How do you make product operations successful? | Patrícia Cadete + Anabela Cesário

In this episode, Phil Hornby speaks with Anabela Cesário and Patrícia Cadete from OutSystems about what makes product operations successful. They dive into how product ops acts as an enabler—not a gatekeeper—focusing on collaboration, simplification, and impact. From driving adoption through co-creation to building an internal academy and operational dashboards, they share concrete practices and philosophies to scale product organizations without bureaucracy.

Anabela Cesário is a Product Management leader and coach passionate about helping teams build products that customers love. With 20+ years of experience, she has successfully built both products and teams from scratch for startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Currently, she serves as the VP of Product Management at OutSystems, reporting to the CPTO. Anabela leads multiple teams, including Product & Engineering Operations (an award-winning team), Product Ownership, Technical Knowledge, and Field Strategy & Support.

She enjoys engaging in discussions on fresh starts, product management, operations, scaling teams, and yoga!

Patrícia is a storyteller by training and by heart. After some time as a TV Journalist, she found a different path in the intersection of all things people, product, and marketing over the past 10+ years.

At OutSystems, she leads R&D Employee Experience, overseeing technical learning, internal communications, and team engagement initiatives. Before, she led their Product Management Academy, helping to grow the next generation of product leaders.

Before OutSystems, Patrícia led the global employer branding strategy at Feedzai, driving brand awareness and recruitment marketing efforts. Her career also includes pivotal roles in small startups, where she contributed as a product manager, account manager, and marketing manager.

Patrícia is also passionate about education and sharing her knowledge, teaching the “Storytelling for Builders” course in the Executive Training Advanced Programs at Carnegie Mellon Portugal Academy.

Here is an audio-only version if that’s your preferred medium - and you can access it through your favourite podcasting platform if you prefer (Apple, Spotify, Amazon).

How do you make product operations successful? | Patrícia Cadete + Anabela Cesário

Patrícia Cadete, Anabela Cesário and Phil Hornby

In the next episode we are talking to Topher Fox, Director of Product Operations @ Aerospike. So watch out for Season 2 - Episode 7!

• Transcript

  - The bad thing about process is when we are actually keeping it very heavy, bureaucratic, and that's not the point of product operations. We want to make people's life easier, not harder. So if we are adding steps instead of removing them, if we are creating bureaucracy instead of removing it, if we're creating misalignment instead of building bridges of communication and alignment, then something is not adding right? So that is not working.

  - We'll try to design processes really simple. And the way we as a team look at processes, always optimise for the.

  - Welcome to "Talking Roadmaps," where we, this season, are talking about product operations. Today, I'm joined by Patricia Cadete and Anabela Cesario. Anabela, can you introduce yourself? Phil, for having me here? It's a pleasure to be here. A bit about myself. I have IT management degree. I work more than 15 years in consultancy. And then in 2026, I believe, I was invited to join OutSystems, change life from consultancy to this product atmosphere that I love. Right since then, I started in engineering. I bootstrap the first product ownership area, then I moved to product management, in 2020 I bootstrap the first product operations area. And currently I'm executive vice president of product management. And one of my areas is product operations and engineering operations.

  - Patricia, what about yourself?

  - Different background, and hi, Phil. I started as a TV journalist and then I moved into the tech startup scene in Portugal. First doing a bit of product management, account management, a bit of everything because we were a very small startup. And then I ended up in the middle of something that I really love, which is people communication and brands, where I was doing employer branding at another Portuguese startup. Then Anabela kind of kidnapped me to build what we call the the B2B product management academy at OutSystems. It was an amazing project. Currently, inside the product ops team, I'm leading the product group employee experience. And I have topics such as technical learning and development, internal comms, as well as well engagement.

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  - It's interesting 'cause yeah, I mean one of my favourite customers is in a different city in Portugal, up in Porto. And I know I was there recently for a product weekend, and I ran into one of your team, actually one of the designers from OutSystems at the event. And I know some of you have been taking part in some of those events as well. So it's a small world. So Patricia, maybe you can start us out with answering, why do companies need product ops?

