Research
ALI Program
ALI Program · SEBRAE/CNPq · 2015–2018
Overview
Over three years as a Local Innovation Agent, I served about 40 small and medium businesses, across the three broad segments the program covered: retail, industry and services. Unlike a one-off consulting engagement, the ALI model is continuous support — each company went through a diagnosis cycle followed by months of supported implementation, not a single visit with a final report.
Methodology
The diagnosis combined quantitative and qualitative research: understanding not just the business numbers, but how the owner and team actually worked day to day — where the process stalled, where information was missing to make decisions, where the company left opportunity on the table for lack of the structure to seize it. From there, the action plan focused on three recurring fronts: internal process improvement, digitalization and internationalization.
The digitalization piece, in practice, was where I got hands-on: building institutional websites, structuring WhatsApp-based customer service, and implementing simple management systems — many of these businesses had never had any digital presence before the diagnosis. That's where I started developing, in practice, much of what I use today as a designer and low-code developer.
Patterns observed, by segment
Services — equipment rental (e.g. agricultural machinery)
The most common bottleneck was manual availability control — rental and maintenance schedules on paper or loose spreadsheets, generating booking conflicts and equipment sitting idle unnecessarily. I implemented simple digital availability and maintenance control, plus structured WhatsApp-based service, giving customers a fast way to check availability without having to call.
Retail — restaurants
Here the pattern was gut-feeling pricing, with no clarity on the real cost per dish, and informal inventory control — it was common to discover, during diagnosis, that some menu items were actually running at a loss without the owner realizing it. Beyond mapping the real cost per dish (menu engineering), I helped structure a digital presence — a simple site and service/ordering via WhatsApp, essential for businesses of this size that had no channel beyond the physical counter.
Industry
At the industrial businesses served, the most recurring finding was a production process bottleneck with no formal mapping — the company knew there was loss, but couldn't pinpoint exactly where. Beyond mapping and standardizing the production process, I implemented simple management systems to move production tracking off loose spreadsheets or memory-based control.
Result
The experience consolidated a way of working that I still carry today as a designer: understanding the business's real problem, rigorously, before proposing any solution. And it was literally where I started building websites, structuring digital service and implementing management systems for the first time — long before "Product Designer" became my title. It's the same logic behind every diagnosis I do today before opening Figma.
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