Caroline Wiencken

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My approach to Flatpay · Head of Pay

Grow Pay.
Protect simplicity.

You've transformed how businesses accept payments by making it simpler, fairer, and more affordable.

I bring the product leadership to scale that impact — turning your instinct for innovation into a repeatable engine for growth.

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How I would grow Pay

Start with the goal. Work back to the change.

These are the goals I would validate with Flatpay first — then agree the baselines, targets and trade-offs with the team.

  1. 01

    Grow merchant value.

    Start with Flatpay’s growth ambitions and merchant economics. Find where first payments, repeat processing and retention break down — not just where clicks fall.

    Expected outcome: More merchants reach their first payment, keep processing and stay. Measure activation rate, 30-day processing retention and net revenue per merchant.

  2. 02

    Scale without complexity.

    Keep a shared product core across markets. Remove unnecessary setup steps and automate repeat work before adding new features or processes.

    Expected outcome: Faster time to first payment and fewer support requests, with lower cost to serve and reliability maintained.

  3. 03

    Build the decision engine.

    Give teams clear goals, evidence and authority. Build on people’s strengths and remove approval loops that do not improve the decision.

    Expected outcome: Less time waiting for decisions, more capacity on valuable work and more improvements that move a merchant or commercial metric.

How I’ve done similar things

First 90 days

Build momentum around what matters.

  1. Days 1–30

    Find the leverage

    • Understand the business economics, merchant behaviour, product performance and decision-making.
    • Identify the customer problems with the greatest commercial impact.

    Measurable outcomes

    • Activation, 30-day processing retention and cost-to-serve baselines agreed
    • One highest-value merchant problem selected, with a measurable target

  2. Days 31–60

    Make the choices

    • Align product priorities with business ambitions.
    • Establish clear ownership, decision principles and measurable outcomes.
    • Equip PMs and teams to decide well independently.

    Measurable outcomes

    • Decision lead time reduced from 10 to 5 working days
    • 20% less team time spent on approvals and coordination

  3. Days 61–90

    Demonstrate progress

    • Test the highest-value opportunities with customers.
    • Use behavioural evidence to accelerate investment decisions.
    • Build a repeatable rhythm of learning, deciding and delivering.

    Measurable outcomes

    • First-payment activation up 5 percentage points in a pilot cohort
    • 15% fewer onboarding support requests, without worse reliability

Success after 90 days: Less waiting and manual work. More merchants activated. Evidence of improved economics — compared with the starting baseline.

Similar experience

The outcomes behind the approach.

Aceve · Product strategy

Knowing where to invest

3
parallel value streams

Challenged assumptions and aligned product direction with business goals and customer problems.

Outcome: The manager evaluation credits this work with strengthening the KP strategy, aligning the product vision with business goals and changing supplier onboarding through aligned incentives. It also recognises the team’s shift from ticket delivery toward customer outcomes.

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Ageras · Commercial performance

Turning insight into growth

≈55%
lower churn
70%
less bad debt
65%
higher top-of-funnel conversion
6
markets served by the lead form

Changed the marketplace offering, pricing and acquisition flow to improve retention, economics and conversion.

Outcome: Following the offering and pricing changes, bad debt fell by 70% and churn by approximately 55%. The new lead form increased top-of-funnel conversion by 65% across six markets.

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Aceve · Search investment

Making technology investments count

Connected search-vendor evaluation with business needs and customer validation before recommending investment.

Outcome: The assessment and pilot gave the investment recommendation a basis in technical performance and customer usability. The manager recognised my balance of understanding technology and enabling the team to solve problems. The evaluation reports shorter learning cycles from AI-assisted development, but gives no measured search-success or cost reduction.

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Manager feedback · Aceve

What it’s like to work with me.

“Your leadership style is one of leading through context which is important in our transition and I do lean on you as someone to help me drive that change.”
Manager evaluation · Leadership
“You are truly leading the way here in showing how focussing on and speaking about outcomes can make a real difference.”
Manager evaluation · Outcome focus
“All in all, you have exceeded all expectations in the last 5 months.”
Overall manager assessment · Aceve

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