The Indiegraf team is on a continuous journey to expand not only the capacity of our partner publishers, but also the things we can offer them. A recent milestone in this journey has been adding Carol Cavaleiro to our team, who joined us last year in the role of Product Manager. Having Carol in our team will allow us to think strategically about our Indie Tech product as we heighten our efforts to build beautiful, high-performing and accessible websites for the indie publishers in our network.
Carol is based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and she worked as an infographic designer for some of the biggest Brazilian outlets for over 10 years before co-founding Aos Fatos, an award-winning fact-checking agency. As head of innovation at Aos Fatos she discovered a passion for finding and solving problems, a passion she now brings to the Indiegraf table — with a specific focus on improving our partner publishers’ websites to the benefit of their readers. In her first weeks, for example, she spent some time looking at our partners’ analytics to better understand their audiences and thus figure out the best features to serve them. Carol comes to work with her thinking cap on every day, and is motivated by the possibilities of product management: “as a designer, there’s not much you can do in legacy media. But as a product thinker, you can make things happen,” she shared.
We’ve been itching to introduce Carol to the world for a while. Here’s a little more about her and her plans as Product Manager, in her own words:
What is your role at Indiegraf? What role with you play with our partner publishers?
I’m responsible for discovering, creating and maintaining IndieTech, our website template for Pro publishers. So I’m aiming to collect information and feedback, and to support and solve problems for our stakeholders and publishers.
How will your experience with Aos Fatos inform your new role as Product Manager at Indiegraf?
The first product that I managed was a social media monitoring tool that actively looks for mis/disinformation for Aos Fatos in 2020. That’s when I first realized that I loved to solve problems and build solutions. Then I joined NPA’s Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms and it was an eye opener! I was already a product manager — I just didn’t know it. Before this program, everything I was doing was gut-driven, I didn’t have a methodology. When I took this course everything became clearer in terms of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. Then I did some audience and product labs with Google News Initiative and found it really interesting to learn how products are formed from different perspectives. If you’re an independent publisher, you’re not just a journalist doing your work, you also need to understand about how people receive your work, how to create and measure impact. This multidisciplinary aspect is what I really like about product management. I’m excited to help our partner newsrooms develop a product eye.
What early projects are you prioritizing in this new role?
My goal is to create a communication channel with publishers to let them know about our newest releases, what we are currently working on, and to set up a place for publishers to pitch ideas on new features or improvements to our product.
