Who I Am
I’m Isabela Dornelas, a Product Manager based in Berlin, working at the intersection of research, product discovery and digital health. I’m Brazilian, I work in Portuguese, English and Spanish, and I’m learning German.
I’m especially interested in women’s health, FemTech and digital health — fields where products deal with sensitive questions, real bodies and high stakes, and where getting the evidence right matters.
From Historical Research to Product
For over a decade I worked as a historian of medicine. My PhD at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) investigated how medicine, law and religion shaped decisions about therapeutic abortion and caesarean birth in Brazil. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, I studied the material history of surgery and obstetrics.
That work trained the skills I now use every day in product:
- Asking good questions, and not settling for easy answers.
- Working with incomplete and contradictory evidence — and being clear about what it does and does not support.
- Turning large amounts of qualitative material into findings that people can act on.
- Explaining complex ideas to very different audiences.
Today I bring that experience into digital product development: discovery and product management for a digital health product at Agulha Digital, operations and process improvement in a part-time Minijob at a Berlin photography company, and a programme in Product Management in IT with AI at SPICED Academy.
What I Bring to Product Teams
- Research. Interviews, synthesis and journey mapping, done with rigour from the start.
- Critical thinking. Separating evidence from assumption, and making trade-offs explicit.
- Experimentation. AI-assisted prototyping and analysis to test ideas quickly and cheaply.
- Collaboration. Years of work in international, interdisciplinary teams — and today, with engineers, healthcare professionals and operations teams.
Experience & Education
Product
- Product Manager — Agulha Digital, remote (Brazil & Germany) · 2025 – present
- Operations & Process Improvement — Minijob at an online photography company, Berlin · 2026 – present
- Product Management in IT with AI — SPICED Academy, Berlin · 2026
Research & teaching
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow — Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin · 2022 – 2025
- Research Fellow — Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine · 2023 – 2024
- Visiting Researcher — Ibero-American Institute and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin · 2021 – 2022 (DAAD grant)
- University teaching in the history of science, gender and women’s health
- Scientific Journal Editor — Temporalidades · 2016 – 2017
Education
- PhD in History — Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) · 2022
- MA in History — UFMG · 2018 · Best Dissertation Award, Brazilian Society for the History of Science (2020)
- BA in History — UFMG · 2016
My research and publications are listed under Writing .