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 products built around an editing surface.

Each of these editors asked people to translate an intention into the language of software through fields, screens, settings, and structured inputs. Much of my work was about making that translation easier: reducing friction, understanding where people became confused, and helping the product meet them a little closer to where they already were.

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.

Language agents invert that relationship. Instead of asking people to learn how software organizes information, they allow people to speak naturally while the system listens, interprets, structures, remembers, and acts. After two decades building interfaces people had to operate, I became interested in systems that could do more of that work themselves, and in what might emerge when those systems remain accountable to the same person over time.

That experience now informs my work across product, writing, and research. I am particularly interested in how memory, continuity, and long-term interaction can make language agents more personal, useful, and accountable, and in what changes when an intelligent system stops merely responding and begins to remember.

Events

Not everything I shipped was software. I was the lead organizer of the first two WordCamp Porto Alegre — the official WordPress event — bringing my hometown's community together in 2013 and 2015.

WordCamp Porto Alegre 2013

The first edition — I led the team that brought the official WordPress event to Porto Alegre.

Event site

WordCamp Porto Alegre 2015

Back two years later, bigger — the second edition confirmed the city's WordPress community had taken root.

Event site

Vortex

Music came next. Vortex was my electronic music project — three house and techno editions across Rio Grande do Sul, my home state, run not for profit. The point was to learn from the inside how an electronic music event comes together: lineup, venue, sound, and the night itself.