Fractional CPO · Fractional CTO · Product & Technology Strategy
I help founders and CEOs make better product and technology decisions — and turn those decisions into shipped products, teams and systems. Senior leadership without committing to a full-time executive hire.
Piyush Pathak
Founder, CommerceUp — acquired by Aspire, 2023
Former Head of Product & Engineering, Aspire
14+ years · 100+ products & brands · India · UAE · US
Piyush Pathak
Founder
14+
Years leading product and engineering
100+
Products and brands shipped across my career
70+
Merchants on CommerceUp, the platform I founded
What I can do for you
Decide what to build — and what to cut
Set the architecture and technology direction
Build, hire and lead the product & engineering team
Get it shipped, on a cadence you can see
Answer the build-or-buy call before it's expensive
Use AI where it genuinely helps, not where it performs
Experience that builds confidence
Companies I founded, led, or built inside.
01
The operator behind the advice
Fourteen years: engineer and architect in digital publishing, then founder and CEO of a commerce SaaS that Aspire acquired, then the executive running global product and engineering for the company that bought it. I’ve made most of the expensive mistakes personally.
Took a profitable but leverage-less consultancy and turned the pattern its clients kept paying for into CommerceUp — a multi-tenant commerce platform. Strategy in 2019, live in 2020.
What that means for you
I have made the services-to-product jump with my own money on it — including the parts that don't appear in the case studies.
Across the UAE and MENA, profitable and investor-backed. Architected it end to end — store builder, inventory, orders, payments, analytics — through monolith, service decomposition and multi-region as merchant scale forced each move. Owned the full P&L.
What that means for you
I know which architecture decisions actually bite at scale, because I was the one paying for them.
A San Francisco platform acquired the company in 2023. I ran the deal myself, then the post-merger integration of product, team and customer base — and closed the original company out properly.
What that means for you
I have been on the sell side of diligence. That changes permanently what you notice in a roadmap, an org chart and a set of numbers.
02
Recent advisory
Anonymised, because that is the deal. The through-line is not a sector — it is a decision that is expensive to get wrong and cheap to get a second opinion on.
Governance, risk & compliance · Banking
“We sell to enterprise banks. Can we sell to smaller ones?”
The challenge
An enterprise GRC platform with a real business selling to large banks, looking at the SMB market underneath it. The trap is assuming a down-market motion is the same product at a lower price. It isn't — and the parts of an enterprise product that win the enterprise deal are frequently the parts that make a smaller buyer walk away.
What I did
Worked with the team on what an SMB motion actually requires — packaging, onboarding, pricing and support model — and on which parts of the existing product actively block a smaller buyer. The output was a SaaS direction and the sequence to get there, not a deck.
Quick commerce · Marketplace
“How do offline and online orders run through one pipeline?”
The challenge
A quick-commerce marketplace in the Instacart mould. The storefront was never the hard part — the hard part was reconciling in-store orders and online orders into a single fulfilment pipeline without two systems of record and two versions of the truth about stock.
What I did
Defined the product end to end: the marketplace model, the order and fulfilment flow across both channels, and the implementation path from first version to operating scale.
Recent advisory has also covered security tooling for infrastructure compliance, and consumer mobile products in mental health. Client names and results are withheld by agreement — happy to talk through any of it on a call.
03
How I engage
Most of my time goes to fractional leadership, and I take two of those at once. Everything else starts with the same free thirty-minute conversation.
Two other ways in
Not an agency with a bench. Not a marketplace of strangers.
I stay personally involved in the product and technology direction for the whole engagement — that is the thing you are actually buying, and it is not delegable.
When an engagement needs more capacity than one person, I bring in senior specialists I have worked with before — design, engineering, delivery — sized to the work and engaged on demand. You always know who is on it and why. Nobody gets handed to a junior team after the contract is signed.
04
Where I help
If one of these is the sentence you keep saying in leadership meetings, that is the conversation to have — and the engagement pages above go into what each one involves.
From an idea with no shape yet, or a v1 that has stopped moving.
Everyone is busy and nobody can say what the next two quarters are for.
Or fix the one we have, which is shipping slower than its headcount suggests.
The question is usually replatform, rebuild, or repair — and the answer is usually not the obvious one.
Where the edge cases are the product and the money has to reconcile.
The category I'm building in right now, so the answers are current rather than remembered.
Both in what you build and in how your team builds it.
Sectors operated in
Ecommerce & retailSaaSFintech & paymentsMarketplacesCreator economyDigital publishingWhy Piyush
Sometimes you need someone who has already made the decision.
I’ve built companies, led product and engineering organizations, been through an acquisition from the inside, and worked across product, technology and business strategy in three markets.
The value isn’t another pair of hands. It’s judgment, pattern recognition, and knowing which problems are worth your quarter.
I don’t have to write every line of code to be accountable for what gets built.
I work with experienced engineers and modern AI development tools to turn product decisions into working software — which is the part most people who sell judgment can’t do.
Currently taking new engagements
I keep the practice deliberately small, so the person you talk to is the person doing the work — and I spend the rest of the week building Convertly, which is what keeps the advice current.
Building something instead?
If you already know what you need built, skip the call. Tell me what it is and I’ll write you a plan — what to ship first, what to cut, recommended stack, timeline and budget range — within 24 hours.