Executive Product Leadership for Moments that Matter
Fractional leadership and strategic advisory for organizations navigating growth, transformation, and complex product and payments challenges.
Bringing executive-level experience to product strategy, payments modernization, commercialization, and organizational transformation—through flexible engagements tailored to your business needs.
From Reactive Execution to Strategic Product Discipline
Montana Rose Partners provides experienced executive product leadership to organizations facing periods of growth, transformation, or change — without requiring a permanent executive hire. We step into complex environments, create clarity around what matters most, and build the structure and alignment needed to move forward.
Whether your team is navigating a critical growth phase, modernizing a legacy payment platform, or struggling to connect product strategy to business outcomes, we bring the operating discipline and executive perspective to help you move faster and more confidently.
Our work is grounded in practical outcomes, cross-functional alignment, and measurable business impact — not frameworks for the sake of frameworks.
Our Focus Areas
- Fractional & interim product leadership
- Payments strategy & modernization
- Product roadmap alignment
- GTM & commercialization
- AI enablement for product teams
Expert Leadership, Deployed Where You Need It
Every engagement is designed to deliver immediate value and lasting capability — from stabilizing a product team in transition to building the foundation for long-term growth.
Fractional Product Leadership
Interim or fractional VP-level product leadership to stabilize teams, sharpen execution, and connect product strategy directly to business goals. Ideal for organizations navigating leadership transitions, rapid scaling, or restructuring — without the cost of a full-time executive hire.
Payments Strategy & Modernization
Deep advisory support across payment platforms, PayFac models, processor relationships, customer migration, risk, compliance, and operational readiness. Whether you're building a new payment capability or modernizing legacy infrastructure, we bring the experience to navigate complexity.
Product Strategy & Roadmap Alignment
Facilitation and advisory services to clarify priorities, align stakeholders, and build roadmaps grounded in customer value and business outcomes — not just engineering capacity. We help product, sales, and executive teams agree on what matters and why.
GTM & Product Commercialization
Support translating product capabilities into market-ready solutions — from positioning and packaging to sales enablement and customer adoption strategy. We bridge the gap between what your product does and how the market understands its value.
AI Enablement for Product Teams
Practical, hands-on guidance for using AI to improve product discovery, documentation, research, analysis, and team productivity. We help product teams adopt AI tools in ways that fit their workflow and accelerate real outcomes — not theoretical ones.
The Right Expertise. The Right Engagement.
Every organization faces different challenges. Montana Rose offers flexible engagement models designed to provide the right level of expertise, leadership, and support—whether you need a fresh perspective, a defined strategic initiative, or an experienced executive embedded in your business.
Hourly or Daily
Executive Advisory
Targeted expertise for critical decisions, strategic challenges, and leadership guidance.
Ideal for organizations seeking experienced executive insight without a long-term commitment.
Project-Based
Strategic Projects
Defined initiatives with clear objectives, deliverables, and timelines.
Ideal for organizations navigating a specific challenge, opportunity, or transformation.
Monthly Retainer
Fractional Executive Leadership
Experienced executive leadership embedded within your organization to provide ongoing strategic direction, alignment, and accountability.
Ideal for organizations that need senior-level product or payments leadership without a permanent executive hire.
Engagement Examples
Fractional Payments Leadership
Monthly Retainer Engagements
Ongoing senior leadership for organizations that need experienced payments ownership but do not require a full-time executive.
Example engagements:
- Serve as fractional Head of Payments, VP of Payments, or senior payments product leader
- Own payment strategy, roadmap, priorities, and executive reporting
- Lead processor, bank, gateway, and technology partner relationships
- Oversee payment platform consolidation and customer migration programs
- Drive payment revenue, attach rate, authorization performance, and margin improvement
- Establish governance across Product, Engineering, Operations, Finance, Compliance, and Sales
- Guide risk, ACH, chargeback, settlement, funding, and operational-readiness decisions
- Build the payments function until the organization is ready for a permanent leader
Best suited for: Companies where payments are strategically important but leadership is fragmented, transitional, or not yet mature enough to justify a full-time executive hire.
Strategic Projects
Project-Based Engagements
Defined payment initiatives with clear objectives, deliverables, and a measurable outcome.
