Building a Product organisation that could protect the product
I built and led a ten-person Product organisation, rebuilt a core collections workflow and helped the company serve a major enterprise programme without sacrificing every other customer’s roadmap.
The operating context
receeve built a collections platform for regulated financial workflows. Banks and lenders used it to design, automate and operate how they handled at-risk customer relationships.
The company grew from roughly 15 people to around 70 during my tenure. Product had to mature quickly without becoming a layer between customers and engineering.
Building the Product function
- I built and led Product across product management, technical product ownership, UX/UI, product marketing and data science.
- I brought UX in-house, owned product direction and worked across discovery, enterprise requirements, platform decisions, hiring and delivery.
- Michael Backes led the overall Shape Up implementation. The Head of Engineering and I helped adapt the model to enterprise B2B and ran it day to day, with teams owning outcomes rather than processing a ticket queue.
Protecting the product
The collections orchestrator was manual and chaotic. Configuring a bank’s process needed an engineer, which put engineering directly in every customer’s critical path. We rebuilt it as a visual drag-and-drop strategy builder so a bank could design its own collections process in minutes.
Then a multi-million euro programme for a large European consumer bank reset the roadmap. We implemented two legitimate lanes: a product track that kept building the platform, and a customer track with its own engineers and PM, prioritised with the customer-facing teams.
What the model enabled
- The bank went live while the roadmap for other customers survived the programme.
- Payment providers with different APIs and operating models sat behind a harmonisation layer instead of leaking their differences into the product.
- I represented Product in the company’s fundraising due diligence.
- Michael later documented that work in his book Shaping Enterprise: A Field Guide to Shape Up in B2B Product Organisations. I reviewed the manuscript and am named in the acknowledgements.
What I would design earlier
The customer track should have existed from day one. In every company, sales and customer commitments will bend the roadmap when they have no legitimate lane. The answer is not to ignore them, but to design a route that serves them without quietly consuming the product teams.
“Pau played a pivotal role in scaling our Product organization, implementing Shape Up methodologies, and acting as the key interface between Product and the entire company. His work was instrumental in ensuring that product delivery, including critical enterprise features, was consistently on time and met the highest standards.”
“His ability to connect Product, Engineering, Business, and customers turned complex challenges into practical solutions. [...] Pau was able to quickly understand complex requirements, ask the right questions, challenge assumptions when needed, and translate customer needs into actionable decisions for Product and Engineering.”