Daniel J. Ruiz Contact me

The hardest product decisions are what you don't build.

Features are easy to add. Knowing when not to add them is harder. The case studies below show how I approached those decisions across three very different products.

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The Hierro Vivo listing on Google Play: five product screenshots, and the Data Safety section stating no data is shared with third parties and no data is collected.
Crewli running on a phone: the food menu, with dinner, lunch and brunch tabs and dishes grouped by course.

More than a decade spent close to customers, in marketing, customer research, and customer success, as well as two years as a project manager running ten to fifteen client projects at a time with creative and development teams. Now I build the products myself.

6 restaurant clients running
Crewli today
3 products designed, built,
and shipped
10+ years working directly
with customers

Case studies

Three products. Three different problems.

The Crewli bulletin board on a phone, showing a dated special posted for the whole team.

Live with clients

Crewli

Restaurant operations platform

Crewli began as a digital replacement for the binder every restaurant already had. Customer conversations revealed a different problem entirely: owners wanted confidence that work had actually happened. That shift changed the product far more than any feature request.

  • Six restaurant clients, three paying
  • Timestamped work records
  • Bilingual from version one
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The Hierro Vivo daily screen in Spanish, showing four of six habits done today, with sleep, movement, water, meditation and coffee tracked.

In closed testing

Hierro Vivo

Android habit tracker

Every other habit tracker treats a day you never logged as a zero, which quietly hands out streaks nobody earned. This one treats it as unknown. That single rule decided the data model, the calendar and the business model.

  • In closed testing on Google Play
  • Spanish for Latin America
  • No data collected
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Product Builder Academy on a phone: the home screen explaining that it teaches what real products are made of without learning to code, and the Software Builder path with nine units and 110 lessons.

Unlisted by design

Product Builder Academy

Technical fluency for non-engineers

The gap was never learning to code. The gap was learning how software works well enough to make better product decisions. Everything in the curriculum follows that idea.

  • 110 lessons written, 86 mapped
  • Progress tracks mastery
  • Built for non-engineers
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Open to work

Looking for an Associate Product Manager or Product Manager role.

If you're hiring, or you want to talk about anything on this page, the fastest way to reach me is below.