Daniel Coelho · Human in the loop, CPO at Flowgate

About Daniel

Now: Chief Product Officer at Flowgate, since June 2025
Based in: Braga, Portugal
Trained as: Software engineer, University of Minho
In crypto since: 2017, in payments since 2018

Hey, I’m Daniel. I run product at Flowgate, a crypto payment processor that is now part of CoinsPaid. I was the first engineer hired at Utrust, two months after its 2017 ICO, and moved from building the checkout to deciding what it should do. I look for the problem first and manage the product second, these days with AI agents doing a lot of the typing.

Where I help

Hovering high level on vision
Discussing strategy across peers and departments
Creating OKRs and KPIs for the product
Managing a product team of designers and engineers
Building and managing the product roadmap
Aligning priorities and expectations
Researching requirements and customers

Writing specifications and managing the backlog
Designing and building internal tools
Building product launch plans
Setting up analytics and automation
Quick coding for temporary projects
Supporting and buffering the sales team
Improving internal processes and tooling

Work so far

Crypto payment processor for merchants, acquired by CoinsPaid. I joined in June 2025 and own the product end to end.
- Vision, roadmap and priorities across the whole product.
- Specifications for the engineering team, written so that people and AI agents can both build from them.
- Internal tools, documentation and prototypes built hands-on with Claude Code.
flowgate.tech
Structured a crypto payments company for scale.
- Outlined the mission, vision and values, and focused the team on growth.
- Managed product redesigns, releases and a rebrand.
- Specified merchant onboarding that complies with the latest regulations.
- Built internal management tools with Retool and MongoDB.
- Introduced sprints, roadmaps for every department, and support and sales flows on Gleap.
- Organised in-person team retreats.
A physical optical shop in Braga, started with friends. We did the concept and the project ourselves, and a good part of the renovation too.
opticasaovictor.pt
A crypto treasury management startup.
- Developed the product roadmap.
- Wrote product specifications for the engineering teams.
- Planned the design sprints.
cleverpocket.xyz
First engineer hired at a crypto payments startup, two months after its 2017 ICO. Utrust was acquired in January 2022 and is now xMoney.
- Built and maintained the first front end of the MVP, launched in April 2018.
- Designed and specified the core payment flow v2.0 in 2022. It is still in use.
- Defined the first product OKRs and KPIs, and ran monthly roadmap re-prioritisation.
- Launched integrations for WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and others.
- Managed three to five engineers shipping weekly releases.
xmoney.com
First job as a full-stack developer at a small startup, in Ruby on Rails and React.
occameducation.com
Travelled and volunteered in international Erasmus+ projects, working on the soft skills no degree covers while contributing to a closer Europe.
Graduated in Software Engineering in Braga. The engineering habit stayed: I still read the code before I write the ticket.

I work in Claude Code every day. Internal tools, dashboards, documentation and prototypes go from a written spec to something running, without waiting for a free sprint.

Builds with
AI agents

A specification clear enough for an engineer is clear enough for a model. Mine work as the prompt, the test plan and the acceptance criteria at once.

Specs
that run

Agents are only as good as what they are told. I write the workspace rules, skills and shared context that let a team and its agents work in the same repositories.