Ownership
Judgment
Impact
Craft
FY2025
Scope
Ask
FY2025 Self-Review · Product Management · Fenwick Financial

MAYA CHEN Senior PM, Checkout & Payments — The Case for Group PM

Owned Checkout End-to-End Through a Pricing Overhaul and a Live Outage

Since March 2025 I've run the Checkout & Payments pod — one designer, four engineers, and a standing seat with Risk and Data Science. The mandate: protect conversion while a mandated interchange-fee change and rising fraud losses pulled in opposite directions.

I set the roadmap, wrote every PRD from problem statement to rollout plan, and was the on-call decision-maker the two times checkout broke in production.

PM
Checkout
Pricing
Fraud
Mobile
Risk
Roadmap
Proof, Not Adjectives

Three Moments the Numbers Don't Capture

I

Caught the Pricing Cliff Six Weeks Early

Modeled the Q3 interchange-fee change against actual transaction mix, flagged a projected 4-point drop in gross margin that finance's plan had missed, and shipped a tiered surcharge before the change went live. Margin held flat.

II

Ran Recovery During the June Outage

When the payment processor's webhook queue backed up for 47 minutes, I was incident commander: rerouted traffic to the backup processor and shipped the customer-facing status banner within 20 minutes.

III

Turned a Losing Test Into the Year's Best Idea

The one-click Apple Pay test lost by 2 points in July. Instead of shelving it, I read the session recordings, found a mistimed permission prompt, fixed it — the rerun became our biggest single-quarter conversion win.

What I Actually Shipped in FY2025

Experiments Run
22
22
PRDs Shipped
14
14
Launch Reviews Led
9
9
Cross-Team Runbooks
6
6
Postmortems Authored
3
3
Margin
Judgment
Trust
Calibration
Q3
Why
Maya didn't just hit her numbers — she was the person calibration trusted to explain why the numbers moved, and what she'd do differently next time.
Priya Raman · VP Product, Fenwick Financial

The Year, Quarter by Quarter

Q1
Diagnosed the Risk
Modeled the pricing cliff before it hit the P&L
Q2
Shipped the Fix
Tiered surcharge live four weeks ahead of the mandate
Q3
Held the Line
Incident-commanded the June outage, zero data loss
Q4
Compounded the Win
Apple Pay fix became the year's top conversion driver
Now
Scaled the Playbook
Runbook adopted by two other payments pods

The Impact, in Numbers

+2.3pt
Checkout
Conversion
$1.4M
Margin
Protected
-31%
Fraud
Losses
0
Repeat Outages
Since the Fix

The Judgment Call Framework I Built This Year

Signal
Model the Downside
Ship the Smallest Fix
Own the Outcome
Read the Data First
Every call this year started from the transaction mix, not the dashboard summary
Preview Before Promising
The surcharge and the Apple Pay fix both shipped as a scoped pilot first
Write It Down Either Way
Postmortems even on good news — that's what made the runbook reusable
Group PM Charter — Draft

What I'm Asking to Own Next

Checkout proved I can carry a pricing overhaul and an outage in the same quarter without dropping either. The Group PM scope extends that ownership to mobile wallet and international checkout, where the same margin-and-trust tradeoffs are already surfacing.

It also means leading, not just doing: a team of three PMs, with me setting the roadmap and reviewing their calls the way Priya reviews mine today.

Payments
Fraud
Mobile Wallet
Intl. Checkout
People Management
Margin
Trust
Ownership
Ask
Scope
Impact
Judgment
FY2025 Self-Review · The Ask

Promote Me to Group PM, Payments Platform

Maya Chen · Checkout & Payments · Calibration 2026
01 / 10