Fractional Product Leader · Payments & Monetisation

I help product teams
turn payments into
a growth lever.

Payments isn't just how money comes in. It's strategy, team alignment, and infrastructure. I bring a decade of inside experience — from Adyen, Uber, Onfido and more — to help companies get it right, fast.

Who this is for Product leaders and founders at Series A–C companies where payments is already material to revenue — and no one truly owns the payment strategy yet.

Book a discovery call → See how I work ↓
Fractional PM for companies that want to leverage payments fast — and build the team for long-term success.
Checkout conversion 1–3% drop-off reduction = significant revenue at scale
Acceptance rate optimisation Wrong routing, failed retries, and weak fallbacks cost more than you think
Payment methods & localisation The right method in the right market can move conversion by 10–30%
KYC & onboarding drop-off Identity friction is often the biggest hidden blocker to activation
Subscription & monetisation models Pricing architecture, churn, and billing logic built to scale
Checkout conversion · Acceptance rate · Payment methods · KYC & onboarding · Subscription models · Risk & fraud · Drop-off rate · Payment funnel · Monetisation strategy · North Star metrics · Checkout conversion · Acceptance rate · Payment methods · KYC & onboarding · Subscription models · Risk & fraud · Drop-off rate · Payment funnel · Monetisation strategy · North Star metrics ·
The challenge

You're losing revenue
you can't see.

Payments is not a feature. It's infrastructure. Most companies treat it as a checkbox. The best ones treat it as a growth lever. The difference is strategy, team alignment, and someone who's seen both sides.

?
01
You're losing revenue you can't see
Failed transactions, poor routing, and weak retry logic cost 2–8% of revenue silently. No dashboard flags it clearly.
02
Your checkout is leaking
Every extra field, redirect, or unsupported payment method is a drop-off. Most teams don't know where the funnel breaks.
03
Subscription and monetisation left on the table
Pricing architecture, billing logic, and churn mechanics are rarely owned by anyone with a product mindset. Revenue leaks through failed renewals, wrong plan structures, and churn that was entirely preventable.
04
No one owns the payment strategy
Engineering owns the integration. Finance owns the reconciliation. Product owns nothing. The result is nobody optimising the whole.
About
Stefania Colombo

Not a consultancy.
A payments insider.

I spent a decade inside some of Europe's most demanding payment and fintech organisations — owning checkout flows, building monetisation models, optimising acceptance rates, and untangling the complexity that sits between a user and a successful transaction.

Across every company, the same pattern: payments treated as plumbing, not strategy. Teams shipping fast without asking why. Revenue leaking in ways nobody measured. And the people who understood the problem most clearly — engineers, designers, ops — rarely in the room where decisions were made.

So I built a way of working that fixes exactly that. I come in, diagnose fast, align the team, and build the foundation for payments to become a growth lever — not a cost centre.

Paddle
Senior Product Manager — Monetisation
Checkout funnel, payment methods prioritisation, churn reduction, and billing dashboards across 6,000+ apps.
Most recent
Uber
Senior Product Manager — Growth & Payments
Growth and payments across Rides, Eats, and Flights on a global multi-sided platform.
Onfido
Senior Product Manager — Identity Platform
AI orchestration, billing infrastructure, and revenue transparency for identity verification at scale.
Adyen
Product Manager — Checkout & Payments
Enterprise checkout for airlines, eBay, Prada, and Hermès. POS solutions and ecosystem partnerships including Oracle.
Rocket Internet
Business Development — E-commerce
Commercial expansion across Asia and analysis of global savings group portfolio companies.
GetYourGuide
Marketplace Growth & Marketing Expansion
Meta ads expansion across Southern Europe and SEO growth on a fast-scaling travel marketplace.
Early career
Workshops

Surgical intervention —
workshop, sprint,
or fractional.

I work in two modes:

Fractional product leader2–3 days/week, embedded in your team. I own the payment product surface, run the OKRs, and build the structure for long-term success.
Workshops & sprintsOne focused day or week on a specific problem — alignment, checkout conversion, subscription design, or a growth experiment framework.
Alignment
Strategic Alignment

Who owns checkout conversion? Who owns acceptance rate? Who owns cost per transaction? This session surfaces the hidden assumptions, assigns clear ownership, and gets the whole team pointing at the same metrics.

MTWTF
Ideation
Design Sprint

Five days to answer one critical payment question — a broken checkout flow, a new market entry, a subscription model redesign. Prototype, test with real users, and leave with a validated direction instead of another roadmap debate.

ObjectiveKR 1KR 2KR 3
Planning
OKR Planning

Set the metrics that actually matter — acceptance rate, checkout conversion, activation rate, revenue per user. Build a data tree that connects every team's work to the north star. Stop measuring activity. Start measuring outcome.

HypothesisTestLearn
Growth
Growth Experiment Machine

Run structured A/B tests on your payment flow — checkout layouts, payment method order, retry logic, pricing pages. Define the hypothesis before you build. Set decision rules before you measure. Stop guessing, start compounding.

How I work

How I work.

01
Discovery call

30 minutes. Understand your challenge, figure out if I'm the right fit. No obligation.

02
Early discovery

1–2 structured sessions to fully understand your team, product, and problem.

03
Proposal in 48h

What I'll do, how long, what it costs. No ambiguity, no surprises.

04
I get to work

I embed fast and deliver value from the first session.

FAQ
Who do you work with?
Founders, product leaders, engineers, designers, and cross-functional teams at startups, scale-ups, and enterprises. Anyone who builds products and wants to move with more clarity, alignment, and purpose.
What does an engagement look like?
Strategy Sprint or Design Sprint: 1–2 weeks. Growth diagnostic: 2–4 weeks. Ongoing advisory retainers: 3–12 months. Everything scoped clearly upfront.
In-person or remote?
Both. Workshops work best in-person — the energy and focus is unbeatable. I'm based in the Netherlands and work regularly across Amsterdam and Italy. Advisory and strategy work is seamless remotely. I adapt to what works for your team.
Do you speak at events or run offsites?
Yes — on product strategy, payments, growth, and collaboration. Reach out and we'll figure out what makes sense.
Let's talk

Ready to get
unstuck?

A product challenge, a team spinning its wheels, a growth question you can't crack. A 30-minute call costs nothing and usually clarifies everything.

Book a free discovery call →