
In February 2021, he published a conversation with Bogdan Nedanov, then a retail data-science leader at Shopify. They had worked together earlier in Nedanov’s career. An initial outline about working with product managers widened into data science, remote work and Shopify.
That expansion is revealing. Braga followed the guest’s experience beyond the boundary of his own job family. Product work happens alongside people trained to see different things in the same problem. A data scientist’s account belongs in that conversation. The interview made a colleague’s developing expertise available to readers who had never shared their workplace.
March brought Rodrigo Iannuzzi, a product lead formerly at Nubank. Braga had noticed Iannuzzi’s announcement of a sabbatical on LinkedIn and wanted to understand the trajectory behind it. Their discussion covered product careers, startups and the Brazilian bank.
Braga’s introduction also expressed pride in his Brazilian roots. Here, an international career was an invitation to ask questions. Iannuzzi’s decisions, rather than a familiar company name alone, supplied the interview’s substance. The series made professional change discussable: why someone joins, why someone leaves, and what they carry into the next chapter.
Product Mayday / Published conversations
- October 2020Nick Norcross
Fintech career decisions - February 2021Bogdan Nedanov
Data science and remote work - March 2021Rodrigo Iannuzzi
Startups and product careers
Different disciplines. A shared willingness to explain the work.
A bookshelf with a return address
Braga added another public learning project in 2021: write down the takeaways from the nonfiction books he read. The Year of Books essays covered Andrew Grove’s High Output Management, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s No Rules Rules, David Epstein’s Range and Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers. Reading would produce something another person could use.
In the Grove essay, his attention settled on the everyday mechanics of management: explaining context, choosing objectives, developing people and preparing for one-to-one meetings. He discussed the possibility that time spent helping one colleague could affect much more work afterward. The reader gets a view of management through preparation and influence, rather than through the manager’s crowded diary.
The Netflix book gave him an occasion to discuss candid feedback and the relationship between freedom and shared context. He also took issue with the expectation that innovation should appear on schedule, as though a meeting invitation could summon an idea. Setting aside thinking time might help. Expecting a valuable invention by the end of a forty-five-minute slot was another matter.
His notes on Range explored the usefulness of learning across domains. He urged readers to examine problems before reaching for familiar procedures, and to consider how someone from another field might approach them. That interest fits the range of guests in Product Mayday: finance, data science and startup product work become neighboring sources of experience.
With 7 Powers, the emphasis moved to business strategy and the conditions that let a company sustain an advantage. Braga paired his own takeaways with further reading from Sachin Rekhi and Gib Biddle. He was comfortable pointing readers toward other people’s explanations. The essay could serve as a starting point, with the reading continuing elsewhere.
His June 2020 response to The Fearless Organization had already put listening and speaking up at the center of his leadership thinking. He emphasized asking questions, appreciating contributions and showing the behavior one hoped to encourage in others. These are modest actions to describe. Doing them repeatedly, especially when a colleague disagrees, gives them their weight.
The person outside the headshot
Braga brought these concerns to Georgetown MBA students in September 2019 in a presentation he called Product Rumble. Inspired by Brené Brown, it examined difficulties that product managers encounter in their careers. He later published two essays from the material.
For an exercise in seeing the person behind the résumé, he placed his professional profile beside a collage of his life. He described himself as a husband and father, a soccer enthusiast, an aspiring runner and someone fond of summer, margaritas and coffee. The collection included friends, family and technology experiments. The headshot had rather a lot of competition.
In the companion essay, he described a week at the University of Virginia’s Darden School with leadership professor Jim Clawson. The experience prompted him to think about a personal charter: the purpose, values and principles that help someone make decisions. He connected that exercise with leading teams and looking further ahead.
He also made time management conspicuously concrete. Reflection needed a place on the calendar. Learning needed an ongoing practice. His advice had the feel of someone trying to keep worthwhile activities from becoming permanent intentions. A calendar can be a rather blunt instrument, but it does have the virtue of asking when.
A place at somebody else’s table
His public mentoring profiles now identify him as Founder - Product Solopreneur at Mayday Labs. ADPList offers a place to find him as a mentor; Topmate describes his product-building and advisory background. The combination keeps independent building and conversation with other practitioners close together.
There is also a public glimpse of him contributing to a wider learning community. Ethan Evans named Braga among volunteer judges for course scholarships, identifying him as a founder and product mentor. The group helped select scholarship recipients and contributed through activities such as sharing knowledge and reviewing career materials.
It is an ordinary role with a concrete purpose: spend judgment on somebody else’s opportunity. That sits comfortably beside the interviews and reading notes. The work gets another audience; the audience gets something it can act on.
The changed sign-off remains a useful detail to carry through this portrait. Braga noticed that a phrase he enjoyed had lost part of its meaning. He gave it a second draft. Building leaves room for that moment: hear what came across, reconsider the words, and try again.