Leader Spotlight: Moving from customer success manager to CPO, with Javier Pérez Trufero

Javier Pérez Trufero is Chief Product Officer at CARTO, overseeing the company’s product and customer experience areas. He previously established and grew CARTO’s data reselling business to make it a key aspect of the company’s current value proposition. Starting as a CSM, Javier has over eight years of experience driving product strategy and enterprise growth in geospatial analytics.

Javier shares his journey from customer success manager to CPO, strategies for scaling product for large enterprise clients, the evolution of CARTO’s data offerings, and how AI is transforming product teams and the product itself.

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The journey so far

Could you give an overview of what CARTO does and the types of problems you're solving for customers today?

CARTO is a spatial analytics platform. We help data analysts, data scientists, and developers turn location data into business insights. Our users can use our tools, APIs, and libraries to build everything from map-centric visualizations and interactive dashboards to analytical workflows and full-scale geospatial applications.

Spatial analysis is relevant to a wide range of use cases across many industries. For example, we work with telecom companies on network planning and churn prediction. We support insurance companies in assessing portfolio risk using location-based data — looking at hazards, crime rates, and other spatial factors. We also help retailers with expansion planning, CPG brands with merchant optimization, and logistics companies with route optimization. There are countless applications for which our platform is valuable.

What sets CARTO apart technologically is our cloud-native architecture. Unlike traditional GIS platforms that require customers to transfer data to proprietary systems, CARTO runs directly on top of leading cloud platforms like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Databricks. That means there's no need to move data — CARTO performs push-down analytics directly in the customer’s cloud environment. This architecture gives enterprises advantages in data governance, security, and scalability.

You started at CARTO eight years ago as a customer success manager and were recently named CPO. How has your role evolved alongside the company's product journey?

A lot has changed in eight years, both for me and for CARTO. I've seen almost the entire company change, including colleagues and teams, and we also went through a complete replatform. During this time, I witnessed the product being completely rebuilt.

I joined in 2017 as a customer success manager, focused on large accounts outside the U.S. That role gave me a deep understanding of customer needs and where our product delivered real value. At the time, though, we were struggling to gain traction with our product strategy, partly because BI tools were gaining strong adoption.

At that point, the executive team began exploring new ways to create more value and make the product stickier. One key realization was that CARTO doesn’t work without data. We saw customers looking to enrich their own data with third-party sources, but the process was fragmented. If a customer wanted to do that, they had to contact each vendor individually, negotiate separate terms, receive data in various formats and platforms, and then ETL it into CARTO before they could start using it.

To address that pain point, I was asked to lead a new data initiative. I moved into a new role and started building relationships with data providers. We launched a data catalog in 2019, offering third-party data in a ready-to-query format via subscription. That project launched in 2019 and was a major success. It remains a key part of our business. The catalog we’ve built now contains over 12,000 data products from nearly 50 different vendors and public sources, and it contributes significantly to our revenue. I led that initiative exclusively for three years, and although I’ve since transitioned to a broader role, I continued to oversee it. This gave me deep exposure to the product, and eventually, I was effectively managing part of it.

At one point, the data team even had a product manager, and we operated like a mini-startup within CARTO, leading that initiative. When the company was preparing to launch the beta of the new CARTO platform — the replatforming I mentioned earlier — I was offered the chance to lead the entire effort. This involved merging data with product management and overseeing all the different platform components.

I’ve been in that role for the past four years. Most recently, I was promoted to CPO and have also taken on responsibility for managing the customer success and technical support teams.

Combining product and customer success

The organization recently combined product and customer success under your leadership. Why does this structure make sense now, and what do you hope to achieve by uniting the two?

There are a few different factors, and the timing is important. In a scale-up like CARTO, you probably can’t combine product and customer success under one executive at just any moment, but for us, now makes sense.

First, the company has a strong strategic focus on improving revenue retention and expanding its business from existing customer accounts. And because our product is quite technical, having tighter alignment between product and customer success increases our chances of success.

What I’m trying to achieve is more structured and shorter feedback loops, and greater involvement of product managers in customer conversations. I want to involve customers more effectively in how we shape the roadmap, what we’re considering and why, so they feel like participants, and they’re more committed to our success. I believe this will lead to better prioritization and stronger roadmaps.