  - I think about the way that we operate. Everything is moving so fast. Everything is getting so complex day by day. There's a lot of stakeholders or partners that we need to be aligned with. And the fast pace of our industries, well, doesn't help. So there are a lot of things that get lost in translation or they start to get forgotten. And sometimes things might not be that important, but when you stack them all together, all of a sudden efficiently gets broken somehow along the way. The way that I like to see product ops, it's sort of the glue that holds teams together, product teams together. Particularly now that our team is engineering and product operations, we see it more and more as we are that enablement partner that is helping product teams to be more effective, to be more efficient, to streamline processes, overall to be better, to feel more empowered more easily.

  - I mean, that reminds me a lot of, your sales operations has been around for a lot longer, and that's all about the sales team, be more effective, more efficient. And I mean, I remember as a product leader when effectively I was doing a lot of the product ops, 'cause it existed forever, we just didn't have a name for it. And I know, Anabela, you've got a perspective on kind of engineering ops and product ops and the need for them both. So what did Patricia miss? And maybe you can add that engineering ops layer on top as well.

  - I can add the communication and alignment. Ops, at least at OutSystems, communication is a very, very core area for us. So as a product company, product management and engineering are kind of in the centre. So we invest a lot of improving the communication with stakeholders like solution architects, sales people, marketing, engineering. So I would say that communication, streamlining processes, creating very simple processes to help us communicate, really important for us.

  - Okay, so we're starting to kinda get into what it is that product ops do. So Anabela, maybe you can start us out there, kind of what is product ops, then?

  - What is product ops? I think product ops, it depends on the size of the company and type of the company, where you are. You see different implementations of product operations. I can share what it is for us. For us at OutSystems, collaboration with the product management team to improve their lives, to remove from them all the bureaucratic work, all the heavy processes, and allow them to focus on the core things that are really important for a PM, spend time with customers and also invest in the product, right? So I would say that for us, it's mainly improve the efficiency of the product management team and also the collaboration, as I said with the key areas of the organisation.

  - So yes, we use the P word, the process word. I mean Marty Cagan, that's probably his biggest kind of criticism of product operations. It creates process people. And sometimes process kinda creates this control layer, I think. So tell me about that. How do you balance that?

  - It's very interesting discussion when we think about process as a rigid thing. Process is a bad word in product operations. Every time someone says process, people get stiff, people get stiff, but I mean, it just works. And you can have multiple meanings depending on the person that is implementing said process. It's the product operations versus product enablement, because it sounds better, it looks better, it feels better. Suddenly people are more at ease with enablements versus operations because operation also carries a very strong stance, carry meaning, and that's a very important thing to have in mind. The bad thing about process is when we are actually very heavy, bureaucratic, and that's not the point of product operations. We want to make people's life easier, not harder. So if we are adding steps instead of removing them, if we are creating bureaucracy instead of removing it, if we are creating misalignment instead of building bridges of communication and alignment, then something is not adding right? So that is not working. So that is it. For me, okay, yes, some product ops folks, but I don't consider them product ops folks if they are not using process in the right sense. Maybe they are not co-creating things with the product managers, with engineers. They are think, or doing what they think it's right, but they are not thinking about their audience. They are not looking at things with a data-driven approach. They are trying to improve, but with kind of a naive point of view sometimes. So that's the way I look at the word process or even operations.

  - I have to agree. I used to be an operations manager and my job was about process within the organisation, and it was all about how do I make it right sized and right communicated and tailored to each context, not this is the big way we must do everything.

  - I did this at my previous company, it works so well. I will just replicate it here because I mean, it had a huge return on investment at my previous company. So definitely it'll work here at this company that has a different size, that operates in a different way, that a different department is leading, decision making happens in a different, I mean we all know this.

