About
My full name is Rafael de Menezes Ehlers. I was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1983, and today I live in Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, Brazil. I am a millennial from that small historical window where computers were still strange enough to feel magical: my first computer course was an MS-DOS class at nine years old, on green-screen monitors, and I have been trying to understand what these machines do to people, work, language, and imagination ever since.
I came to product management the long way: twenty-five years in tech, more than a decade of them in the WordPress plugin ecosystem — supporting, specifying, and shipping alongside engineering teams — and, most recently, in Shopify. One thread ran through all of it: there was always an editor in the middle. A newsletter editor at MailPoet, a form editor at GravityKit, a Quiz editor at Octane AI — all of them plugins and apps with an editing surface at their core.
Editors are unforgiving products: every rough edge shows up in someone's workflow within minutes, and I spent a decade answering the support tickets that prove it. That is where my working habits come from — discovery before PRDs, assumptions validated with real users, and staying close enough to the implementation to ship things that actually work, not just demo well.
Along the way I became a WordPress contributor, organized the first two WordCamp Porto Alegre — the official WordPress event — and spoke at several others, including this panel.
Work Experience
Product Manager
Nov 2025 – Jul 2026 · 9 monthsOctane AI · Remote
Project Manager & Support Lead
Jul 2015 – Aug 2025 · 10 years 2 monthsGravityKit · Remote
Support Lead
Nov 2013 – Dec 2020 · 7 years 2 monthsMailPoet (part of Automattic) · Remote
Projects
Side projects I build to stay close to implementation. Most start as an itch I can't scratch at work, something I want to use myself, or a methodology I want to understand by shipping it — an AI critical-reading tool, a Bayesian interview engine, a class-management platform, and more.
See all projectsResearch
Alongside product work, I work as an independent conceptual AI researcher on language agents, memory, perspective, individuation, self-models, and successor-model lifecycles. The public essay We Scaled the Ape and Expected the Human is the originating map — distilled from The Journey of the Monad, a book I am writing — and the papers are the secular, testable research proposals that grew from it. The current series includes 6 papers.
Books
I write books to think through ideas I can't shake — usually between science, philosophy, and the questions neither one answers. One is published; three are in progress.
See the booksEducation
PUC-RS · Associate Degree in Database Technology (focus on Data Analytics, Data Modeling/Warehousing, and DBA) · Mar 2024 – Jul 2026, graduating Aug 2026. Capstone: Predicting Negative Reviews in the Olist Ecosystem.
Escola Técnica Santo Inácio · Technical high school in Information Technology · 1999 – 2002.
Next up: an MBA in Project Management and a Master's in Software Engineering, both starting Sep 2026.
Get in touch
The best part of putting all this online is hearing back from the people who read it. If something here resonated — a project, a paper, a book, or just an idea you want to argue about — I'd genuinely like to hear from you. Say hi anytime.