Pratiksha Vaidya

About

Fractional CPO / Head of Product partnering with early- to growth-stage companies on product strategy, monetization, and AI-native transformation. 20+ years building and scaling product organizations, including standing up product functions from the ground up across fintech, payments, marketplaces, and B2B/B2C SaaS at PayPal, Intuit, Shopify, Eventbrite, and Thumbtack. Hands-on coaching and developing PMs, reconfiguring product teams and processes for AI-accelerated engineering, and embedding AI directly into product workflows and customer-facing experiences.

Experience

• Head of Product — Supply, Commerce, Trust & Payments · Thumbtack2024

  • Leadership | Member of the product executive team, reporting to the CPO and leading the product function across the supply side (Pro), Commerce & Payments, and Trust & Safety at Thumbtack - a $X00M P&L. • Scope | Drove product-led growth (PLG) and Pro success; owned product strategy, partnerships, and P&L for Fintech and Trust & Safety - accountable for fintech growth, innovation, profitability, and operational efficiency. • AI-native transformation | Pioneered AI-native ways of working across product, engineering, design, and data - rolled out a custom-built AI system that doubled team productivity by EOY with no added headcount. • PM coaching | Coached and developed PMs across the org, building on prior experience as a Product School instructor; mentored team members moving into expanded product scope. • ML for supply | Set strategy and led delivery of ML-powered recommendations and dashboards that surface each Pro's most relevant next action, leading to +14% hire-rate and +23% revenue lift. • Recurring payments | Improved Pro recurring/card-on-file collection rate from 97% to 99%, lifting subscription-style revenue retention. • AI tools for Pros | Built AI tools for Pros - AI receptionist and AI profile builders that cut time-to-quality-profile and lifted Pro responsiveness. • Moving upmarket | Evangelized and operationalized the upmarket Pro strategy, scaling product capabilities for larger Pros that improved supply quality and stability and drove double-digit growth in upmarket supply.

• Head of Product — Shopify Markets (International Commerce) · Shopify2022 – 2023

  • Leadership | Built and led the Markets Admin product organization largely from the ground up, creating commerce capabilities that help millions of merchants sell internationally. • Merchant impact | Enabled 15K+ merchants to acquire new buyers and grow internationally by building localization capabilities including currencies (FX), checkout, alternate payment methods, languages, product catalog, shipping/fulfillment, and 3rd-party integrations. • Key launches | Markets Pro launch, Translate & Adapt app, Smart Order Routing, Catalog customization, and payout/disbursement currencies per market.

• Director of Product — Marketplace Payments & Commerce · Eventbrite2020 – 2022

  • Leadership | Built and led a 120+ member cross-functional product and P&L organization for Marketplace Payments & Commerce, growing the function from a small founding team. Owned end-to-end strategy and execution across checkout and wallets, money-in and money-out products, payments infrastructure, subscriptions, pricing and monetization, risk and fraud, payouts, billing, and financial operations. • SMB/Merchant impact | Improved seller retention by 7% via tools for financial empowerment with high adoption and retention, while maintaining a low risk-loss rate and reducing processing & operational costs. • Consumer impact | Increased consumer delight and checkout conversion by 14% via features that address consumer choice, trust, and empowerment. • Business impact | Increased revenue by 30% and improved EBITDA via $8M cost savings YoY. • Key launches | Unified checkout experience, wallet payment methods, Creator Credits, Instant payouts, Flexible refunds, BNPL, and global tax & regulatory compliance.

• Product Lead — Payments Experiences & Processing · Intuit2018 – 2019

  • Payments growth | Led a high-performing team to improve active usage and retention of QuickBooks SMB payment merchants. Owned B2B and B2C payment experiences across web and mobile, payment processing platform, invoicing, POS, wallet, and subscription billing services. • Active usage | Built a cohesive suite of payment offerings that drove a 13% increase in monthly active usage of business payments, and delivered an incremental $10M YoY in cost savings

• Lead Product Manager — PayPal · PayPal2014 – 2018

  • Scope | Built PayPal's next gen global core payments platform processing ~$1T in transaction volume. Led strategy, growth, and monetization of Money-Out experiences, authorization-rate improvement, and reduction in transaction processing cost. • Key accomplishment | PayPal and Venmo "Instant Transfers/Payouts" (Visa Direct & Mastercard MoneySend) - a multimillion-dollar revenue product providing instant access of funds to users, powering P2P offerings, merchant services, and marketplace disbursements. • Smart routing | Built a Smart Routing Engine that improved Transaction Expense by $6M YoY and lifted conversion rate.

• Sr. Product Manager (Consultant) · TwinSpires.com2012 – 2014

  • Built integrated Payment & Fraud Protection Framework across Churchill Downs businesses. • Launched new payment options including credit card, PIN-based debit, and Cash Deposits via GreenDot; implemented Loyalty Program and Virtual Currency modules.

• Senior Business Analyst · Cognizant Business Development2010 – 2012

  • Led business development team; won key strategic accounts increasing annual revenue by $25M.

• Business Analyst (Consultant) · General Electric2006 – 2010

  • Led Fleet Model Process Optimization - decreased part delivery lead time by 50%; promoted to a leadership team within 1.5 years.

Education

• Sardar Patel University, Gujarat, IndiaBachelor of Engineering, Electronics & Communications

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