I help companies scale without breaking.

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The growth phase is exhilarating — and brutal.

→ you’ve hired people in order to accelerate, but you feel slower than ever?

→ the top of funnel is high, but monetisation and retention aren’t keeping pace?

→ your team is talented, but you don’t feel quite on top of the day-to-day?

→ need senior product thinking today, but no time to hire a permanent leader?

I can help.

I’m Elena Petrakieva, a fractional product leader with 12+ years experience in optimising growing fintech businesses.

How we can partner

  • 2-3 days per week, embedded in your org

    • Scale with the confidence of senior product expertise

    • Executive ownership over a defined set of outcomes

    • Can hire and onboard your permanent product leader

  • Weekly sessions with your existing leader

    • Counsel and sounding board for your CPO or VP

    • Accelerate their skill growth and executive presence

    • A thinking partner through the messy middle, not just a workshop and goodbye

  • Structure per project need

    • Senior product thinking, delivered — exactly what you need and nothing more

    • Clean boundaries: defined deliverables, no management remit, no mission creep

    • Expectations aligned from day one

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What I can bring

I’m really, really good at these things.

    • Audit of your product, organisation, and processes

    • (Re)frame your product strategy to fit your scale and ambition

    • How to build strategic alignment once you are too big to rely on tribal knowledge

    • A “rhythm of the business” that keeps your teams fast and moving in the same direction

    • Prioritisation frameworks that mean fewer meetings and faster decisions

    • The right balance between experimentation, optimisation, and innovation within your product culture

    • Effective product discovery & delivery processes that can scale as your teams grow

    • Product muscle built into your existing leadership

    • The tools to scale fast without lowering your standards - org design, hiring and onboarding, performance management and reward systems

 

  • Elena has a way of cutting through the noise — getting a team focused on what actually moves the needle and building the discipline to deliver it consistently. I worked with her during the fastest growth period of ClearScore's history, and what she built didn't break under the pressure. If you're at the stage where you're outgrowing how you've operated so far, she's exactly who you need.

    Tim Chong, Co-Founder and CEO, Yonder

  • Elena built a product team that people genuinely wanted to be part of — high standards, clear thinking, and no tolerance for theatre. She scaled the function without losing what made it good. I took everything I learned from her into my next role. For a founder who wants product done properly from the start, not retrofitted later, Elena is the person to call.

    Dan Elias, Head of Product, Countingup

  • One of the best product advisors on the market. Her experience and know-how are unmatched, and her advise and mentorship has added a lot to our product. Made me rethink strategy, operations, and product prioritisation.

    Lachezar Dinchev, Cofounder, Sierra Echo

  • Elena joined ClearScore a year after launch and over nine years became one of the most impactful operators in the business. She has a rare combination — product intuition, technical fluency, and the emotional intelligence to earn trust across engineering, commercial, and executive teams. I'd recommend her without hesitation to any founder navigating complexity at pace.

    Klaus Thorup, CTO, ClearScore

I’ve done this before

In the last decade, I was part of the team that scaled ClearScore — one of London's top fintechs — from the ground up.

  • First Head of Product — established the PDLC, product team operations and culture

  • Led cross-functional teams to deliver several 0-to-1 innovations and several key feature improvements

  • Key partner to C-suite when market conditions required blitz scaling up or down (rebasing of org structure, PDLC/SDLC, rhythm of the business, RIF management)

  • In the last two years, I spearheaded ClearScore’s largest initiative to date - £8m transformation that improved engineering efficiency by 30%, rationalised the design and content systems, and set our data architecture up for the future (enabling the recent launch of the world’s first Agentic Credit Broking Protocol)

Before that, I worked and studied in the USA

  • GreenSky

    Senior analyst during a key scaling period. Improved underwriting efficiencies, reduced delinquencies, and raised NPS scores through process and technology improvements.

  • Capital One

    Part of the Analyst Development Program. Promoted to the Technology Strategy team — one of the most coveted analyst roles — where I worked on real-time data architecture.

  • Georgia Tech

    B.S. in Economics and International Affairs. Won a U.S. Economic Development Administration grant for research on emerging tech policy (AI, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing).