The B2Gov Calculator: When a Product Manager Becomes a Data Wizard

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.

That's exactly where I found myself when our leadership team dropped a bombshell: "We need to optimize our government sales process. Can you help?"

Now, 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. Traditional B2B or B2C sales strategies? Forget about them. Government procurement requires vendors to navigate a labyrinth of technical specifications, legal requirements, and bureaucratic processes that can make even seasoned sales professionals break into a cold sweat.

The Challenge: Beyond Human Capability

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. Multiply that by dozens of potential clients, and you've got a scalability nightmare.

The process involved:

• Researching historical data across multiple government databases
• Understanding complex budget allocations and educational indicators
• Creating customized pricing based on countless variables
• Generating professional presentations
• Preparing dozens of legal documents for public procurement processes

But here's the kicker: the leadership team looked around the office and thought, "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 have any business taking on a project that could reasonably require an entire development team? Probably not.

Did I say yes anyway? You bet I did.

Why Me? The Accidental Swiss Army Knife

The reason I became the unlikely candidate for this mission wasn't because I volunteered (though I did). It was because I had accidentally accumulated what our CTO called "an unfair combination of skills" across different domains:

• Commercial Process Understanding: Years of working with sales teams
• Public Procurement Knowledge: Understanding the byzantine world of government contracts
• Data Research Skills: Ability to navigate and extract insights from public databases
• Data Modeling: Structuring complex information into usable formats
• Data Processing: Cleaning and transforming messy datasets
• Predictive Modeling: Creating algorithms that actually work
• Frontend Development: Building interfaces that don't make users cry
• API Integration: Making different systems talk to each other

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.

Take federal transfers as an 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. The amount that stayed with the state? That's on one website. The amount distributed to each municipality? That's on a completely different website, managed by a different agency.

WHY? Your guess is as good as mine.

But I was determined. I dove into census data spanning 20 years, extracted 120 essential columns from datasets with over 400 variables, and navigated through 10+ different government portals. Each source had its own format, its own naming conventions, and its own special way of representing municipalities – sometimes by name, sometimes by code, sometimes by what seemed like pure chaos.

After weeks of data archaeology, I emerged with the holy grail: a unified dataset with 5,500 rows and 150 columns covering every municipality and state in Brazil.

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.

This wasn't a simple landing page – it was a comprehensive solution that needed to:

• Filter through thousands of data points
• Apply complex pricing logic
• Generate customized proposals
• Create dozens of legal documents
• Handle over 1,500 possible document combinations

The frontend alone required extensive JavaScript development to manage all the filtering logic, pricing calculations, and webhook integrations. But the real magic happened in the backend, where two powerful webhooks connected to Google Apps Script:

• 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 ones and 20 dynamic, contextual documents that would be included or excluded based on complex procurement logic.

The system had to understand different types of public contracting processes, fill in specific clauses, manage dynamic indexing, and ensure legal compliance across multiple scenarios. The combinatorial analysis showed over 1,500 possible documentation versions.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit: I never fully tested every possible combination. The math was just too overwhelming.

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, and prepare legal documents was pure magic. Their expressions went from skepticism to amazement to something approaching reverence.

One salesperson literally said, "This is like having a superpower."

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 operational efficiency gains were immediately visible in how many prospects each salesperson could manage.

But here's the thing about B2Gov sales: 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.

The Bigger Lesson: Impact Transcends Job Descriptions

This project taught me something fundamental about creating value: impact isn't limited by your job description. Sometimes the highest-leverage thing you can do for your company isn't the obvious product management task on your roadmap.

It's about identifying where your unique combination of skills can solve the most pressing business problems, even if those problems seem to belong to someone else's domain.

Was building a data-intensive, multi-functional sales tool part of my core PM responsibilities? Absolutely not.

Did it require me to become a temporary data engineer, frontend developer, automation specialist, and government procurement expert? Unfortunately, yes.

Was it worth it? Without question.

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.

And yes, I'm still proud that I built something that makes seasoned sales professionals feel like they have superpowers. Because sometimes, that's exactly what great product management looks like.

Building solutions that transcend traditional boundaries requires more than technical skills – it requires the courage to tackle problems that nobody else wants to solve. Sometimes, that's where the real magic happens.