Also, I believe this works now because both teams already have fairly mature processes in place. We have the right people and systems in place to succeed; it’s mostly about execution and scaling. There are times when you need to rebuild product management or customer success from scratch with new processes because existing ones aren’t working. But today we’re not at that point, so combining the two functions can create positive synergies for us.

At the end of the day, the company structure reflects how the company operates. As I get more involved and bring in PMs, we’ll probably react faster with this new structure. That’s what I believe will give us more traction.

Secondly, we’re undergoing a major AI-driven transformation in our product. We’re not a big company, so we want to stay focused on our core and avoid chasing flashy demos. We’re committed to going all in on AI because it will transform many things, but everything we build must be grounded in real customer value.

To achieve this, product and customer success are already working very closely. We collaborate with customers as design partners, engaging early adopters, validating use cases, and shaping the product’s future based directly on their feedback. This ensures that what we deliver fits real-world production environments. This collaboration is already a key synergy, and our goal is to scale and maintain it broadly across the company.

How AI is changing product and empowering PMs

How are you integrating AI into the product, and how do you ensure it delivers real value to customers?

We think this agentic AI revolution is going to change GIS as we know it today. Of course, one part of that is giving users productivity features, like co-pilot experiences that help them create or style a map using prompts or generate SQL queries faster using natural language. That’s important. But what really excites us about AI agents is how they can make geospatial analysis more accessible. This has been a core objective for CARTO from the very beginning. Reducing the burden and making GIS accessible to non-GIS experts or non-technical users is something the company has worked on since day one.

Now, with AI agents, we can really make that happen. We can help non-GIS users access spatial intelligence without needing to manage map layers, filters, widgets, or queries. Instead, they can just ask direct business questions to an agent who knows how to operate the geospatial system behind the scenes.

Our vision is that GIS professionals will shift from building maps to building geospatial agents and designing reasoning flows. They’ll then expose maps, workflows, and tools as resources for those agents. In the future, GIS departments will move from asking, “What maps should we create for this use case?” to “What questions should the agent answer?” Then they’ll prepare the agent with the right tools to do so.

That’s what we are currently focused on building.

In what other ways do you see PMs being empowered, especially with AI?

Well, PMs and designers are now able to create prototypes and functional mock-ups much faster than ever before. But more importantly, I see all these AI features giving product managers a real opportunity to get much more hands-on and work much closer with engineering. After all, PMs tend to know more about the users, the business needs, and so on. For example, when building agents, someone needs to define the context that the agent or large language model (LLM) will require and craft good prompts. I think PMs will play a crucial role here, working closely with engineers during implementation by providing that knowledge and even writing system prompts for AI features.

Building on that, I already see more technical PMs able to accelerate or alleviate engineering by handling smaller initiatives that often never make it into the roadmap because they seem minor. I envision PMs managing their areas by doing small pull requests for these initiatives—fixing bugs, programming minor changes, or building basic features.

I’m really excited to see this happen because it will accelerate our roadmap and help us improve the product much faster than we could before.

Challenges and tools behind enterprise readiness

In the last years, you’ve shifted your strategy to target large enterprise clients. What were the biggest challenges in making the product enterprise-ready, and how have you addressed them?

I’d say it required a cultural shift across the entire organization, but especially within product.

One of the things I did early on was to create a dedicated product area with its own product manager and roadmap focused specifically on increasing the enterprise readiness of our product. I gave this area first-class priority in our roadmap. Out of the four strategic areas in our product strategy, one was, and still is, called Enterprise, Security, and Compliance. We have a dedicated team focused on those aspects.

Since we’re a platform with different tools, APIs, and components, it’s easy to lose sight of the overall enterprise experience that connects all those pieces and instead have everyone just adding features to individual tools. Instead, we made sure to maintain an active area focused on user management, security, authentication, deployment options, logging — everything that enterprise customers need.

We started this work very early in the development of the new platform because it takes time. I believe this early focus is what has enabled us, several years later, to scale CARTO within large organizations that have strong requirements around deployment, authentication, and security.

In addition to the product itself, we also put in place processes to deliver a great enterprise experience. This includes how we share roadmaps regularly, keep customers up to date with releases, engage with them to gather feedback, and involve product teams in review sessions. All of these have played an important role.

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