From Amazon to VTEX: Alexandre Gusmão on the Art and Science of Product

Senior Director of Product Management at VTEX, Alexandre Gusmão has built a career across multiple countries and industries, from co-founding a digital investment startup in Brazil to leading personalization at Amazon Retail. Today, he guides VTEX’s product vision across 40+ countries and industries, helping brands decide what to standardize with SaaS and where to differentiate through unique experiences. In this episode of VTEX Live, host Santiago Naranjo, Chief Revenue Officer at VTEX, sits down with Alexandre to discuss how to balance SaaS and innovation, why prioritization is both an art and a science, and how to manage the competing demands of customers, sales, founders, and finance. Alexandre also shares how VTEX avoids the “glorified backlog manager” trap by hiring for domain depth, dogfooding its own platform, and keeping product teams close to customers through flagship programs. If you’ve ever wondered how a global commerce platform scales while still enabling unique customer value, this episode shows why clarity, extensibility, and vision make all the difference. YouTube Chapters 00:00 Candid open & conversation guardrails 02:10 Alexandre’s background and early career 04:01 Learning product by doing (design, eng, robo-advisory) 06:33 Why VTEX’s platform + ecosystem model clicked 08:35 SaaS vs. build: table stakes vs. differentiators 12:20 Prioritizing across regions and industries 17:06 Navigating stakeholders & competitive signals 20:29 Quantifying value to guide decisions 27:02 Lead with vision behind requests 28:08 VTEX Day DJ teaser Resources: Alexandre Gusmão LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandre-gusmao-7a232423/ VTEX Website: https://vtex.com/en-us/ If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on: Apple: https://bit.ly/4fx2r8Q YouTube: https://bit.ly/3HrkHDE