About PML

Built from real product challenges

Hi, I’m Sandro Maia, a Product Leader with experience building and evolving digital products, platforms, and product teams across different industries and international environments.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked with product teams at companies such as IKEA, Storyblok, Magazine Luiza, Raia Drogasil, Hurb, across Europe, the United States, and Africa, including projects and partnerships with companies such as Disney, Orange, Unitel T+. My experience ranges from launching new products from scratch to evolving platforms and products used across multiple markets.

Different companies, industries, markets, and levels of product maturity, but many of the challenges were surprisingly similar.

How do we know how mature a product really is? And once we know, where should we improve next?

That question eventually led me to create the Product Maturity Level (PML).

Why I created PML

Over the years, I saw teams facing questions that went far beyond simply delivering features.

Is our product strategy actually understood by the team? Are we solving real customer problems? Are priorities connected to business outcomes? Are decisions supported by data? Is technology enabling the product or limiting it? Do we understand the financial impact of what we build?

And perhaps most importantly:

Where should we focus first?

I wanted a practical way to bring these conversations together and help teams understand where they actually stand.

That became PML.

The framework provides a structured view of product maturity across 10 key domains, covering Vision and Strategy, Customer Centricity, Team Collaboration and Structure, Prioritization and Product Planning, Technical Alignment and Scalability, Discovery and Delivery, Data and Insights, Innovation and Growth, Financial Impact, and Leadership and Influence.

Built from practice, not theory

PML wasn’t created as an academic exercise.

It grew out of real product challenges, conversations, experiments, mistakes, lessons, and experiences working with teams at different stages of maturity.

Throughout my career, I’ve been involved in product strategy, discovery, prioritization, platform development, customer experience, technology alignment, data-driven decision-making, business impact, and the challenges of creating alignment across teams and organizations.

Over time, I started connecting these experiences into a framework around a simple principle:

Before deciding where you want to go, you need to understand where you are today.

PML turns that principle into something teams can actually use together.

Create your baseline

The goal of PML is not simply to generate a maturity score.

The real value is in the conversations that happen around it.

Different people on the same team may have very different perceptions of strategy, customers, technology, data, priorities, or leadership. Making those differences visible can be just as valuable as the final score.

PML helps teams create a baseline, identify gaps, discuss different perspectives, decide where improvement matters most, take action, and reassess their maturity over time.