Senior Product Manager · B2B Fintech · Austin

I ship products that move the numbers the business actually watches.

I'm Sofia Marchetti. For eight years I've led payments and onboarding products for small-business software: finding the problem worth solving, making the trade-offs, and shipping with engineering until the metric moves.

8 years in product4 products shipped zero to oneMBA, UT Austin
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41%14-day activation, up from 22%
$8.4MNew ARR from instant payouts in year one
117%Net revenue retention after the pricing reset
4Products taken from zero to one

About

Outcomes over output

I lead the payments and onboarding area at Brightline, a $140M ARR software company serving 60,000 small businesses. Two squads, fourteen engineers, two designers, and a roadmap I'm accountable for in revenue and retention, not in features shipped.

Before Brightline I was an early product hire at Ledgerly, where I took the company's first self-serve product from a whiteboard to 9,000 paying customers, and before that an analyst at a payments bank, which is where I learned that a product decision is a bet with a number attached.

I write short PRDs, run a lot of customer calls, and spend most of my week with engineers and designers rather than in slides. I'm at my best on messy, high-stakes problems where the right answer has to be discovered, not assumed.

What I believe

  1. Talk to customers before you talk about customers.
  2. Every roadmap item has a metric and a kill criterion.
  3. Ship the smallest thing that can be wrong, then learn.
  4. Engineers who understand the "why" ship the "what" faster.

Selected work

Three products, three measured outcomes

The problem, how I found the answer, the decision, what shipped, and what moved. Figures are rounded; the decisions are exact.

1Activation

Self-serve onboarding redesign

Brightline Payments · 2024 · 2 squads · 3 sprints to first release

The problem

Only 22% of new sign-ups took a first payment within 14 days. Support tickets and session recordings pointed at the same place: an eleven-step identity and bank verification flow that asked for everything up front.

How I found the answer

Forty customer interviews and a funnel analysis showed 61% of drop-off happened on two screens. Most businesses didn't have the documents to hand; they wanted to explore first and verify later.

The decision

  • Cut the flow to four steps and move verification to the moment it is actually required.
  • Let users reach a working dashboard with sample data before any paperwork.
  • Measure activation, not completion of the form.

What shipped

A progressive onboarding flow with deferred verification, a "try with sample data" mode, and risk rules agreed with compliance so nothing moved money before checks cleared.

41%14-day activation (from 22%)
1.8 dMedian time to first payment (from 6 days)
−34%Onboarding support tickets
ACTIVATION FUNNEL · BEFORE VS AFTER Sign-up100% Verification started87% Reached dashboard74% First payment, 14 d41%22% Before (11-step flow)After (4 steps, deferred verification) Drop-off moved from the form to where it belongs: businesses that never meant to pay.
Fig. 1 — Reconstructed funnel from the product analytics; stage names simplified.
2Zero to one

Launching instant payouts

Brightline Payments · 2023–2024 · partner bank integration · 9 months to GA

The problem

Churn interviews kept surfacing cash flow: customers waited two to three business days for funds, and a competitor had started advertising same-day money. We were losing accounts we had just won.

How I found the answer

Sized the opportunity from payout volume and a willingness-to-pay survey of 1,200 customers, then ran a two-week concierge test: we manually advanced funds for 40 businesses to see whether they would actually pay a fee for speed. 35 did.

The decision

  • Partner with a bank for the rails instead of building in-house: six months faster, lower risk.
  • Price at 1% per payout with a cap, positioned as optional and per-transaction.
  • Launch to the top 10% of accounts by volume first, then open it up.

What shipped

A PRD, a risk and loss model agreed with finance, the partner contract, and an in-product toggle that a business could switch on in one tap. General availability came after two cohorts and one pricing adjustment.

