About Me

I'm Luis, a product director based in Mexico City. I build things at the intersection of technology, finance, and real human problems.

The Short Version

I started as a backend developer, became a tech lead, then found my way into product management. These days I lead a product for regulated financial services at Yext, building compliance infrastructure for tens of thousands of financial advisors.

The Longer Story

My career began the way many engineering careers do: writing code, fixing bugs, and slowly realizing that the hardest problems weren't technical—they were about understanding what to build and why.

In 2014, Javier and I co-founded an edtech startup called Mi Examen UNAM, an exam simulation platform for students applying to Mexico's largest public university. We hit 10,000 users in our first week. It was messy, exciting, and taught us more about product than any school course could.

I spent a couple of years at Linio, Latin America's answer to Amazon (and before their arrival), building marketplace APIs that served 270 million users across nine countries. That's where I learned to think in systems—how distributed architectures work, how APIs become contracts between teams, how technical decisions ripple across organizations.

Then came fintech.

The Fintech Years

In 2016, I joined Konfio as their first backoffice product manager. Konfio was building something ambitious: using machine learning to extend credit to small businesses that traditional banks ignored. I built their KYC and collections platform from scratch—30+ user interviews, team shadowing, workflow automation integrating credit bureaus and tax authorities. We reduced loan disbursement time by 400%. The collection rate improved 22% month over month.

But the project I'm most proud of was a bank partnership for loan securitization. Three months, multiple stakeholders (CEO, CFO, engineering, external compliance officers), and a successful audit with zero findings. Konfio later went on to become a SoftBank-backed unicorn valued at $1.3 billion.

After Konfio, I joined Covalto Financial. Wrote the culture docs, hired engineers and PMs, shipped a loan management platform handling 25%+ of total portfolio value.

Going International

In late 2019, I moved to Singapore to join Hmlet, a Sequoia-backed co-living operator. Leading product across four countries (Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia) taught me that "user research" means something different everywhere. Japan users preferred mobile-first minimalism. Australia users cared about neighborhoods. We rebuilt the platform from scratch—300% performance improvement, 35% conversion increase—and we ran expansion research for Malaysia, Thailand, and Mainland China.

After Hmlet, I stayed in Singapore to work at Zeus Living, an Airbnb-backed furnished housing platform. I optimized payment operations (10% fee reduction through smart routing) and improved customer satisfaction scores through deep discovery work—200+ support tickets analyzed, hours of shadowing the CX team.

Now

These days I'm at Yext, leading compliant messaging and voice products for financial services. My users are financial advisors at Tier 1 institutions who need to communicate with clients while staying on the right side of FINRA and SEC regulations. It's a fascinating problem space: how do you build products that feel seamless while embedding audit trails, approval workflows, and compliance checks at every step?

I work with engineering teams to design event-driven compliance infrastructure. I partner with legal and compliance to translate regulatory requirements into product specs. And I get to think deeply about systems—how they fail, how they scale, how they serve real humans with real constraints.

Beyond Work

I write about complex systems, operational design, and the invisible infrastructure that keeps the world running. You can read my blog for more on that.

I'm a Mexico City native with deep roots in the local fintech community. I speak English and Spanish natively, and chinese, portuguese and french poorly :) I went to UNAM to study Computer Engineering

If you want to get in touch: say.hi@luigisrs.me