Quick Fire 🔥 with Daniela Debebs

Daniela Debebs is a customer experience (CX) expert and Product Specialist at Clay, a unicorn startup, and a rising voice in CX and product strategy. With a career journey that spans law, sales, go-to-market (GTM), product operations, and customer experience, she brings a rare blend of perspectives to scaling product-led growth.  

Drawing on insights from 5,000+ customer interactions, she helps companies translate customer signals into practical steps for product and engineering teams, driving adoption, retention, and renewal. An expert communicator known for simplifying complexity, Daniela speaks and mentors on scaling CX initiatives, product-led growth, and career transitions into the tech industry.

• Explain your job to a 5-year-old.

I help people use technology without feeling lost or frustrated. When something doesn’t work or feels confusing, I figure out how to make it easier. My job is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You hand me a bag of jigsaw pieces, and I help you figure out how to connect them (tools, data, and workflows) in a way that fits together and matches your business goals.

• What drew you to customer experience and product strategy?

I love solving challenges; I derive a great deal of fulfillment from delving into problems. I’ve been in the tech industry for a few years, and one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences I’ve had was working at an early-stage startup and helping launch its first product. I worked on market discovery and realized I constantly needed to clearly explain the problems we wanted to solve and why people should care. I spent time on discovery calls and setting up demo environments, which increased my curiosity about how people interact with products, not just how they work but how they use them.

CX gave me a front-row seat to those human moments and helped me better understand why they matter. Product strategy, on the other hand, gave me the tools to turn those insights into action. The blend of both lets me bridge what users need with what teams build.

• How did your early career in law and sales influence the way you approach product and CX today?

Law trained me to think critically and find structure in complexity. One of the most defining experiences in my career was working in the legal department of a financial institution. I had an incredibly smart manager who taught me how to pull insights from ambiguity, communicate with precision, and work through complex problems. That experience helped me build a lot of muscle, and the skills I honed there became the foundation for everything I’ve done since.

Sales, on the other hand, taught me to listen for what people aren’t saying and to see the role of empathy in communication. Clear, thoughtful communication is an underrated skill, and it’s at the heart of great customer experience and product strategy.

• If you could give one piece of advice to someone transitioning into tech from a completely different field, what would it be?

Experience is never irrelevant and can often be your biggest differentiator. Unconventional backgrounds often become the very thing that makes your perspective unique and your value recognizable in any space. Seeing your experience as a limitation only holds you back.

The key is learning to translate what you already know into new environments. Once you adopt that mindset, your background stops feeling like a weight and starts becoming your advantage. If you pair this with curiosity and a passion for learning, you will be unstoppable.

• What’s the hardest part about turning customer feedback into actionable product decisions?

Separating signals from noise is key. As your customer base grows, feedback can get loud and messy. In a high-growth phase, it’s easy to get caught up in more “exciting features” or “initiatives” and overlook smaller problems that actually matter a lot to your customers.

The solution is having a clear system for spotting patterns and sharing them internally. When you can identify and communicate recurring themes across your customer base, your roadmap and customer journey can align fully.

Without that clarity, you end up chasing low-priority work that benefits no one—not your team, not your customers.

• Can you share one story from the field that changed how you think about CX?

One experience that significantly influenced my perspective on CX was what I like to call “the art of de-escalation.” It’s one of my favorite experiences with a dissatisfied customer.

I was looped into a 50+ email thread from a customer who had just downgraded their plan and was extremely vocal about their frustration. They were struggling to get an enrichment flow to work and felt like the recommendations they’d received weren’t helping. The real challenge, however, was that this was a user who was still learning the system. So, while solutions had been provided, none of them truly resonated because the foundational understanding wasn’t there.

To resolve this, we acknowledged their frustration and provided a clear walkthrough of the feature’s capabilities, using a real example that tied directly to their goal. Once they could clearly see how the product worked for their use case and the exact steps they needed to take, they became more engaged and confident. 

This experience taught me that you can build a great product, but if it doesn’t speak the language of your customers, they won’t see its value. CX constantly requires you to help customers connect the dots between what they want and where your product fits in. If you work in CX, more than ever, you have to lean towards being consultative and proactive. Truly personalised experiences are about meeting customers where they are, not where you expect them to be.

• What’s one tool, habit, or framework that makes you more effective at work?

Being in the product and reviewing customer feedback/sentiment. I must identify at least one paper cut or product limitation every week. It’s great for staying close to how customers feel, not how we think they feel.

I also like to throw myself into complex client workflows. It’s a great way to spot opportunities to improve user experience & unlock better value for key features. 

• How do you balance building products people love (through feedback) with meeting business goals?

These things are rarely separate. When you focus on recurring themes in customer feedback, business goals naturally align with building what people need. Business success is ultimately tied to relevance.

CX teams play a key role in identifying and communicating that relevance, turning customer feedback into clear priorities that explain why something matters and how it affects business outcomes.

Your product should support and influence your customers’ business goals. This shapes how feedback is filtered and prioritised. When what you build solves real business problems and drives their success, it shows in retention and expansion. 

• Outside of work, what sparks your creativity or keeps you inspired?

Outside of work, I find creativity in stillness. A clear mind is often underrated, but it’s crucial when you spend most of your time in a fast-paced environment. I make it a point to create moments of stillness, and some of my best ideas and solutions have come in those quiet moments.

Reading also helps me see the world in colour. It gives me new ideas and perspectives that shape how I approach challenges. I’m especially drawn to stories about people with unconventional backgrounds. One of my recent reads, Invention: A Life, has a quote that mirrors how I approach work and life:

“My tale is one of not being brilliant. I wasn’t even trained as an engineer or scientist. I did, however, have the bloody-mindedness not to follow convention, to challenge experts, and to ignore Doubting Thomases. I am also someone who is prepared to slog through prototype after prototype searching for the breakthrough.”

I try to carry that same curiosity in my work, tempered with just enough aversion to “how things have always been.” 

• Looking ahead, what’s the most exciting trend in CX or product strategy you’re seeing in tech?

We’re in an era where CX is gaining recognition for its role in shaping how companies build and scale. This will keep evolving as more teams take a proactive, strategic approach to creating thoughtful customer experiences that drive revenue.

AI will play an important role in helping companies personalise these experiences at scale. But as we move forward, the key will be implementation and automation that doesn’t remove empathy. AI should act as a bridge, not a wall, between you and your customers.