Decisions, trade-offs and what I would do differently

Transaction Junction sits between retailers, banks, payment providers and value-added service providers as the switching and infrastructure layer. We set out to launch a self-serve reconciliation product as part of a broader redesign of the payment ecosystem and its value proposition. Reconciliation is a mature, well-served category, and most of our target merchants were already comparing us against established enterprise-grade reconciliation engines.

We were taking an MVP to market against that benchmark, which meant the product had to earn trust before it could earn adoption. In a financial product, trust is not a feature you add later. The customer is comparing what our product shows them against something they already trust: the bank's own mark-off file and their own spreadsheet.

I owned product vision, prioritisation and commercial readiness across the merchant and end-user payments value chain. I gave one product manager and one designer full autonomy to run customer interviews and shape the product from what they heard. My job was to hold the view of whether what they were hearing could scale across the whole merchant base, to challenge assumptions, remove blockers, and keep Commercial, Engineering, CS and Support aligned around the same customer outcome rather than optimising independently.

Sales had committed to capabilities, including three-way reconciliation and coverage across all transaction types, that Engineering could not deliver on the original timeline. My instinct at the time was to frame that as outside our control, a technical gap we had not foreseen. On reflection that is not quite right. The real issue was that we had not drawn a hard enough boundary between what Sales could commit to and what had actually been certified and tested. That is a Product accountability gap, not an engineering surprise, and it is the clearest lesson I took from this. I would now put a commercial-to-technical certification boundary in place before Sales starts positioning capability commitments.

One of South Africa's largest eCommerce businesses at the time, part of the Naspers group. The checkout was leaking badly, and the cost of that leak showed up in revenue every day.

Conversion was being treated as a marketing and traffic problem rather than an experience problem. Every squad was also rebuilding the same interface components slightly differently, which made each fix local and temporary.

I defined and led the product design and UX strategy across the whole customer journey, from discovery and sign-up through to checkout. I led a team of seven designers, two developers and a UX researcher, working alongside product managers, front-end engineers and business analysts.

This is where I learned that the design conversation and the commercial conversation are the same conversation, and that keeping them in separate rooms is what makes design look like decoration. It is the foundation of how I have led product ever since.

Touch was a full-stack, self-serve AI platform for chat commerce: intent, sentiment and entity recognition, channel orchestration, a workflow builder, an automation framework, a 360-degree customer view, chat forwarding and multi-agent chat.

Enterprises wanted to serve and sell to customers inside the chat apps their customers already used, but had no way to run that at scale with the controls a large business needs.

I led product objectives and the internal and external teams behind the Touch offering, compiling a strategic roadmap against user, business and technical needs, and working with teams across multiple regions.

Do not get emotionally attached to your product. If sunsetting is right for the bigger picture you have to be able to let it go, and do it cleanly. Being right about a market is not the same as it being the right thing for the business to fund at that moment.