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.

What Happens When Distributed Teams Share a Room for Two Weeks

Some of my teams have spent a week in the same room for the first time. Distributed teams like these normally work across continents, with the product …

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AI Outsourcing: Why Rented Developers Are Being Repriced

The question for AI outsourcing is price. Every contract is a bet that you cannot hire capacity as fast as you can rent it. AI changes what that bet …

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The Open-Weight Default

For two years the model question had one answer: use the best available. That was the correct answer when the gap between the frontier and everything …

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When Your Internal AI Coding Platform Stops Being Shadow IT

A year ago, the AI coding decision was which subscription to expense. Cursor or Copilot, seat count, done. Now a handful of companies, including mine, …

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The Evaluation Harness Comes Before the Agent

You would not run an A/B test where you choose the success metric after seeing which variant won. The result would be meaningless and everyone would …

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Steering, Not Rowing: Ambition Is the New Bottleneck

For most of your career, the way to become more valuable was to row harder and better than the people around you. Ship more. Ship cleaner. Be the one …

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