$8.4MNew ARR in the first 12 months
31%Attach rate among eligible accounts
−2.1 ptsMonthly logo churn in the segment
ADOPTION · 12 MONTHS AFTER LAUNCH GA (month 4) 31% M1M4M8M1230%15%0 Share of eligible accounts with instant payouts switched on.
Fig. 2 — Adoption curve, reconstructed from the launch dashboard.
3Monetization

Pricing and packaging reset

Brightline Payments · 2025 · cross-functional with finance, sales, and marketing

The problem

Sixty percent of revenue sat on legacy plans that bundled everything, so there was nothing to upgrade to. Expansion revenue had been flat for six quarters and sales was discounting to close.

How I found the answer

Usage analysis across 60,000 accounts found three natural clusters by payment volume and feature use. A Van Westendorp survey and twelve pricing interviews set the ranges. We then tested three packaging options with new sign-ups for eight weeks.

The decision

  • Three tiers keyed to monthly volume, with the features customers already valued most placed at the step-up points.
  • Grandfather existing customers for twelve months, with a clear migration offer instead of a forced move.
  • Kill the option that won on conversion but lost on revenue per account.

What shipped

New plans, an in-product plan recommendation based on real usage, sales playbooks and calculators, and a migration campaign run with marketing over two quarters.

117%Net revenue retention (from 104%)
+18%Expansion revenue, year over year
−9 ptsAverage sales discount
PACKAGING TEST · 8 WEEKS · NEW SIGN-UPS OptionConversionRevenue / account A · Legacy bundle6.0%$100 B · Three tiers6.2%$140 C · Low entry tier7.6%$80 Decision: ship B.C won on conversion and lost on revenue; B won where it mattered.
Fig. 3 — Test readout, indexed to the legacy bundle; absolute prices omitted.

Approach

How I work

01 · DISCOVER

Find the real problem

Customer calls every week, usage data every day. I write the problem down in one paragraph before anyone opens a design tool.

02 · DECIDE

Make the trade-off explicit

A one-page PRD with the metric, the bet, the alternatives we rejected and why, and the condition under which we stop.

03 · SHIP

Small, instrumented releases

Cohorts before general availability, dashboards before launch day, and a written readout for every experiment, win or lose.

Experience

Eight years in product

2022 — Present

Senior Product Manager, Payments & Onboarding

Brightline Payments · Austin, TX
  • Own the payments and onboarding roadmap for 60,000 small-business customers; two squads, fourteen engineers, two designers.
  • Shipped instant payouts ($8.4M new ARR), the onboarding redesign (activation 22% to 41%), and the pricing reset (NRR 104% to 117%).
  • Run the quarterly planning process for the product group and present the roadmap to the executive team.
2019 — 2022

Product Manager

Ledgerly (Series A to C bookkeeping software) · Austin, TX
  • Second product hire; took the first self-serve product from a whiteboard to 9,000 paying customers in 18 months.
  • Built the experimentation practice: 40+ A/B tests, a shared metrics dictionary, and weekly readouts.
  • Led the bank-feed integration that became the company's most-used feature (78% weekly active).
2017 — 2019

Product Analyst

Meridian Payments Bank · Dallas, TX
  • Analytics for the merchant services product line: funnel, retention, and unit economics for a $200M portfolio.
  • Built the loss model later reused for instant-payout risk decisions.

Skills & credentials

Toolkit

Product

Discovery & customer researchPRDs & roadmapsExperimentationPricing & packagingZero-to-one launchesGo-to-market

Data & tools

SQLAmplitudeLookerFigmaJira & LinearNotionStripe & payments APIs

Leadership

Cross-functional leadershipExecutive communicationPartner managementCoaching PMsRisk & compliance collaboration
MBAMcCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin
B.S., EconomicsTexas A&M University
Reforge: Product Strategy & MonetizationCompleted 2024

Contact

Let's talk about your product

I'm open to Group Product Manager and Director of Product roles in fintech and B2B software, and to advising early-stage teams on pricing and activation.

TXAustin, Texas · hybrid or remote
inlinkedin.com/in/sofiamarchetti-product
24hI reply within a business day