Platform & Payments Product Manager · London

Vasu Rajat
Kumar.

I walk into rooms I'm not yet the expert in, read the people and the problem, and do the unglamorous daily work until I'm good.

That pattern runs from a sales floor to AI platforms, and from a weight-loss journey to everything after it. Nine years across edtech, pharma compliance, ecommerce, payments, and platform, mostly in rooms where I started as the least expert person and left owning the thing.

Experience
9 years
Currently
Sportradar
Education
Cambridge MBA
Vasu Rajat Kumar
How I got here

The operating system started in a gym.

Vasu training
The same boring rep, every day. Everything else is built on this.

Before any of the product work, there was a weight-loss journey that turned into a fitness one, and it taught me the thing everything else sits on: discipline is doing the same boring thing every day for a payoff that's a long way off. Show up, do the unremarkable rep, come back tomorrow, and the results compound somewhere you can't see yet.

I aimed the same engine at my career. Three strands came out of it.

Courage
Gets me into the room. The industry-switching on my CV isn't someone who couldn't find their ground, it's someone who isn't scared of unfamiliar ground, and who learned you can switch context and solve real problems without being the subject-matter expert on day one.
Empathy
Is how I work once I'm in it. I started my career in sales, so reading people came first and never left. I understand the situation someone is in, then decide how to help, which on a product team means reading what each side is actually protecting before I propose anything.
Discipline
Turns the other two into results. Courage gets me in, empathy points me at the right problem, but the boring daily work is what makes me good. Same as the gym.
Latest first

Selected work.

Told as what they prove, not just what shipped. Two platform builds, three in payments (one a near-miss I'm glad I made), a different industry entirely, and the tools I build at 6am for no one but me.

01
Infrastructure I didn't come from
Model Hosting, governance at scale
Took analytical models off individual laptops and onto a governed, self-serve cloud platform.
CourageSportradar · Platform
Months → days
deployment time
02
A problem no team would own
Data Catalogue, a single source of truth
Negotiated a shared ontology across rival teams, then replaced a fragmented legacy estate.
EmpathySportradar · Platform
Days → minutes
core workflows
03
Payments plumbing, to the basis point
Network Tokenization, precision as a growth lever
Migrated card-on-file to network tokens so returning customers stopped failing at card replacement.
DisciplineTHG · Payments
+2.5%
authorisation rate
04
A payment method that couldn't break the brand
Frasers Plus BNPL, an alternative payment method
Built a bespoke buy-now-pay-later flow wired into a rewards programme, native to the brand.
CourageTHG · Payments
£2.2M
incremental / year
05
A build I'd underscoped
The Gift-Card Pivot, knowing when to kill your own plan
Caught a scoping miss at month three and pivoted to ship on time, instead of slipping peak season.
JudgmentTHG · Payments
£5M
peak, shipped on time
06
A client everyone called difficult
Change Management, a "difficult" client, reframed
Turned a recurring escalation source into a co-design partner and a reference for new business.
EmpathyPQE · Compliance SaaS
−33%
P0/P1 resolution time
07
No brief, no team, just me
TradeX & TradeTracker, what I build for myself
A real-time momentum scanner and a trade journal, built solo. The clearest proof of how I work unsupervised.
DisciplinePersonal · Build
Built solo
nights & 6am
The path

Nine years, five industries.

The switching is the point, not the liability. Each move was a room I chose to walk into.

Download full resume (PDF) ↓
Sportradar
Platform Product Manager · London
Jan 2025 – Present
The Hut Group (THG)
Product Manager · Checkout, Payments & Fraud · London
Sep 2023 – Jan 2025
University of Cambridge
MBA · Judge Business School
2022 – 2023
Pharma Quality Europe (PQE)
Senior Product Consultant · India & Italy
Nov 2018 – Jul 2022
BYJU'S
Senior Product & Business Development Manager · India
Jun 2016 – Nov 2018
VIT
Vellore Institute of Technology
B.Tech, Chemical Engineering
2012 – 2016

Let's find a hard problem to solve.