Example engagements:
- Develop a payments modernization roadmap across fragmented platforms and processors
- Lead a payment processor or gateway evaluation and recommendation
- Build a migration strategy for moving customers from legacy processors to a consolidated payment platform
- Assess payment economics, pricing, revenue opportunities, and cost-to-serve
- Design a PayFac operating model, including product, operations, risk, compliance, and partner responsibilities
- Develop a card-present, ACH, or digital payments expansion strategy
- Assess payment product readiness for a major customer, market, or regulatory change
Best suited for: Organizations with a defined payments challenge that requires structured analysis, recommendations, and an actionable plan.
Executive Advisory
Hourly or Daily Engagements
Targeted executive guidance for complex payment decisions where senior expertise is needed quickly.
Example engagements:
- Review a payment processing strategy before contract renewal or processor selection
- Evaluate whether a PayFac, ISV, gateway, or direct-processing model is the right fit
- Assess service fee, convenience fee, surcharge, or payment monetization strategy
- Advise on ACH, card, RTP, or alternative payment method strategy
- Review processor economics, authorization performance, or settlement concerns
- Support executive preparation for a critical processor, bank, or card network discussion
Best suited for: Focused decisions, executive working sessions, second opinions, or situations where the organization needs experienced payments expertise without a broader engagement.
When the Stakes Are High
Your Product Team Has No Senior Leader
You're between CPOs or VPs, or you've never had one — and the team is losing direction, velocity, or credibility with the business. You need someone who can step in and lead, not just advise.
Your Payment Platform Is Holding You Back
Legacy infrastructure, a PayFac transition, a processor migration, or compliance gaps are creating risk and slowing growth. You need someone who has navigated this before.
No One Agrees on What to Build Next
Product, sales, and leadership are misaligned on priorities. The roadmap is reactive, contested, or disconnected from business outcomes. You need clarity and a process to get there.
Your Product Is Ready, But the Market Isn't Responding
You've built something valuable, but positioning, packaging, or sales enablement isn't landing. You need to close the gap between what your product does and how the market understands it.
Your Team Isn't Getting Value from AI
AI tools are everywhere, but your product team isn't using them effectively. You need practical guidance — not theory — on how to integrate AI into discovery, documentation, and delivery.
You're Modernizing a Legacy Platform
A major migration or infrastructure overhaul is underway and the business risk is high. You need strategic oversight and operational readiness planning from someone who's done it before.
What Sets Us Apart
Strategic, But Practical
We define clear direction and translate it into action. No frameworks for the sake of frameworks — only work that moves the needle.
Executive Experience Without the Permanent Hire
Get senior product leadership support precisely when and where you need it — without the cost and commitment of a full-time executive hire.
Payments Expertise Beyond Theory
Deep, hands-on experience with platforms, processors, PayFac models, risk, migration, and operations — not just high-level advisory opinion.
Clear Communication Across Teams
We help Product, Engineering, Sales, Operations, Finance, and Customer teams align around shared goals — bridging gaps that slow organizations down.
Every Montana Rose engagement follows a proven pattern: we begin by deeply understanding your current state — your people, your priorities, and your gaps — then build alignment across the organization before driving execution with discipline and focus. The result is not just short-term progress, but lasting product capability your team can build on.
Payments Platform Consolidation
Developed an enterprise strategy to consolidate fragmented payment platforms into a unified PayFac architecture, aligning Product, Engineering, Operations, Finance and external processing partners.
Authorization Optimization
Improved payment authorization performance through routing, merchant configuration and payment architecture optimization.
Product Operating Model
Established executive KPIs, governance and operating rhythms across Product, Engineering and Operations to improve accountability and decision-making.
Commercial Strategy
Partnered with executive leadership on multi-year growth strategy, financial modeling, pricing, product investment and go-to-market planning.
Meet Mahala Johnson
Mahala Johnson is an executive product and payments leader with experience building, transforming, and scaling products across payments, SaaS, GovTech, and other complex technology environments.
Her career has spanned product strategy, payment platform modernization, PayFac models, commercialization, operational transformation, and cross-functional leadership. She has worked across Product, Engineering, Sales, Operations, Finance, Compliance, and executive leadership — often stepping into environments where the challenge isn't simply determining what to build, but creating the organizational alignment required to make it successful.
Mahala founded Montana Rose Partners to bring that experience to organizations at critical inflection points — providing senior leadership that can move comfortably between the boardroom, the product roadmap, the operating model, and execution.