Day in the Life: Chief technology and product officer

Digital Signage Today's career series features Teresa Rojas Rajs, who serves as chief technology and product officer at nsign, a software-as-a-service company. In the October 1, 2026 interview, Rojas describes a role that spans product, technology and security — and explains how she arrived in the sector through an unusual academic detour.

From academia to digital signage

Rojas says she earned a PhD in Multimedia Engineering from UPC in Barcelona, where her thesis examined telepresence learning environments for opera singing — remote lessons that depend on audiovisual quality sufficient for actual teaching. She describes that work as her first real exposure to the AV world, combining acoustics, video, networks and people simultaneously. Professionally, she came from software engineering backgrounds including consulting, cloud platforms, business intelligence and large-scale SaaS. She identifies nsign as her direct entry into digital signage and says it remains her first role in the sector.

The CTPO role

Rather than serving as either CTO or CPO, Rojas holds a combined title she abbreviates as CTPO. She says her job involves deciding what the company builds while ensuring it is technically viable, scalable and sustainable in cost. She also carries CISO responsibility, meaning security is embedded in product decisions rather than reviewed afterward. Her daily duties include coordinating and unblocking teams, reviewing product and technology priorities, and spending a significant portion of each week interviewing customers, partners, and software and hardware vendors. The remainder goes to architecture discussions, scalability and security decisions, and hiring and mentoring. She characterizes the field as unusual: thousands of devices connecting globally, plus content, data and physical spaces, all in one ecosystem.

Advice for the role

Rojas identifies the hardest part of her job as prioritization — saying "not now" to good ideas from customers, team members and herself. The best part, she says, is when something intrinsically complex becomes an elegant design that feels simple to the person using it, and watching colleagues grow into architects and leaders. Her advice for those seeking a similar role: learn to speak both product and engineering languages, do not fear complexity because it can be broken down and worked through, and stay curious.

Why it matters

For small-business professionals evaluating digital signage platforms, Rojas's account highlights how much of a vendor's value sits in the combined product-technology-security judgment of its leadership. A platform's ease of use — a quality she prizes — depends on decisions made long before a customer signs up. Understanding who holds those responsibilities, and how they weigh what earns a place in their technology stack and scalability trade-offs, can inform how a business assesses a SaaS partner. The career path she describes, crossing from academic AV research into commercial product leadership, also illustrates the range of backgrounds that converge in this industry.