Early years and where you came from?
28, Born in Comporta, Raised in Germany now in Lisbon
How were you introduced to the world of the Portuguese tech industry?
After working for Facebook
Walk me through your work and what you are doing now in the tech industry.
I run a digital marketing Agency we run ads on social media and google and develop dashboards with real-time data for our clients to be as transparent as possible. Our Team consists of 6 Girls, it's a female-only start-up.
What part of what you do, you love the most?
Brainstorming strategies and ideas with the team and the customer and seeing our clients grow from start-ups to big companies.
How do you think that your background and knowledge impact the way you approach your work in the Portuguese tech industry?
I have both a creative and a tech/marketing background. I studied fashion design&management but when I started at Facebook, I got deep insights in sales, and marketing, using several tools, implementing tracking, working on websites and so on. The mix makes the sauce! Being creative, structured, good with numbers and being able to read numbers and results and having the ability to bring that up in a nice design is basically a mix of knowledge that came from previous experiences and that I gained working on my own start-up. Also, working in a big company taught me a lot about how I want to run a business and how not, I learned how to be structured how processes, sop’s and agile working is important for project management. In terms of team management, we prefer to have s flat hierarchy and give women a chance to have higher positions because we were mainly managed by men in our previous jobs.
What advice do you have for young women that want to get into tech and don’t know where to start?
I think it is so important to work for one or two companies, both (start-up and bigger companies) to learn as much as possible and its also nicer to learn from already some mistakes before you start on your own business or find out where you want to work and who you want to work with. Also never be afraid to follow your private objectives like getting kids and constructing a family, it should never be a reason not to follow your personal and professional objectives.
Walk me through a day in your life as a Portuguese women in tech.
I start the morning with some coffee, walk my dog and listen to some morning meditation and affirmation before I go to the office around 9–10 am (the working hours I adapted to the Portuguese spirit even tho my co-founder Chrystel starts already very early around 7 am) I arrive in the office, and we start our daily team meeting, discussing daily tasks, objectives and clients results. We have a lot of meetings with clients and new potential clients. We don't have fixed breaks and lunch times it’s up to our team when to take their breaks. I usually leave the office around 18h and attend my Yoga class 3x a week in the afternoon. After spending a lot of time on the computer, it is very important to have some balance after work.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice was definitely to start my own agency after I stopped working at Facebook and started my training for Google.
What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Slack, clickup, canva, superhero (meditation app), google calendar as well :D
Any links that you want to share? In what are you working on…
https://www.digitalgrowthstudio.com/ I am very proud of our website, at the moment, we are working on an online course as well as a css feed where we show our ad creative library where customers can filter by vertical and platform to get inspiration
Anything else you want to share?
I got nominated for Forbes 30 under 30 :)
👉Find Maria on LinkedIn
