Pivoting a 150M shopper app from banking to shopping.
Led App Experience and Shopping Discovery in Klarna's pivot from a banking app to a shopping app.
01 · The problem
What Klarna actually needed.
To most users, Klarna was a way to pay: split a checkout, manage what you owe, done. The ambition was bigger. Make the Klarna App where people start a shopping journey, not just where they finish paying for one. That gap between how the app was used (a payments utility) and what it needed to become (a shopping and discovery destination) was the core problem. A payments app gets opened a few times a month. A discovery app gets opened far more often, earlier, and creates the surface area for merchant relationships and engagement that compound. Repositioning wasn't a feature. It changed what the product is for, across a global user base, without breaking the trust that made payments work.
02 · Context and insight
The reframe that set the direction.
I led App Experience and Shopping Discovery, owning the end-to-end experience of the whole app worldwide and reporting to the Global Head of Klarna Media. The reframe at the center of the work: the app's coherence is itself a product, and discovery, not payments, should be the reason a user opens it. With 28 PMs shipping into one surface, the failure mode was a Frankenstein app: locally optimal, globally incoherent.
03, The approach
The decisions that mattered.
Reframe the app around discovery, not payments
The starting point: decide what the app is for when a user opens it cold, not mid-checkout. I pushed the framing from 'manage your payments' to 'start here when you shop,' then translated it into experience principles the discovery surfaces had to satisfy: what shows up on open, how browsing leads into shopping, where payments recedes from headline to rails. Payments stays the trust backbone. Discovery becomes the reason to open the app.
Treat the whole app as one experience with one owner
With 28 PMs shipping into one surface, I positioned App Experience as the team accountable for the end-to-end experience worldwide, setting shared standards for navigation, hierarchy, and how a new feature earns its place in the user's flow. The tradeoff was explicit: some local metric wins got deprioritized when they fragmented the overall journey. That meant making the cost of incoherence legible to teams optimizing for their own numbers.
Drive the transformation through influence across 300+ people
I didn't have 300+ people reporting to me. I had to move them through a shared definition of done. That meant cross-team initiatives where the discovery direction was concrete enough to align around, sequencing what shipped first, deciding which surfaces got repurposed versus rebuilt, and resolving conflicts where a payments-era pattern fought a shopping-era goal. Less authoring features, more making the right thing the path of least resistance for two dozen teams.
04 · How it's built
Close to the stack, not above it.
Not an engineering-led role. This was product leadership over a shared app surface. The leverage came from definition and alignment: a clear, concrete picture of the shopping-and-discovery app that 300+ people could build toward, anchored in app-level behavioral signals rather than each team's local KPI, and held together with Figma for experience direction and an experimentation stack for honest end-to-end measurement.
I drove Klarna's transformation globally, shifting the app from a banking and payments utility toward a shopping and discovery destination. I owned the end-to-end experience worldwide, leading 28 product teams and aligning 300+ people behind one direction. The contribution: forging one coherent app out of the work of dozens of teams, and giving discovery a real place in how users open the product, without sacrificing the trust the payments experience depended on.
What I’d carry forward
The defining constraint was organizational, not design. When 28 teams ship into one app, the experience is whatever their incentives sum to. A single owner without direct authority wins only by making the shared definition of 'good' more compelling than each team's local optimum. Next time I'd push earlier and harder on app-level metrics every team is measured against. Coherence holds when the scoreboard rewards it, not on persuasion alone.