I arrived as a tech lead and left as a product manager, which was less a promotion than a slow admission that I was already doing the job.
Most of it was one product: PorCobrar. I built and shipped the first version, back and front. About eighteen months later it was part of what closed a Series A with monashees — a round is a lot of people's work and I would not claim it as mine, but the thing existed because a few of us made it exist. After that came connecting it to accounting systems, then internal tooling, then a single sign-on so our products could behave like one product.
The part I liked best was the plumbing. I was the only person maintaining the wire-transfer integration, which was moving around ten million pesos a month and was not allowed to be down. CI/CD, and some custom git tooling because our workflow did not fit anyone else's.
Five years is a long time to be anywhere. I learned how to scale a team and how to find out what people actually want, mostly by being wrong in public a few times first.