Leader Spotlight: The importance of understanding value, with Gustavo Martucci
Gustavo Martucci has spent his career at the intersection of product, growth, and marketplaces. He started in corporate development and product strategy at Itaú Unibanco — Latin America’s largest bank — before moving into leadership roles across startups and tech companies. Gustavo led business development at Clicksign, ran product at Career Now Brands, and co-founded Fluxo, a financial modeling SaaS for growing companies. Now, as VP of Product at LawnStarter, he’s shaping how homeowners find and hire outdoor service pros.
In our conversation, Gustavo talks about why creating value should be at the center of every product decision. He also shares how to evaluate initiatives, think in terms of compounding value, and lead effectively as AI changes the pace of product work.
Creating value as a product manager
You came up through the financial world and corporate development before moving into product leadership. How does that background inform the way that you think about creating value as a product manager?
Everyone in finance is always thinking about the concept of creating value. My philosophy is that creating value is the first thing that a PM should prioritize. Product people need to deeply understand how we create value, and that understanding starts with the financials.
At a basic level, a company creates value by selling products or services perceived as more valuable than the resources used to produce them. Part becomes profit, and part goes to the customer as surplus. The role of the PM is either to increase the total value the product is creating or the value that the company can extract from that value creation. If that’s the goal, the only way I can achieve it is if I understand my pricing, my costs, and how I get more customers to acquire more or retain more. You need to deeply understand each one, as well as the P&L.
A lot of PMs are excellent at craft — writing specs, running discovery, shipping features — but struggle to connect their work to how the business actually makes money. In your view, what separates a junior PM from a senior PM, and how much of that gap is about business acumen vs. product craft?
What I see a lot with junior PMs, especially the better ones, is the ability to take a specific initiative and understand all the nuances inside that feature, including the edge cases. Even junior PMs can do that well, and it’s what they focus on. Honestly, I did that when I was more junior. I remember my early days — it was Waterfall back then — creating specs with 200 pages and then blaming people for not reading them when things went wrong. The reality is that’s not helpful.
The difference with senior PMs comes from understanding value — how you trace a feature all the way from the user problem it solves to the business outcome that it drives. Then you connect the dots, which allows you to shape the scope a lot better — both the scope of what is implemented and the scope of what you communicate.
You can distill a feature to its essential scope and use that to prioritize what is really important: What’s going to create value here? What is the opportunity cost of not doing something else that could be creating a lot more value? As people get more senior in their roles, they understand that better. The good and bad news for junior PMs is that a lot of the work junior PMs used to do, agents can do. But on the other side, that frees them up to automate the boring work and speed up their career to become a senior PM as fast as possible.
How to evaluate product investments
What mental model do you use when you’re evaluating whether a new product initiative is worth pursuing?
If we had a crystal ball, the answer is net present value (NPV). What’s the value of the company, measured by discounted cash flow, if I do this initiative versus if I don’t? We don’t have a crystal ball, though, so we use proxies. To understand how much value something creates, we look at how many more users this could help us acquire, conversion lift, cost savings, or strategic positioning. Then, we connect those proxies to the company strategy and current priorities. That’s where you evaluate: is this a high-impact standalone thing, but outside of the strategy, or does it align?
At LawnStarter, we usually start any initiative with what we call an opportunity document. It’s a very simple document with two goals. One is simple math — what’s the best-case scenario for the impact this could drive? For example, someone says, “We should add a route optimization feature for our providers.” This is a common complaint from our providers in support tickets, and it could save them X hours per week, which gives us X percent more capacity and translates into Y more in revenue.
The second thing is to write down the hypotheses and the questions you need to answer to test them. For example, what is the cost of implementing a route optimization system? It’s very compute-intensive. What exactly would pros want? Do they want something automated or something with a lot of customization? How much do we need to build to give a good user experience?
And from the customer side, what happens if we start telling customers, “Instead of Tuesday, I’ll show up on Wednesday because it saves hours of driving?” Is that OK, or does it drive churn? This document might have 20 questions like that, answered by data, design, engineering, or the PM. It’s about defining the research needed before committing — asking questions, not giving answers. Then you write a very short go/no-go statement: what answers would lead us to pursue this versus not?
When you’re determining whether or not something will add value to the business, there’s a tension between evaluating initiatives in isolation vs. looking at them as a whole in the system. How do you hold both of these lenses at the same time?
First, you need to have a company strategy. Ideally, you know what the overall themes are that you’re investing in and how much you’re investing. Initiatives should fit within those, and you prioritize inside that framework. If something looks like a great opportunity but doesn’t fit, then you need to escalate and ask, “What do we need to drop if we really want to do this?”
The second part is more ambiguous. From a product leader standpoint, you need a clear vision for where the product is going. That includes understanding which areas of your product are not just one-shot away from creating value. It might take six iterations, but you understand that value compounds in those areas. There are other areas where you take one shot and create value right now.
Going back to NPV, it’s not just about what value something creates now — it’s the future value and the compounding that really matter. At LawnStarter, one area we’ve invested in over the years is how we match a customer to the ideal provider. That’s at the core of our marketplace. If we had said, “This improvement only gives us 0.1 percent,” we would never have built a great system.
Sometimes you evaluate an initiative as a standalone thing. Other times, part of the value is that it’s one step in a staircase of compound value. That’s where things get more ambiguous, and honestly, where I’ve been spending a lot of time recently, reshaping my mental model as velocity increases.
