The B2Gov Calculator: When a Product Manager Becomes a Data Wizard
How I accidentally built the most powerful sales tool in our company's history
The story of how a Product Manager with **zero sales tool development experience** ended up building a comprehensive B2Gov calculator that **revolutionized our government sales process**. This project required mastering data archaeology, complex integrations, and Brazilian bureaucracy—all while maintaining my day job.
Client
Internal Project
Duration
2-3 Months
Role
Product Manager & Data Analyst (Accidental Data Wizard)
Project Metrics
Area
Sales Enablement
Impact
Operational Efficiency
Project Team
- Solo Project (Cross-functional Collaboration)
The B2Gov Calculator
When a Product Manager Becomes a Data Wizard
How I accidentally built the most powerful sales tool in our company's history (and why it definitely wasn't in my job description)
🎭 The Plot Twist: When Success Creates New Problems
Picture this: you're a Product Manager riding high on consistent results. Your main product is stable, metrics are healthy, and everything is humming along beautifully. Life is good, right?
Then reality hits you with a curveball that makes you question everything you thought you knew about your role.
"We need to optimize our government sales process. Can you help?"
— Leadership Team
🏛️ The Challenge: Beyond Human Capability
Here's the thing about government sales (B2Gov) – it's like playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The rules are different, the stakes are higher, and the complexity is mind-boggling.
⏱️ The Manual Process Nightmare
Our sales team was drowning in manual processes. Creating a single government proposal wasn't just time-consuming – it was an endurance test that could take 4 to 6 hours per prospect.
Research Phase:
- Historical data across multiple government databases
- Complex budget allocations and educational indicators
- Municipal and state-specific requirements
Delivery Phase:
- Customized pricing based on countless variables
- Professional presentations
- Dozens of legal documents for procurement
🤔 The Leadership Logic: "You know who should build this incredibly complex, cross-functional tool? The Product Manager."
Was this my responsibility? Absolutely not. Was it in my job description? Not even close. Did I say yes anyway? You bet I did.
🛠️ Why Me? The Accidental Swiss Army Knife
The reason I became the unlikely candidate wasn't because I volunteered (though I did). It was because I had accidentally accumulated what our CTO called "an unfair combination of skills":
💼 Business Skills
- • Commercial Process Understanding
- • Public Procurement Knowledge
- • Stakeholder Management
📊 Data Skills
- • Data Research & Modeling
- • Data Processing & Cleaning
- • Predictive Modeling
💻 Technical Skills
- • Frontend Development
- • API Integration
- • System Architecture
In most companies, you'd need a team of specialists. In our startup reality, you had me, a coffee machine, and a deadline that seemed to mock the laws of physics.
🕵️ The Data Hunt: Brazil's Information Treasure Hunt
Finding Brazilian public data is like playing the world's most frustrating scavenger hunt. Government agencies seem to have a competition for who can make their data most inaccessible.
🤯 The Federal Transfer Example
The federal government sends money to states. Part stays with the state, part goes to municipalities based on each state's specific rules. Simple, right? Wrong.
Amount that stayed with state
One website, managed by Agency A
Amount distributed to municipalities
Different website, managed by Agency B
WHY? Your guess is as good as mine.
🏆 The Final Dataset
After weeks of data archaeology, I emerged with the holy grail:
⚙️ Building the Beast: More Than Just a Calculator
The interface development phase was where things got interesting. We were required to use Wix (don't ask), which made creating a basic webpage easy but building a robust data application... challenging.
🎯 System Requirements
Frontend Capabilities:
- Filter through thousands of data points
- Apply complex pricing logic
- Handle real-time calculations
- Manage user interactions
Backend Integration:
- Generate customized proposals
- Create legal documents
- Handle 1,500+ document combinations
- Automate presentation creation
🎨 Webhook #1: The Presentation Generator
This beauty took all the selected information from the calculator and automatically populated a Google Slides presentation, generating both PowerPoint and PDF versions for the sales team.
📄 Webhook #2: The Document Factory
This was the crown jewel – and the source of my nightmares. It managed a Google Drive folder containing 50+ documents:
- 30 static documents
- 20 dynamic, contextual documents
- Complex procurement logic
- Legal compliance across multiple scenarios
😅 Confession: I'm slightly embarrassed to admit—I never fully tested every possible combination. The math was just too overwhelming.
Over 1,500 possible documentation versions. Sometimes you just have to trust the logic and pray to the debugging gods.
✨ The Magic Moment: When Technology Feels Like Wizardry
After weeks of sweat, debugging, and more coffee than any human should consume, the moment of truth arrived. I demonstrated the calculator to our sales team.
Watching their faces as they input a municipality name and watched the system instantly:
- Populate 120+ data points
- Generate pricing models
- Create professional presentations
- Prepare legal documents
"This is like having a superpower."
— Actual quote from our sales team
Of course, the honeymoon phase lasted exactly 30 seconds before the inevitable: "Great! Now you have no excuse not to hit those aggressive sales targets."
📈 The Impact: When Efficiency Meets Reality
The calculator didn't just improve our sales process – it transformed it. We went from managing a handful of leads simultaneously to handling dozens.
⏰ The B2Gov Reality Check: The cycle is about 18 months from initial contact to signed contract. The calculator launched in 2024, so we're still in the early stages of seeing its full impact.
However, I'm confident that in the coming months and years, we'll see the true ROI of this tool forged in determination and caffeine.
🎓 Key Takeaways: Beyond the Technical Achievement
1. Cross-Functional Knowledge Is a Superpower
Having surface-level understanding across multiple domains allowed me to see connections that specialists might miss. The ability to understand both technical constraints and business requirements made the solution more robust and user-friendly.
2. Sometimes You Are the Bottleneck (And That's Okay)
In startup environments, being the person who can "figure it out" often means becoming a temporary bottleneck. The key is recognizing when this investment of your time creates exponential value for the organization.
3. Data Complexity Is Always Underestimated
Every data integration project takes 2-3x longer than you think. Government data? Make that 4-5x. Plan accordingly, and always have a backup plan for your backup plan.
4. User Amazement Is the Best Validation
When users see technology solve their daily frustrations effortlessly, their reaction tells you everything about the value you've created. That moment of "wow" is worth all the late nights debugging webhook responses.
🌟 The Moral of the Story
Sometimes being a great Product Manager means temporarily becoming something else entirely. It means recognizing that the most impactful thing you can build might not be a feature for your existing product – it might be an entirely new tool that unlocks organizational potential.
The B2Gov Calculator wasn't just a technical achievement; it was a lesson in how versatility, determination, and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone can create solutions that seemed impossible at the start.
Building solutions that transcend traditional boundaries requires more than technical skills – it requires the courage to tackle problems that nobody else wants to solve.
Project Gallery
