Carlota Pabón Tejada

Why this persona fits the audience

Manages product releases for a 6-person no-code startup in Barcelona, coordinating launch assets with engineering and design while tracking distribution steps in Jira and a spreadsheet. Has helped with a few public launches and works with a lean, mostly manual process across multiple channels.

• Age: 33
• Location: Barcelona, Spain
• Occupation: Product manager
• Income: €70k/year
• Education: Bachelor's degree in product design
• Company size: 6 employees (early-stage startup)
• Years in role: 4 years

“I don't just manage products; I curate the entire journey from a messy idea to a moment someone actually clicks 'buy.'”

Carlota Pabón Tejada has navigated the volatile waters of the Barcelona tech scene since graduating with a degree in Product Design four years ago. Currently serving as the de facto Product Manager for a six-person no-code startup, she occupies a unique space where she must wear the hats of strategist, project manager, and part-time marketer simultaneously. Her professional reality is defined by a lack of resources but an abundance of ambition; she manages product releases by orchestrating a delicate dance between engineering constraints and design aspirations, all while manually tracking distribution steps in a sprawling Jira instance and a custom-built spreadsheet. She has overseen three public launches, each a lesson in resourcefulness. During the most recent campaign, she personally drafted email sequences, designed social assets, and coordinated with a remote developer to fix a critical bug two hours before go-live. This hands-on approach stems from a belief that efficiency is born from ownership, not delegation, especially in early-stage environments. Despite earning a respectable €70k annually, she remains acutely aware of the financial fragility of startups, leading her to scrutinize every software subscription for its tangible return on investment. Carlota's life is a study in balancing high-stakes professional demands with a grounded personal existence. She finds solace in the tactile nature of urban gardening and the rhythm of running along the Mediterranean, activities that anchor her amidst the abstract nature of digital product development. While she is open to new ideas and technologies, her skepticism toward 'shiny objects' is well-known among her peers. She prefers robust, reliable systems over flashy features that promise the world but deliver little. Her career trajectory is driven by a desire to scale her impact without losing the agility that defines the startup culture she loves, making her a pivotal figure in her company's evolution.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Monday starts with Carlota reviewing her color-coded spreadsheet, highlighting overdue items in red before the team arrives. At 9:30 AM, she leads a stand-up, quickly identifying a blocker in the onboarding flow. By 11:00 AM, she's deep in a design review, pushing back on a feature request that doesn't align with user needs. Lunch is a quick falafel wrap eaten at her desk while replying to investor emails. The afternoon is a sprint: drafting the copy for Friday's Product Hunt post, coordinating with the designer for the hero image, and updating the Jira board with yesterday's commits. Around 4:00 PM, she hosts a retrospective, listening intently to the engineers' concerns about burnout. After logging off at 6:30 PM, she spends an hour tending to her balcony garden, finally disconnecting from the digital noise until tomorrow.

Lifestyle

Carlota lives in a sun-drenched, slightly chaotic apartment in Gràcia, filled with plants she tends to obsessively and stacks of physical notebooks. Her routine is rhythmic: early morning runs along the coast, followed by coffee at a local roastery where she checks emails before work starts. She prioritizes health, cooking nutritious meals on Sundays to prep for the week, and maintains a strict separation between work and personal time, though the lines blur during launch weeks. Financially, she is prudent, saving aggressively for a potential down payment on a small studio, but willing to spend on software that saves her time. Socially, she thrives in small, intimate gatherings rather than large parties, often hosting board game nights or wine tastings with close friends from the tech scene.

Work life

Her days are a constant juggling act between three distinct roles: strategist, executor, and messenger. As the sole PM for a six-person team, she coordinates the final sprint with two engineers and a designer, translating vague user feedback into concrete Jira tickets. She manually tracks every step of their launch distribution—emails, social posts, community outreach—in a complex, color-coded Google Sheet that rivals their codebase in complexity. The pressure is high; with no dedicated marketing head, she owns the narrative. A typical Tuesday involves debugging a broken integration, rewriting a press release at 11 AM, and then spending an hour aligning the team on visual assets before the afternoon stand-up. She feels the weight of being the 'glue' that holds the product vision together while ensuring nothing slips through the cracks of their lean operations.

Relationships

Carlota is deeply embedded in Barcelona's tight-knit indie founder community, frequently attending meetups at WeWork or local co-working spaces. She relies heavily on a mentor, a former VP of Product at a unicorn, for strategic advice. Her relationship with her team is familial; they share frustrations and victories intimately. She keeps her family back in Valencia close via weekly video calls, often discussing their own professional challenges. Friends outside of work provide a necessary escape, grounding her in non-tech conversations about art, travel, and food.

How they decide

Carlota is a pragmatic researcher who values peer validation over hype. She rarely makes impulsive purchases; instead, she builds a case for any tool based on a clear problem-solution fit, often creating a mini-business case comparing the cost against hours saved. She leans heavily on free trials and community testimonials, preferring to see a tool integrated into a real workflow before committing. If a solution requires significant training or disrupts her existing ecosystem without immediate value, she defaults to maintaining the status quo, even if it's inefficient.

How they sound

Her speech is precise and efficient, reflecting her background in design and product. She uses industry terminology like 'funnel,' 'backlog,' and 'release candidate' naturally but avoids corporate jargon when possible. Her cadence is steady and measured, rarely raising her voice, but she can be direct when cutting through ambiguity. She tends to speak in structured points ('First, second, third') and often self-corrects to ensure clarity. She avoids vague emotional language, preferring data-driven explanations, and rarely admits to not knowing something without immediately pivoting to how she will find the answer.