  - Let me add something how we do it at OutSystems. So as Patricia said, we try to design processes really simple. And the way we as a team look at process is always optimise for the main things. We always design the process to represent 70%, 75% of the reality, and they exclude the exceptions. So these make it completely simple. And also whenever we design a process, we bring a champion from the area that we want to collaborate with. For instance, if we are designing a product management process and interaction with product marketing, we bring them to design the process with us. So in the end, if you make it simple and work with them, from our experience, it has been key for them. The process that we adopt, that is also very important as a product operations area, adoption.

  - Interact with them as well. Like, what is the feedback, what are you feeling? Is this working, is it not working? What can we do to improve it? We're always listening to them. Even a couple of weeks back, we ended up a new round of interviews. So we interviewed a lot of folks getting feedback on the things that we need to improve this year. So it's always happening. It's a cycle

  - That sounds like quite a hard and quite skillful job. What makes a great product operations manager then?

  - Manager or it could be an individual contributor, right? You are talking about operation person.

  - Yes, and well, in fact that's interesting, yeah, 'cause a bit like a product manager, I think of the individual contributor as a product operations manager, but you might have different titles at OutSystems.

  - No, I was more looking at the angle of your question. It was myself as leading the team, what is valuable for me or as an individual contributor, but I got the question. As a manager and someone that start, bootstrap the team, what is really important for me is to have diversity. So for me, it's the key thing. Patricia has a completely different background from myself, from a guy that I have on my team that it was a PO and a PM. So first, diversity. And then I look at skillset, mainly two things, communication, communication, you being able to understand your customer, because PMs and stakeholders are also our customers, right? We need to understand them, we need to empathise with them. Problem, this mixed with problem solving because you need to understand the problems and be able to find solutions, right? And the second angle is the customer centric. So if you are a product ops person, you need to, again, talk with the customers, understand the problem, design a solution, but don't stop there. As Patricia said, keep evolving it and always look to have adoption. Everything that the product operations area does needs to be adopted. If not, it'll lose the impact, right?

  - Now, Patricia, you, from the sounds of it, don't have a product management background. Now, some people would say, ooh, how can you be a product ops person and therefore kind of bring good product management practises if you don't have that background? What's your rebuttal?

  - No, that's a very interesting question that I asked myself in the beginning when I was in the recruitment process. How will this go? The thing is, when we bootstrapped the academy, we wanted someone to really execute the academy because we were bringing externally the best product management gurus to actually give training and give coaching. So I was helping to build the frameworks, to build the processes for self-evaluation, to understand what were the gaps that we had internally, the main ones, because we really wanted everyone to be listening to the same type of knowledge, to have a common ground of what were the best practises, but let me tell you, at my previous company, I was doing employer branding. Who were the target audiences that we were hiring? Product managers, software engineers, UXers. So I already had a lot of context in terms of who exactly, how product teams operate, what do they do, what is the role, the responsibilities. So I had enough context. In fact it was a product management who thought that, yeah, I will bring Patricia, this should be a good challenge for her, but yes, I've been doing the glue. And by the way, I do have a product management training on my, let's say, backpack, because I have done that. When I started at OutSystems, one of the first things that I asked Anabela is, "can I do product management fundamentals from Lisa Perry Institute?" And I did that because I wanted to understand better, what about AB testing, understand the depths of what a product manager does in their day to day life so I could help them better, so I could better identify who are the key speakers, the best frameworks, but I'm not working alone. I always work with champions from product management, with the best out there. One of them, Bruce McCarthy, you are very well related to as well. Tammy Rice has been one of our partners in the past from the academy. So it's been a pleasure to be surrounded by brilliant people and to learn from them. Four years ago, I didn't have as much knowledge, context, depth of interest, even, around this topic.

  - You just make me sad that I'm not on the list. Maybe a future iteration.

  - Maybe in a one year time I'll be talking about Phil Hornby. I'm just talking about the folks that we actually brought to give training internally.

