PouchNATION · Product & platform strategy · Current
Turning a reboot into a product that scales.
Context
PouchNATION is a cashless-payments and operations platform for venues and events — wearables and RFID, a web dashboard, and an Android point-of-sale app, all running in the outdoor, high-traffic, low-connectivity conditions where events actually happen. The business had gone flat through Covid and was acquired by new owners who wanted to reboot it — and to move its centre of gravity from one-off large events, which don't recur often enough to drive predictable revenue, toward venues, where ongoing operations mean recurring revenue. I joined as Director of Digital Experience to own the product side of that reboot: product strategy, the roadmap, and product design — deciding what to build, when, and why, grounded in customer and market evidence.
The challenge
A freshly acquired product is a black box. You inherit features of unknown maturity, a roadmap shaped by the previous owners, and a sales motion that has already made promises — here, selling features that either weren't built or weren't battle-tested for deployment at scale. And scale wasn't abstract: PouchNATION processes a high volume of transactions, so the bar for every feature was whether it holds up under real load. That is what put the stakes on all of it — moving features from MVP to a genuinely scalable state, standing up the payment-processor and gateway partnerships each market needs to process payments and earn MDR (and testing the EDC integrations behind them), and keeping the web-dashboard and Android experiences usable in the outdoor, high-traffic, low-connectivity venues where those transactions actually happen. Every market also brought its own compliance and regulatory requirements to stay competitive — and all of it had to be done lean, on minimal headcount, while the company raised its next round.
What I did
I started by building the thing the organisation didn't have: a single source of truth. I led a full product audit and made it the reference the whole company works from — including a product-maturity rating scale that grades every feature from MVP to scalable. For the first time, sales, product and engineering had one honest picture of what exists and how far it is from production-ready under real transaction volume.
In parallel, I ran a full UX audit and revamp of the web dashboard and the Android app — including rethinking the interface for comfortable outdoor use in low-connectivity, high-traffic environments, where standard UI patterns quietly fail.
I'm sequencing market entry directly into the roadmap: the payment-processor and gateway partnerships each market needs to earn MDR, room to test EDC integrations, and the local compliance and regulatory features that make the product competitive market by market — all grounded in market and user research to benchmark against the best and push toward best-in-class.
And because the mandate is lean and pre-funding, I evaluated and adopted a range of online and offline AI tools across the team's workflows — buying back the productivity that headcount can't.
How I led
A source of truth only works if it has teeth. The hardest early call was reining in a sales team that was closing deals on features which hadn't earned a "scalable" rating on the maturity scale — because the fastest way to lose a venue is to sell it something that breaks under real load. I enforced the scale against genuine short-term revenue pressure: if it isn't proven at scale, we don't sell it as if it is. Holding that line is as much the job as the roadmap — it's what keeps a reboot from repeating the mistakes that flattened the business the first time.
Outcome
This is a live mandate, in active execution — so the honest markers are leading indicators, not final numbers. The product now runs on a shared source of truth and a maturity scale the organisation actually decides from; the dashboard and Android experiences are being rebuilt around real outdoor conditions; and market entry is staged on the roadmap, with payments, EDC and compliance sequenced market by market. The reboot now has a strategy, a system of record, and a lean, AI-assisted operating model built to scale it — with the commercial results still landing as execution continues. (Specific figures under NDA.)
What it proves
Senior product leadership at its least glamorous and most valuable: taking an unproven, freshly acquired product and building the strategy, the source of truth, and the lean operating model to scale it across markets — with the discipline to hold the maturity line against short-term pressure while doing it. The operator who makes a reboot real.