I help companies scale without breaking.

Book an Intro Call
Book an Intro Call

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 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

Work With Me
Work With Me
 
 
 
 

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, performance management systems, reward systems

 

I’ve done this before

  • Users

  • Revenue

  • Employees

  • Markets

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 improvements to key features

  • 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 us 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).