  - I love the investment that you and the kind of going into the domain there. It's a testament, 'cause one of the challenges I've personally seen with product ops is that sometimes it essentially ends up being a bunch of very, very junior people who become assistants to the PM. Personally I find that a bit of an anti-pattern as opposed to that enablement function of making the teams more efficient, more effective so we don't need to give them assistance maybe. So Anabela, what is it really? Let's get to the guts of it. What is it really that product ops is doing? What are the actual pillars of it that we're doing to make them more efficient, more effective?

  - I used to think about them as focus areas, but are the same as pillar. Okay, the first one. And in the beginning, if you are thinking on bootstrapping product operations or adopting it, it's improve the efficiency of the team. Understand the PM team in this case. Understand where are the bottlenecks, what are the really problems that they are struggling with and try to solve them, at least the ones that are more important or have more impact in the company business. Then the second one is communication, is never enough to talk about communication in a PM role. You know it. You need to work a lot on your influence. To be a good PM, you need to be able to influence at least 90% of the company, from the CEO, the CTO, the sales, the solution architect, you name it, right? So product operations is here to support the PMs on this journey, making their life easier. And I would say that the third one is helping your teams to grow. And in our case, we did it and we bootstrap a product management B2B PM academy because we were kind of in a hypergrowth phase and our PMs told us that, okay, I'm a kind of a startup PM, I know how to do product in a startup, but how can I help the company grow that fast? And it was one of the reasons that we bootstrap the PM academy and it was a huge success.

  - Now I think, Patricia, you used the word data driven or data informed or something earlier. So where does data play into all of this?

  - One of the things that product operation also helps a lot is to give executives visibility in terms of the product health. So product operation can be a real partner into making sure that you have the dashboards, that you have the data, that the data is the same regardless of where you are going to get that data. So it's a very interesting thing even from a tools perspective, when you are implementing the right tool and that tool is tracking the right things and the information that you have there is consistent. And Anabela knows this because we have been working to create so many dashboards from the product operations side to make sure that product managers, the VPs and the engineering VPs have access to all sorts of product information that is interesting for them. And I probably can give a bit more details into the type of thing that we have been doing and building. On my side specifically, I look at metrics that are more related, for example, with engagement, with regrettable attrition because we have very talented people that we're aiming to keep and to retain in a happy way. One of the things that we are doing that is true tailor training, but from a product perspective, lead time, I mean it's the number of things that we are looking to have in a way that is consistent, in a way that is always updated, that is, people are always seeing the same numbers and they are not getting different stats from different tools and getting different views of the data. That is super important and super hard as well. We don't know sometimes why, sometimes it's just a different source that we are looking at. Sometimes we are just having the wrong filter in, but we need to do that enablement and we need to make sure that we are always and everyone is looking at the same thing.

  - Yeah, 'cause I so often hear those kind of pieces of process, data, tools, and kind of enablement of kind of getting the data or getting insights, like discovery and so on, which sounds like an easy case to me. Anabela, you've got a product operations organisation, you are growing and building the capabilities of them. Some people would argue, shouldn't the product managers take care of it themselves? How do I justify or kind of kinda talk about the ROI of product operations?

  - I do believe that the collaboration is the secret. So you need to design the product operation role and make very clear what are the responsibilities of a product operation and of a PM, separate them very well. Once you do that, you just need to focus on impact, for instance. Patricia already talk about it. In the beginning, we did something that I usually recommend to the audience, is that we talk with, we did a round of interviews and in one month, we talked with 70 stakeholders from the company. We raised 76 concerns and then we identified patterns. And we prioritise the ones that had more impact at the company. Looking at how many times would that issue occur, how many teams were affected and so on or what was the bottleneck in times of process? Okay, is this taking one month, one week, that kind of stuff. And based on that, we start solving the big problems. And the big problems, usually they are associated with in influent people in the organisation, right? And what happened was that we did a pilot, things work well, we started to have some promoters. And once you started, it was easy for me back then to ask for more budget, why? Because I was finding the right problems that would help people with influence at the company to give more good feedback and then they start to wanted more and more. And with that, the budget comes. So in this way, in a nutshell, aim to have impact and the rest is easier.

