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 tech.

• 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 get a lot of fulfillment from digging 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.