She has been working with Sonae Sierra since 2008, having held positions on the Executive Committee and as a director of Sierra Portugal S.A., with responsibilities in the areas of Innovation, Marketing, Commercial and Continuous Improvement, having come from Sonaeom where she was a director in several companies in the telecommunications area since 2000.

She was also the first Portuguese woman to join McKinsey & Company as a consultant and one of the youngest ever to be appointed project manager, from where she left, at the age of 29, for the financial sector to take on the leadership of UNICRE's issuing business, when Unibanco products were leading the Portuguese market.

She collaborates with Insight Out on Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting projects and develops various projects in the management area as a freelancer.

She was Chairmain of the ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centers) Solal Awards for Europe & South Africa South and Chairman of the European ICSC Marketing Core Group. She was also a guest lecturer at UCP in the Communication Skills subject and at the Lisbon MBA, where she was responsible for the Business Cases subject, a course she created herself, and for the Case Competition. She took part in the Mentoring program, as a mentor, at UCP, Lisbon MBA and Sonae Sierra.

Manuela is a founding member of the 101010 Association of School 42 in Portugal, a school with which she collaborates probono.

She has a degree in Economics from UCP and an MBA from Universidade Nova de Lisboa
She completed the Leadership and Organizational Transformation course at the London Business School, the Negotiation and Influencing Strategies course at Stanford, the Leading Change and Organizational Renewal course at Harvard and the Digital Business Strategy course at Columbia.

She has a Coaching course run by Insight Out and certified by the ICF (International Coaching Federation), and is now completing a specialization in Team and Organizational Coaching.