  - That just sounds like product work. I mean that's the current trend right now, okay? Product manager been told, why are you not caring about impact? Why have you not cared about making money for our business? You've just been driving these random metrics, which, by the way, I never struggled to justify a product management role 'cause I always knew the commercial impact, the business impact I was having, but so many now don't. And you're doing the same thing with product ops. It makes it easy. You speak the language of the business.

  - Yeah, I think it's because I was a PM. And once you are a PM, I love being PM. I think it's one of the most difficult roles that I have played, and I played several, but it's challenging but I love it. And the thing is that it helps you and create a operating model and approach that if you follow, it's help you with bootstrapping a product operations area or other stuff. So we are somehow trained to make things happen and to look at impact, I think.

  - So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit, ladies. Patricia, what's the biggest mistake you've seen in companies with their product operations function?

  - One of the things that, well, that I think it's a myth around product operations is that product ops has the last word, product ops defines how the product management practise does and the product lifecycle should work and just goes into teams and tells them do this, be that. Product ops is not, or should not, brute force tools, processes. It always co-create solutions with the teams, for the teams. That's why we are here. It's to be a partner, to partner and not brute force and to suggest things that we isolated in a box, think they are the best ones in a dark cave. No, we aim to bring light, we aim to bring light and not the other way around. And sometimes I've seen product ops teams enter this cycle of we need to solve a lot of things. There's a lot of things to be solved. And along the way they forgot to bring the light and they start to bring a bit of grey. And they need to balance this a bit. They need to balance the fact that they need to prioritise. Just like a product manager does need to select the things that they will do and most of all, select the things that they are not going to do, product operation needs to do the same. There are a lot of things that they need to handle. They need to select which ones they are going to go for and bring the light on those things instead of doing all of the list of things and then bringing grey and black because they are trying to cover everything. That has been the thing that I've seen the most.

  - Anabela what about yourself? What's the biggest mistake you've seen?

  - I think it's a good question. I am thinking about two, but I will choose one. And I think the one is trying to please everyone, trying to accept and address all the requests. Especially when you have junior people, like you said, bring junior people, they receive a lot of requests. Probably in a day they would receive 50 or 30 probably new requests, right? And instead of prioritising, instead of stack rank, understand what are the ones that have more impact, again, impact, they start doing everything. And that's usually doesn't work because they will not be able to deliver anything and showcase the value of product operations.

  - I'm hearing such a thread of decision making here, which is my favourite personal subject, might be the one I'm trying to write about at the moment, but yeah, it's really interesting to hear now. I also heard a thread there that possibly ties quite nicely to this. So we're starting from a, we've got a product organisation and we're now thinking we need product ops. How do we start? Anabela, maybe you can pick it up from there.

  - Okay, I think that you should start by understanding your customer. So what is your customer, what are your stakeholders? And then what are the problems that your company is facing and your stakeholders? Once you have this clear in your mind, try to find a way to define the size of the team. How many people do you need or you can have? From my experience, start small. No one will give you 10 people, even if you have the biggest problems to solve. No one invests that much in product operations. Probably if you compare it with a PM team, probably you'll find budget to hire 10 PMs while you find budget to hire one or two PMs, but okay, start small, focus on solving one or two big problems. I think Patricia already talk about it. Don't do it yourself. Bring champions from the team, is like to find a sponsor. You can find a formal sponsor or you can find a promoter, right? And for us, the champions are the promoters. And once you do that, the results will start to appear. Bring some metrics, always try to measure the success of what you are doing. And then the money would come. And probably you, I can tell you my experience, we started with a team of three. It was very good back then, and then in one year, we moved to seven and then 10. So it was, back then in 2020, I think it was a huge growth for product operations area.