Leading with vision in an AI landscape
With AI fundamentally changing the velocity of product work, how do you prevent this idea of “We can do more” from becoming “We should do more?”
It’s funny because at the same time AI is changing everything about our jobs — my day-to-day is completely different from what it was three months ago — it’s not changing the core premises at all. It’s never been more important to have a clear, well-articulated vision that everyone on the team understands.
Before AI, you could enforce that vision by steering a team — “We’re doing this,” “Adjust this,” “This is a little off.” But now we can do so much more that if you try to operate that way, it becomes like herding cats. You won’t be able to do it. Now, the priority is, “Does everyone understand the vision?” That’s crucial because even when you’re not in the room, the direction is still clear and you don’t need to steer. It’s like internal company self-driving. You don’t need to be at the wheel, and it still goes in the right direction.
Of course, for the most critical things, I’ll still be there steering. But there are going to be many other things happening at the same time that I’m not even looking at until they’re in production. You have to trust that you’ve given enough direction. If you’re not setting a clear vision and not thinking critically about what you should do before you do it, it’s very easy for the product to become disjointed.
I’ve seen SaaS products where there are three different ways the product is trying to present some AI interface, and none of them actually solve the problem. That’s probably because it’s what PMs were able to prototype and push. That’s not a recipe for success. Things start conflicting with each other.
You mentioned that having a vision is more important than ever. Can you talk about what’s changed and what hasn’t in your role as a product leader in the last 3 months with AI?
Having the vision was always important, but a big part of what changes now is the way I’ve been talking to my team. In the near future, we’re going to get to the point that 80 percent of the tasks internally at our company are done by AI agents. It’s not enough for me to just have a vision — I need one that is actually codified so that both human PMs and AI agents understand it and act accordingly.
More recently, at LawnStarter, I rebuilt our internal knowledge system using Claude Code. We now have an entire markdown-based system in a GitHub repo that the entire company is using. I created the system so every PM could use Claude Code to create things like opportunity documents, for example. Then, when they’re doing that, the AI has links to our business context, vision, company goals, etc., so that everything can be tightened up together.
Essentially, AI gives us the first revision of, “Is this aligned?” Part of it is: can you create this alignment with code? That is very different from creating alignment by showing up in meetings and telling people, “This is not good enough. This is different from how we are treating this other situation here.” That also meant that in the last two or three months, I’ve shipped more code than in my previous 20 years. Now, we have a tool that the entire company uses, and all of its context is connected to AI agents. Yes, the job really changed, but it comes back to creating value and to our vision. It’s just with a different mechanism that is way more powerful.
Understanding value creation in the marketplace
LawnStarter is a two-sided marketplace, which means that value creation is more complex than a single-sided product, because you have to serve both the customer and the service provider simultaneously. Can you explain how this dynamic changes the way you think about what metrics actually matter?
LawnStarter is originally a marketplace where you can get someone to mow your lawn. It’s since evolved, and it’s different from traditional home services marketplaces in that we provide a lower-friction experience for the customer. You enter your address, get a price immediately, and if you accept it, we send a provider to do the job. It works like the Ubers of the world.
In terms of metrics, I once heard someone say that marketplaces are more like biology than physics, which is very true. It’s a complex system. If you compare it with a SaaS product or a DTC product, often you have one customer, which means one degree of uncertainty. You do something, and if that customer responds in a certain way, you’re doing better. If they don’t, you’re doing worse. When you have a two- or three-sided marketplace, there are all these components and interactions, so everything you do impacts many different systems and metrics at the same time.
When we’re thinking about metrics for initiatives, we need to think about what we’re trying to move, as well as what happens on the other side. For example, let’s say we’re going to make a change to our marketplace policies. We need to think about how that impacts how customers view our service, what percentage of jobs get picked up by the top pros, how that impacts retention on the customer side, and then how it impacts retention on the provider side, their routes, and profitability.
You need to go a few steps deeper in the marketplace and understand how the loop works on those metrics, and make sure you are not just thinking, “If I improve this conversion metric, everything’s going to go great.” Sometimes you improve conversion, but get worse results. In marketplaces, when you’re dealing with metrics, you need to think more about the secondary and tertiary effects on both sides.
For a PM reading this who wants to start thinking more like a business leader, not just a product practitioner, what’s the first thing they should do on Monday morning?
I think the first thing is to step back and ask yourself, “Do I fully understand how companies create value?” Especially if you don’t come from a business background, it’s worth spending time studying that. There are plenty of good books and articles, and you can honestly ask ChatGPT or Claude to explain them. Understanding the economics of how value is created, captured, and compounded is super key for a PM.
The second step is to get specific. Do you understand how your company creates value and the role of your product within that? Not just hypotheticals — do you know your average price? How does your company price services? What are the acquisition channels, how do they map to pricing, what different kinds of customers pay for things, and when they value them? And what are the costs associated with that?
It’s also important to understand the cost side of the P&L — what you spend money on that could be used as leverage or cut down. With that knowledge, ask, “Do you have a vision for where this product should be in three to five years to create dramatically more value than it does today?” Then, can you trace everything you’re doing back to that?
And finally, if your three- to five-year vision does not incorporate a world in which AI agents are everywhere, you should rethink it. They will be. It’s already starting to happen. That’s the reality we’re all in. It’s better to try to have fun with it and embrace it than fight it.
What does LogRocket do?
LogRocket’s Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.