Roberto Hortal — Product Leadership in the AI Era

Hi, I’m Roberto Hortal
People-first. AI-powered. Building teams that punch above their weight.

For over 20 years I've turned bold ideas into products millions of people use — at Nokia, easyJet, Co-op, EDF, and now Wall Street English. I write about making AI adoption actually stick, leading product and technology teams, and the unglamorous work of turning strategy into shipped results. Subscribe below and get every new post the moment it goes live.

Roberto Hortal

Roberto Hortal. CPTO, Wall Street English

Making Products That People Love at:

Meet Roberto Hortal: a tireless innovator with over 20 years’ Product and Innovation experience at senior level across a range of sectors including Education, Green Tech, Energy, Retail, Travel, Insurance and Telecommunications.

I am Chief Product and Technology Officer at Wall Street English. Throughout my career, I have led Product, Technology and Innovation at several global B2C and B2B organisations.

I am passionate about transforming organisations, adopting the tools and practices of the Internet era to respond to the evolving needs of customers and colleagues.

Company as a Product You Never Managed

Product leaders reject a spec with no success metric. They ask for a feedback loop before build starts. They refuse to ship a feature nobody asked …

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AI Isn’t Free Anymore

Simon Eskildsen runs a database company, turbopuffer, that lives entirely on CPUs rather than GPUs. Asked recently by Gergely Orosz how easy it still …

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Your AI Governance Policy Is Written for the Wrong Unit

Many organisations start their AI governance policy with a list of approved models. That list would not have stopped the July attack on Hugging Face, …

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The North Star Metric That Tells You to Remove Things

Ask what your north star metric would have to show before it told you to delete a feature. For most teams the answer is nothing, because the metric …

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Don’t Leave React Native Just Because Shopify Did

Shopify has decided to leave React Native, and much of the industry has treated that as a verdict on React Native. It is a decision by one company, …

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The AI Acceleration Trap: When Output Outruns Absorption

Your teams can now produce more than your organisation can take in, and the numbers leadership watches reward them for it. That is the AI acceleration …

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