  - Definitely sounds like it. I mean I know many organisations that still and not dissimilar sizes to yourselves. So I mean, and there is a little philosophical thing that I always think about of. Almost product operations maybe should be trying to make themselves redundant, 'cause they're making all those efficiency savings, they're making things more effective and better.

  - When they will disappear, we'll make ourselves useless.

  - Well, there's always another problem, right? Even if you solve the problems that are there now, there's 10 more that appear next week. So it's like if you're still dealing with the old ones.

  - No, it's complexity, velocity, and then high rate of change. So when you are solving a problem, another thing pops up like a mushroom. So in the end we try to make ourselves useless, but it's very hard. It's very hard.

  - I have to ask about road roadmapping. So Anabela, what's product ops involvement with roadmaps?

  - The involvement starts with the product strategy definition. So product operations, in the beginning, we didn't have this role, but currently we have. We assist the head of product and the PMs on the product strategy definition and non-alignment with the company strategy. At this phase, we are kind of facilitators, ensuring that, you know, the strategy is defined and is not delayed for one, two, thee months. And then we ensure that everything works, but after the strategy definition, what is most difficult, and you know it as a PM, is to get buy-in from stakeholders, right? So we tend to help on that. Once the strategy is defined, we work with PM and engineering on creating the roadmap and also, again, as a facilitator, an influencer, but the decisions are made by PM and engineering leaders. And then we work with the teams to help on the capacity planning and on the delivery. And I would say that we have a more active role on the execution side, but currently we own the cycle, the strategy and road mapping cycle.

  - And increasing, or quite often the first thing I hear when someone creates a product ops function is we've gotta get hold of the roadmap. It's like, it's actually often one of the triggers to say this is outta control. We need someone to take it under their wing and control it. Not make the decisions, as you said, but to orchestrate it.

  - It's true because you know it as a PM. This phase, it's really very exhausting, right? You have a lot of politics in the way, everyone wants a different piece. So product operations here plays a role of helping PM to keep the energy and align them and force them and survive to all of these pressure.

  - And I've heard that sort of answer a few times from people and it makes me think, hold on a second, am I'm a product operations person? 'Cause that's the sort of thing I help people do many times in my life. Basically making it all come together as a leader, as a consultant, as a coach. It's very interesting to hear. Now we know product operations, within your organisation, within any organisation, isn't static. So do we need a roadmap for our product ops function, Patricia?

  - We do, and we have. I know I have my area, just my area and all the other areas. We are organising focus in focus areas and each area has very well-defined metrics, very well defined, I'll not say very well-defined roadmaps because that's flexible, but we do have desired now, next, later type of roadmaps, the things that we want to do, the things that make sense. And as we are always co-creating with others and we are capturing feedback from the things that we are doing, things are a bit more fluid because we're always adapting to feedback and we are always aiming for continuous improvements, but yeah, product operations does have its own road mapping exercise and it does have a cycle of continuous improvement. I told you in the beginning that we just finished a state of a cycle of interviews, more than 15 interviews across the company, with departments, customer office, security, marketing, digital, finance, legal, besides what we consider the product team, right? Everyone inside the product team, the practises, the VPs, the leads, the ICs, people from different seniorities, backgrounds, experiences at the company so that we don't get too biassed by the folks that we typically think that we should talk to. There's a lot of sources of inputs that we are considering, that are feeding such roadmap.

  - We could probably spend another whole interview on roadmaps, but we'll draw that there and we'll maybe just start bringing it to a little bit of a close. I'm gonna ask broadly to both of you, whose advice on product operations do you listen to?

  - Okay, my main influence was and still is Melissa Perry. So when we start product operation, she was one of the few speaking about product operations. And I really like, as a PM, I also want like the way she approaches this modern product management. Simple to understand. I love the escaping the build trap. So for me, it was Melissa.

  - Love it, Patricia, what about yourself? Are you just gonna say Denise?

