Program Management & PMO
Programme management is the operating system underneath every regulated payments build. These posts cover building a PMO from scratch, PMBOK + Agile hybrids, RAID governance, SteerCo cadence, OKR design and the rituals that hold a 12-squad org together.
Case studies
Essays · 10
PCI DSS and ISO 27001 as Product Programs
PCI DSS and ISO 27001 are not paperwork projects. Run as product programs, they make the platform measurably stronger.
Payment Cost Is a Product Variable: From 50% to 1% (Tapmad Migration Playbook)
Payment cost is not procurement. It is product architecture. Here is the rail-mix playbook that pulled a subscription business from 50% to 1% cost-of-revenue.
Where PMOs Fail: Six Patterns I've Watched in Fintech Programmes
PMOs don't fail because the PMs are bad. They fail because the function gets miscast as governance theatre instead of decision-making infrastructure. Six failure shapes, the symptoms, the fix.
Product Management for Payments Platforms: What's Different, and What's Not
A payments PM is a SaaS PM with three extra constituencies and one extra reflex. Get the reflex wrong and the other constituencies stop trusting you.
Project Management for Fintech Regulatory Programmes: PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, AML/CFT
A regulatory programme is not a compliance exercise. It is a project with an immovable deadline (the audit), an external grader (the auditor), and a delivery cost (remediation) that gets paid up front or many times over.
Program Management vs Product Management in Fintech: Lane Lines That Actually Hold
Product and program management overlap because they have to. The overlap is where most fintechs break. Hold the lane lines and the overlap becomes the most productive seam in the org.
Building a PMO from Scratch in a Fintech: A 90-Day Playbook
A fintech PMO is not a governance overlay. It's the operating system that lets product, engineering, risk and compliance ship together at regulated-payments cadence.
PMBOK + Agile Hybrid Frameworks for Payments Teams
Pure Agile breaks on regulatory capital projects. Pure PMBOK breaks on product velocity. The right answer is a hybrid, and the design of the hybrid is the actual work.
Running a $3M Digital Transformation Programme: A Postmortem (TapmadTV)
What it actually took to land a $3M transformation programme on schedule across 5 technology workstreams and 8 vendors, and the three things I would do differently.
RAID Logs, SteerCo and the PMO Stack That Actually Ships at $1B+ Scale
Most PMO failure modes come from registers without owners, SteerCos without decisions, and OKRs without consequences. Fix the stack, fix the delivery.