What I have learnt about leadership focus and asset building
As leaders, we carry the weight of multiple areas across the company. In this post, I share a few thoughts on how to stay focused and build the assets that make it possible
It’s been a while since I last wrote here. I started this newsletter to share my product management journey and now I’m returning with a broader focus: leadership, operations and building long term companies with long term people.
What you’ll find in this post
My new perspective on the newsletter
Lessons I’ve learnt about leadership focus in recent months
Why shifting from task‑doing to asset‑building matters
A book suggestion
A brief life update
A new perspective for Producto y negronis
In 2024 I stepped into a new career chapter, moving from my role as Head of Product at marketgoo to become the COO.
A year and a half in, I can honestly say I’m extremely happy with the transition and can see myself in a similar role for the rest of my career. At the same time, I still feel early in the role with plenty to learn.
Shifting away from a dedicated Product role, my day-to-day now revolves around strategy, finance, people management and vision execution. I’m excited to share some of the lessons and insights I’m gaining along the way.
From now on, this newsletter will dive into these topics and I hope you’ll find enough value to stick around. I’m also switching to English to reach a broader audience while still keeping the name Producto y Negronis (if that makes any sense). For now, I’m embracing a doing-over-perfection mindset and excited to see where it goes.
What I Have Learnt About Leadership Focus and Asset Building
2024 was a transformative year at marketgoo. We navigated the impact of AI on SEO, the consolidation of the hosting industry and the launch of a completely new business vertical around domain intelligence.
The hardest part was balancing two very different realities: on one side, managing our SEO business alongside the uncertainty about how AI will reshape online search; on the other, building a new vertical that required significant capital investment but was fueled by a bold vision and early customer demand. By the end of the year, that new line of business showed encouraging signs of validation, with a few high-ticket customers already on board.
In conversations with friends and colleagues, we eventually came to the same conclusion: the skills and mindsets that helped us succeed in the early days were not the same ones we needed to reach the next stage of growth for the company. For years, we excelled at building products and technology, supported by strong distribution deals, most of them driven by a founder-led sales approach.
But when that was no longer enough and the new business unit demanded a more professionalized go-to-market approach, the leadership team found ourselves wearing too many hats especially in Marketing, Sales and Partnerships. This shift was not obvious in the moment, at least for us. It turned out a slow process where we ended up doing a lot without truly moving the needle… until we hit a wall and risked burning out or even putting both our health and the company’s trajectory at stake.
Our problem was not effort, but focus.
When days are filled with urgent tasks, there’s little time left to pause, think and work on the non-urgent but important things that actually drive the company forward.
By the end of last year, we realized this was our biggest bottleneck and started making changes.
From Tasks to Assets
The first shift was moving from carrying the weight ourselves to building assets.
By asset I mean something you create once that continues to deliver value without your constant involvement: a process playbook, a key hire, an automation. We try to encourage ourselves every time we catch ourselves repeating a task, to ask: What can I build today so I never have to do this again?
As the saying goes, “at scale, all companies become hiring companies.” The more we have covered strategic roles that were missing, delegated and equipped people, the more our impact has started to multiply.
This is where leverage comes in: the difference between what you put in and what you get out. A concrete example: we have built a senior GTM team with leaders in Marketing, Sales and Account Management. That decision forced us to stop the wishful thinking that we, the founders and early execs, could keep doing it all ourselves.
Extreme Focus
The second shift was learning to do less.
We keep a “don’t do list” and I’m willing to pause or even kill projects to focus on just one to three true priorities. This is easier said than done, but we are definitely doing a better work today than 12 months ago.
Another example: every Monday I block 90 minutes for strategic thinking and ask myself: What’s the one big thing that, if solved, would have the most significant impact on the business?
Likewise I also secure weekly slots for:
Deep focus work
People management and recruiting
Professional development
Key to this is freeing ourserselves into lighter calendars, one of the ultimate and aspiring lifestyle symbols.
The Founder’s Leverage
Another example is Wences, our founder and visionary and obviously one of our main assets. Last summer, we realized he was constantly being pulled into countless field projects across the company, even while on family holidays.
Today, we’ve managed to reposition his role so he spends his energy where he creates the most value:
Just having time to think
Working with me on the high-level strategy
Owning the product vision
It’s still early, but we’ve found what feels like the sweet spot for him: operating at a high level in vision and zooming in on critical details when necessary, while avoiding the middle ground of endless project management and operational calls that drained his time.
In conclusion
We’re still facing many challenges, and our Domain Intelligence suite has yet to fully prove product–market fit. But for the first time in a long time, it feels like we’re truly doing what we need to do.
Time will tell if these shifts take us to the next level. In the meantime, I’ll keep sharing the journey here.
A suggestion
‘Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It’, by Chris Voss.
I’ve read it in the past few days and it’s definitely a game changer.
Life lately
Beyond marketgoo, a lot has changed over the past two years.
I fulfilled a long‑time dream of living in Mallorca, moving here with my girlfriend at the end of last year. In June this year, we got happily married in her hometown of Santander.
Now, we’re enjoying a calmer life in Mallorca although staying closely connected to Madrid, traveling regularly for work, and keeping an eye on Indonesia, where our investments in Bali are growing.
It’s a very sweet moment in life, and I feel deeply grateful. This newsletter will be also a way of sharing that journey over the coming years.
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