  - No, no, no. I mean, Denise and Melissa, they come, well, they come as a pair. So Melissa, it's obviously an good inspiration, but I would say John Cutler. I have been following not just on the product operations side or product enablement because he was actually, he wrote an article about how he like much better enablement instead of product operations, but he's been a product inspiration for me to follow and he had very nice insights about this area as well, which I completely agree and I align on.

  - John's a previous guest on the show talking about roadmaps. So yes, I'm very much on the same page there. So okay, now I'm gonna come to my last big question. I'll start with yourself, Anabela. If you had to distil your philosophy on product operations down to one or two sentences, what would it be?

  - Always aim for impact, okay? This is the subject of several of my thoughts because I really believe in it. So whenever you do in life, but it also applies to product operations. Focus on the things that will bring you visibility, impact. And I would add to the impact, don't forget adoption because adoption will also bring you the impact.

  - Patricia, follow that.

  - I have this mentor in my life that I has been following me everywhere I go. And I believe that, in product operations, makes a lot of sense, which is just keep it simple stupid, not stupid. Smart folk keep it simple. It's just as plain and simple as that.

  - Is there anything that I should have asked you about product ops that I haven't?

  - I think that in my opinion is how will product operations adapt to AI? So something that we has been discussing as a team. Okay, so how can we take advantage of product operation, sorry, of AI in product operations? How can we even build on top of AI and create something awesome on top of that? So I think it's something that the audience should look and think about it. AI is here.

  - Any opinions you'd like to share?

  - Okay, they are simple. So AI is here to stay, so let's take advantage of the good things that it'll bring us, and don't be afraid. So it's that simple as that. Don't be afraid of AI, it's here to stay. Probably the AI in six months, one year, 10 years will be completely different, but embrace it, take advantage of it.

  - I do think as a product operations teams, we do have the duty to understand even from a legal and compliance perspective how can we make sure that teams are using AI, are being empowered, enabled by AI in a way that they feel safe. I feel like people, teams are afraid to use because of not having so much regulation. And sometimes companies, teams feel that they don't have the ability to actually use AI to be more productive because.

  - Two ways, either goes, they're scared of it because they don't know the company policies, they don't know the company's acceptance, et cetera, or they just go completely gung-ho for it and the company is then nervous. I haven't found the nice middle ground anywhere yet.

  - No, and people are nervous, which, by the way, I just have the results of the learning and the technical learning and development survey that we sent out to our product group team, and AI is a key topic and people want to have more knowledge about that. They want to be more productive. They want to know which tools can they use, how can they use, how can they be better than, because they feel like it's one of the top things that they need to be prepared for in the future. Not just in the future. Right now they need to be enabled, they need to grow their skills on that. And I have talked with so many people here and we are like, we cannot show people the paradise and then say, yeah, but you cannot do that because the policy says blah, blah blah. So we need to find a middle term, what can we say, how can we enable them? How can we make our people more productive, better, have a small side brain, a small brain on the side to help them be better, to free up time? And in operations, it's about simplifying people's lives. So I do believe we do have a responsibility and the duty to make that happen.

  - You might wanna watch Chris Butler's episode back when that hits the air, 'cause he talks quite a bit about AI 'cause it's a quite a big part of his activities within product operations. So that's an episode I recorded a couple of weeks ago. Okay, ladies, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. I always like to give you an opportunity just to pitch. Well, I guess really what OutSystems does, let's go down that route, but if you'd like to pitch anything else, who wants to take it?

  - OutSystems is a low-code development platform. We are leader in the market, I think, since the company started 23 years ago. And somehow we are the AI of 20 years ago. So we would help you to bring and, sorry, to develop and build applications very easy and very fast. With the pre-made components, with a stable software development lifecycle, we control the lifecycle since you are starting the analysis, development, tests and so on. And now we are also, we have offer that is called mentor, and that is bringing AI on top of the low-code platform. So if you need to create an application, a core system for your company, look at us because we will make your life easier and speed up the development process.

  - Anabela, Patricia, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks for your time.

  - Thank you.

  - Thank you for having us.