The green light that hid an empty backup

The first security incident I handled had nothing to do with an intruder. In 2001 a dental practice near Coimbra lost three weeks of patient bookings when its server disk failed. The practice had changed a backup tape every evening for two years. Nobody had ever tried to restore from one, and the tapes were blank. I was twenty-three, a support technician at Rendalva Informática, and I spent a weekend rebuilding the diary from paper notes and the receptionist's memory. The owner was not careless. The software had shown a green light every night, and she had believed it.

I had joined Rendalva in September 2000, after a degree in informatics engineering at the Sarvelha Polytechnic Institute. The company installed networks and supported about 600 small offices: dentists, notaries, accountants and family workshops. From 2002 I led six technicians. The work taught me how people outside technology meet its failures. They rarely lacked intelligence. They lacked time, context and a message written for them.

In 2004 I moved to Lisbon to join Estúdio Caravelim, a small design and research consultancy. I ran usability sessions for public-service websites, insurers and utilities. One session changed my practice permanently. A blind participant needed eleven minutes to complete a form that a sighted colleague finished in ninety seconds, because its error messages could not be reached by her screen reader. The client called it an edge case. I began recruiting disabled participants into every study I ran, and I learnt to report such findings as failures of the product rather than limitations of the person using it.

Research gave me evidence but not authority. In 2009 I joined Brivastel Systems in Porto as product manager for backup appliances sold to small offices. I remembered the dental practice. My first significant feature was a monthly restore test that opened a randomly chosen file from each backup and reported whether it could be read. Sales colleagues worried that a visible failure would alarm customers. It did, usefully: about one appliance in twelve failed in the first quarter, mostly through misconfigured jobs that resellers then corrected.

From 2013 to 2017 I led product at Turnalde Software in Madrid, which built staff-scheduling and shift-swap software for retail and restaurant chains. Our users were shop assistants and kitchen staff reading rotas on inexpensive phones between shifts. I learnt to design for weak connections, small screens and people with no particular reason to like our app. I also learnt how pricing behaves when the buyer is a head office and the user is someone else.

Calvessin's founders asked me in 2017 to lead product for their small-business line. They had built strong detection for organisations with technical staff; most small firms had none. As vice-president of product, I spent much of my first year sitting with owners as alerts arrived. Too many messages assumed the reader knew what a mail-forwarding rule was. We rewrote the alert library, rebuilt the owner dashboard around three possible actions, and in 2019 prepared the Irish launch.

Since March 2021 I have been chief product officer. The role added pricing, partner experience, privacy design and, more recently, automated features to my remit. I work closely with the chief technology officer, the chief operating officer who runs the alert desk, our data-protection officer and the finance team. I present product and pricing papers to our board each quarter and report on privacy and automated features to its audit and risk committee twice a year. I am not a director.

I lead through written reasoning. Every significant product decision at Calvessin has a short paper naming who disagreed and what we chose to give up. That habit makes a choice easier to revisit when the evidence changes, and harder for anyone, including me, to tidy the history after a good outcome.

Outside the company I sit on the assistive-technology advisory committee of Associação Arcolume, a Lisbon association that tests digital services with disabled users. The work keeps me honest about our own gaps, several of which are described on this site.

I would now like to bring that perspective to a board. Many companies are adding automated features and serving customers who will never read a technical manual. I can help directors ask what the customer will actually understand, what the product is entitled to claim and which limits should be published before someone discovers them.

Open to Board appointments

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