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HARDIK SINGH

PayWheel

De facto product owner for a payroll and HR platform serving 125+ B2B customers, through to its acquisition by greytHR.

ROLE
De facto Product Owner
SCOPE
Backlog, releases, GTM support, acquisition diligence
SKILLS
Backlog ownership, A/B experimentation, GTM, stakeholder management
STATUS
Acquired by greytHR

Context

PayWheel is an HRMS and payroll SaaS used by more than 125 businesses. Payroll is one of the least forgiving workflows in software: pay people correctly, on time, every time. When the senior PM exited, I stepped in as the de facto product owner and kept the product running with zero disruption for three months, leading a four member team across prioritization, requirements, and engineering coordination.

The problem

Payroll products do not get partial credit. A feature that is 95 percent right still produces a wrong payslip, an angry HR head, and a support fire. The backlog had to balance statutory changes that cannot slip, customer escalations that will not wait, and platform debt that compounds quietly. With so many customers pulling in different directions, the real product problem was deciding what not to build.

What I did

  1. Owned the backlog end to end. Intake, triage, specs, acceptance. Engineering always had a single, argued-for order of work.
  2. Ran A/B experiments on onboarding and the leave and attendance journeys, lifting onboarding completion and feature adoption by 54 percent.
  3. Partnered with Sales and Marketing on GTM: prospect demos, pitch and proposal support, competitive positioning. That work contributed to $3M in new business.
  4. Presented the product to greytHR's senior leadership and Tricon's CEO during acquisition diligence. The demo preceded the finalized deal.

Outcome

125+ customers live with zero BAU disruption, a 54 percent adoption lift, $3M of new business influenced, and an acquisition completed. In enterprise software that is the closest thing to a report card.

What it taught me

Ownership is not a title. It is being the person others route hard questions to. In payroll, trust is the product. Features are just how you earn it.