Recruited by the founder of a hyper-growth fintech app where every product decision arrived by text message. I rebuilt it into seven outcome-owning pods, then found the pivot that took the company to $50M ARR and 1M+ monthly active users in ten months.
Benjamin is a mobile app that pays users real cash back for shopping online, with debit and credit products attached. When I joined, it was growing on the strength of the founder’s conviction alone. There was no product team, no roadmap, and no filter between the founder’s ideas and the engineers building them.
Over the engagement I built the product and design organization from zero, restructured delivery into seven outcome-owning pods, launched a card program with a bank and network partner, and led the customer research that produced the pivot the company now runs on.
What makes this engagement useful as a reference is that all three problems were live at once: the company had to organize, ship, and find a better market position simultaneously. Most growth-stage companies I talk to are in exactly that position.
The company was one hundred percent founder led. Requests came by text, email, Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp, three to four new features a week, every channel used as a queue. Engineers received instructions directly and were told to work on everything at once, which meant almost nothing shipped.
They were strong engineers. They were badly underutilized: nobody had told them what problem they owned. The founder’s mandate to me was blunt, get things shipped fast enough to compete, which is close to impossible when the operating model itself is the bottleneck.
Ninety days got the house in order. The market work ran in parallel and kept going long after.
Nothing but learning. What the product is, where product-market fit actually sat, who the competitors were, and why the company was building what it was building.
I flew to the engineering team and we went back through months of messages, every request the founder had ever sent, and mapped all of it onto one wall. Then we cut it into seven verticals.
Two-week sprints running in every pod, features actually shipping, and the product organization aligned with the user acquisition strategy that was about to turn on.
Instead of one shared feature list, I cut the work into seven verticals and gave each one a product manager, a dedicated group of engineers, and a result to own. Designers were shared across two to three pods, matched by specialization: a gaming pod needs a gaming designer, internal tools need something else entirely.
The structural change that mattered most was access. The founder no longer went directly to engineers. Every idea entered through the pod’s product manager, who held final authority over what got built, what got killed, and what shipped, and who carried the weight of that pod’s outcomes.
Staffing moved fast. A core group of product managers has followed me across companies, so the senior layer was in place immediately; hiring the remaining three took about three months. Designers were remote and came in on portfolio strength, where the hard part was choosing between good options rather than finding them.
Core shopping and cash-back experience
Play-to-earn titles and partner integrations
Debit and credit programs, payouts, ledger
Instrumentation and the numbers pods steered by
Personalization and in-product intelligence
KYC, regulatory obligations, program controls
Operations tooling and support workflows
The next mandate was the card program, and we delivered it: an affiliate shopping plugin network, a MasterCard partnership, and a single East Coast bank sponsor, with the debit and credit products launched on top. The hard part was never the interface. It was compliance and partner management, KYC, the ledger, the BIN sponsor, program management, and card-linked offers, all of which had to hold up before a single card could ship.
Even with that live, I did not believe cash back could carry the company. The category was saturated. So I ran hands-on, over-the-shoulder customer interviews and focus groups, and the finding was simple and slightly uncomfortable: users were not there to save money on purchases. They were there to earn money.
I had been watching play-to-earn apps gain traction for about a year. I sourced three partners who could supply a steady stream of paid-to-play titles, both AAA and B-tier, and the gaming pod shipped new games and features every two weeks against an aggressive acquisition push. That pivot is what moved the business.
The founder’s original thesis. Real, but in a crowded category.
MasterCard, a bank sponsor, and the compliance stack behind them.
Three game partners, new titles every two weeks, and users who came to earn.
Across rewards and fintech partnerships, on the back of the play-to-earn pivot.
Two-week release cadence on games and features, paired with aggressive paid acquisition.
Restructured how user rewards were paid out through Venmo and PayPal.
Roughly 80% of that revenue went straight back out as user acquisition spend. Growth at that speed was bought as much as it was built, and knowing which half is which is the whole job.
He was, in a specific sense, and that was the point. Before, he decided everything and almost nothing shipped. After, the company had a regular cadence of data-backed work reaching users, but it was not always the exact thing he had asked for on a Tuesday night.
That was the real work of the engagement: keeping a founder-led product culture intact while replacing the mechanism underneath it. His instincts stayed in the system, they just had to enter through a product manager and survive contact with evidence. Any leader taking this on should expect that tension and plan for it rather than be surprised by it.
Bringing order to chaos is what I do, coupled with speed to market. When a team is stuck in old ways of working, or when everything routes through one person’s inbox, the fix is rarely more effort. It is ownership, a cadence, and a filter between ideas and engineers.
The same engagement also installs the workflows and product-embedded AI channels that let a small team move like a much larger one. You should recognize yourself in this page if you are growing fast, have real conviction at the top, and cannot get that conviction out the door reliably.
Interested in what this looks like for your team? See how engagements are structured or book a 30-minute strategy session.
Results reflect work delivered as a product executive at Benjamin. Figures are as reported at the time of the engagement.
Start with a 30-minute product strategy session. You’ll leave with the first three moves, whether or not we work together.