Inside Alunafi: Building A Product From An Idea To Reality With Fabio Riva, Product Manager

Sometimes the most powerful stories don’t start with a polished product or a perfect roadmap. They start with an idea. When Fabio Riva joined Alunafi, the platform was still in its early stages of definition. Just an idea, a vision, and a lot of trust. Over time, Alunafi evolved into a live, operational platform used in real-world conditions.

This is the story of how that happened. And what comes next.

Meet Fabio

At Alunafi, Fabio is the product guy. The one overseeing development, managing issues, coordinating bots, and making sure the product actually works, even when it’s messy behind the scenes.

“I’m the person that makes things work.”

It’s a modest description for a role that sits at the intersection of engineering, operations, compliance, and user experience. But that simplicity reflects how Fabio approaches product: focused on function, impact, and continuous improvement.

Joining without a product, just an idea

Fabio didn’t join Alunafi because everything was already built. Quite the opposite. During his final interview, he asked a direct question:

Do you already have the product?

The answer was clear and transparent. The vision was defined, the direction was set, and the foundations were being prepared, but everything still needed to be built. For Fabio, that honesty mattered.

“I bought the idea. I trusted it.”

He saw the ambition behind the vision, the intention to build something meaningful, and decided to commit early, when the product was still a blueprint and the team was shaping its first mock-ups, working from the ground up.

From Blueprint to a Live Product

Turning a blueprint into a live product was not a sudden moment or a single breakthrough. It was a collective process shaped by trust and close collaboration across the team.

“ Amazing is the only word I can think of.
Because of the trust, Julian, the teamwork, the people,
the understanding between each other – between the product team,
between the operation, between the compliance.
Everything is very, very fluid.”

That fluidity between teams became essential. Product, operations, and compliance evolved together, with shared understanding guiding decisions and progress. Rather than one defining milestone, the product took shape through alignment, trust, and continuous collaboration.

In the early days, everything had to be defined at once: the product logic, the technical foundations, the collaboration between teams, and the constraints that come with building in a regulated environment. What existed on paper had to become something stable, usable, and reliable.

This phase was about iteration more than perfection. Testing assumptions, adjusting priorities, and aligning product decisions with operational and compliance realities.

It was the moment where vision met execution and where the product started to take real shape.

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Want to learn more about the people building Alunafi? More team stories are coming soon.