Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Most scaling fintech and financial services hit the same invisible ceiling: product teams are structured for yesterday’s goals, causing delivery bottlenecks, feature factories, and execution lag. As a product division scales, this structural friction builds silently. You start noticing that features take twice as long to ship, engineering and product teams pull in opposite directions, and your product roadmap looks less like a strategic vision and more like a chaotic wish list. If these organizational cracks remain unaddressed, the costs compound. Worst of all, you spend in hundreds of thousands building products that your market doesn’t want because your team isn't aligned with your commercial growth goals. That's why I founded The Protege Group. I act as an on-demand, Fractional CPO and Product Advisor, working directly with founders and tech leaders to design, restructure, and optimize their product teams for rapid scale and commercial impact. Because I operate fractionally, you get elite, executive-level intervention without the overhead or bureaucracy of legacy consulting agencies. I plug directly into your leadership team to deliver: Operating Model Transformation - Aligning product, design, and engineering pipelines to maximize efficiency. Product Org Design - Assessing best practice ways of working to eliminate silos and execution lag. Commercial Growth Engines - Creating the blueprint for accelerating PLG pipelines and reducing time-to-market. If you're scaling an early-stage fintech or accelerating an established product team in Sydney and need some support, let's talk. Core Expertise: Product Strategy | Team Topology | Org Scale | Fractional Leadership | Fintech | Product-Led Growth (PLG) | Product Advisory | Product Operating Models | Australia | UK
Are your Product and Technology teams driving business outcomes or delivering features? Many CEOs, CTOs and business leaders invest heavily in product and engineering capabilities, yet still struggle with slow delivery, misaligned priorities and limited commercial impact. The problem often isn't talent or technology. It's a lack of alignment between business strategy, product decision-making and technical execution. At The Protege Group, we help organisations bridge this gap by building product-centric operating models that connect strategy to delivery and delivery to measurable outcomes. Our services include product strategy, product management consulting, fractional product leadership, cross-functional alignment workshops, product design, and AI-enabled product innovation. If your teams are busy but growth isn't accelerating, we can help you with that.
Led three business-critical product launches within a three-month transformation window. As a result, we reduced outbound operational dependency on call centres, and increased digital quote volumes through strategic digital enablement. Introduced an MVP-first operating model to accelerate time-to-value, reshaping delivery cadence and bringing forward unrealised customer and revenue impact. By embedding a value-based prioritisation framework, I ensured capital and engineering capacity were aligned to initiatives with the strongest commercial return. Partnered with change management to drive rapid adoption of digital initiatives within a corporate environment, delivering results at pace while elevating product discipline across the programme.
I led the product strategy for the leading CRM and automation platform for UK mortgage and insurance advisers transforming the UK mortgage industry. My mission was to make the home-buying journey faster and more transparent by replacing manual processes with intelligent technology. Key achievements: Product Growth: Launched Broker-led credit checks, contributing £50k MRR. Efficiency at Scale: Automated critical workflows, saving advisers 100,000+ hours of admin time. Scaled Product Adoption: Drove significant company growth by 15x and reached £9M in ARR within 12 months (Growjo, 2025). Increased NPS score by +40. Product & Ways of Working: Led and coached 40 across 3 innovation squads (Core Platform, APIs & Network). I combine a passion for building intuitive B2B SaaS products with the regulatory rigour required in the FinTech space to build tools that help brokers scale.
Embedded PM in an agile squad, interviewing users, analysing data, forming insights, and writing requirements for the squad. Increased user acquisition by launching features that helped close major client contracts (e.g. Document Templates, Workflow Automation). Launched features now used by 8,000+ paying users in the UK mortgage and insurance market.
Teya (Formerly SaltPay) Conducted market research and GTM strategy for a startup acquired by Teya. Piloted the software with a super user client in London. Observed in-field insights from the client's use of the software and provided qualitative feedback to the development squad for product improvement. Delivered a comprehensive recommendations report post-pilot.
Designed and built B2B SaaS superannuation software for corporate client Vanguard Australia. Developed an onboarding journey for the launch of Vanguard's new superannuation offering in the Australian market in collaboration with VA's Head of Product and Head of Investments. Elicited product requirements from customers and stakeholders, prototyped product features and A/B tested for feedback.