Summary
Most pricing strategies stall between the deck and the decision. Drawing on a decade of experience in CPG revenue growth management, Gustavo Mendonça explains why he joined RML to turn strategy into working systems.
I’ve spent my career at the intersection of data, commercial strategy, and technology. For a decade, that meant sitting inside one of the world’s largest CPG businesses, at Kraft Heinz, in senior revenue growth management and digital transformation roles, leading the global RGM agenda and helping shape how the business used data to drive commercial decisions. Before that, I spent nearly ten years in financial services, across banking, hedge funds, and investment management.
It’s an unusual combination. But it’s exactly that combination that shaped how I think about the problem I’ve spent my career trying to solve, and why I’ve now joined Revenue Management Labs (RML) as Managing Partner, leading the firm’s AI capabilities, its CPG advisory practice, and its expansion into Europe.
The Gap I Kept Running Into
Over ten years in CPG, I watched pricing and revenue management evolve from spreadsheets and gut calls into something far more structural. The tools got better. The data got richer. The thinking got sharper. But I also saw, time and again, just how hard it still is for most companies to close the gap between having the right pricing strategy and actually executing it, consistently, across hundreds of decisions, every single week.
That’s the part that doesn’t show up in the strategy deck. A great pricing strategy can be built in a quarter. Living up to it, decision after decision, account after account, week after week, that’s the real work. And it’s exactly where most organizations, no matter how sophisticated, start to lose the thread.
What Drew Me Here
That gap is why I joined RML: the chance to turn that thinking into tools teams actually use. Not just strategy on a slide, but systems that change how decisions get made day to day.
AI doesn’t replace the judgment good commercial teams bring. It amplifies it. Done right, it lets you encode the thinking you’ve built over a career into tools that shape better strategy, faster, and then turn that strategy into a live system: one that catches the deal that’s off-track, the account that’s slipping, the price point leaving margin on the table, before it costs real money, not after.
That’s the thinking behind RML’s Build capability, and it’s exactly the kind of working decision system I want to help clients create.
What I’ll Be Focused On
On the CPG side, I bring deep category and commercial expertise to clients navigating pricing, trade, and revenue growth decisions, grounded in a decade of operating inside one of the world’s largest CPG businesses. I know what it’s like to be on the other side of this conversation, trying to make these calls in real time with imperfect data and a business that won’t wait.
I’ll also be focused on helping clients build AI-enabled capabilities and drive digital transformation at scale, not as a bolt-on, but as infrastructure that becomes part of how the business actually operates. And I’ll be helping lead RML’s expansion into Europe, bringing the same approach to a broader set of markets and clients.
Why I See This as a Turning Point
In my view, AI is changing two things at once in our industry.
First, it’s changing traditional consulting. The value is no longer just the advice. It’s the working system that advice leaves behind. A strategy that lives only in a deck has already started to go stale by the time it’s approved. A strategy embedded in a system keeps working long after the engagement ends.
Second, it’s changing software. The expertise isn’t sold separately from the tool anymore. It’s built into it. The line between “consulting” and “software” is disappearing, and that’s exactly where I want to be building.
And that’s the real opportunity. Most of the market still treats RGM transformation as a series of handoffs, strategy from one firm, tools from another, change management from a third. The value shows up when it’s one continuous loop: advise, build, embed. Get the advice right, build it into working tools, and drive the change management that makes teams actually use them. That’s the work I came here to do, with a team already doing it end to end.
That’s what a new chapter looks like. Let’s build.
