You’re the PM for Merchant Console at PayPilot, a Series D fintech that provides payment processing and fraud tooling for ~220,000 SMB merchants in the US and EU. PayPilot’s core revenue comes from take-rate + premium add-ons (chargeback protection, advanced reporting). The Merchant Console is where merchants reconcile payouts, manage disputes, and configure fraud rules.
The console currently serves 3.5M monthly active users (MAUs) across web, with ~420k weekly active merchants. The product is business-critical: when merchants can’t reconcile payouts or respond to disputes quickly, they churn to Stripe, Adyen, or Shopify Payments.
PayPilot’s web frontend is a mix of legacy AngularJS (1.x), Angular (v10), and a newer React codebase built by a growth team. Engineering leadership wants to standardize on one modern framework for the next 18–24 months as the company rebuilds the Merchant Console to support new products (instant payouts, multi-entity reporting, and EU PSD2-related flows).
| Persona | Segment size | Top jobs | Key pain points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner-Operator (non-technical) | 45% | “Know how much I got paid and why” | Confusing payout breakdowns, slow pages on older laptops |
| Bookkeeper / Accountant | 30% | “Export clean data into QuickBooks/Xero” | Inconsistent report formats, missing filters, timeouts |
| Ops Manager (multi-location) | 20% | “Monitor performance across stores” | Needs fast dashboards, role-based access, saved views |
| Developer / Technical Admin | 5% | “Configure webhooks & fraud rules safely” | Wants reliable UI patterns, good docs, predictable releases |
PayPilot’s differentiation is best-in-class dispute automation and lower total cost for SMBs. However, recent NPS verbatims show UI quality is becoming a deciding factor.
Over the last 2 quarters, Merchant Console reliability and delivery speed have degraded:
Engineering proposes two options:
Leadership asks you a deceptively simple question: “React vs. Angular — what should we do?”
As the PM, you must treat this as a product decision, not a personal preference debate.
You can assume backend APIs remain unchanged for the next quarter.