Welcome to The Engine Room @ payabl., a series dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent behind our success. We're pulling back the curtain to introduce you to the dedicated team members who build, secure, and refine our world-class solutions.
Learn about their challenges, triumphs, and what it truly means to make it fun while fostering a culture where teamwork flows first and every individual's potential is ignited.
Next up in the series: Priyanka Lehmann, Principal Product Manager.
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When Priyanka Lehmann joined payabl. in September 2022, she was stepping into a company that was scaling fast. Her background spans over 17 years of building digital products across financial services, consultancy, and retail with her pragmatism and cross-discipline depth making her a strong fit for payabl.
Since then, Priyanka has owned the customer-facing experience on payabl.one to leading launches for payments and Gateway. Then in early 2026, she was promoted to Principal Product Manager.
For Priyanka, the role has always been about more than managing a product roadmap. "Working here has fundamentally helped me broaden my definition of what 'outcome' truly means," she says. "I have moved beyond looking at the success of just my specific product area to focusing on the end value. It means looking at the entire journey through our customer's eyes, and realising that our work only matters when the final outcome is achieved."
Fine-tuning the driving experience
If you ask Priyanka to explain what she does, she gravitates towards a metaphor before a job title.
"I was responsible for the interior of the ‘car’," she says, describing her time owning the payabl.one customer experience. "I made sure the seats were comfortable, and the driver had all the data to manage their journey. It was about the driving experience."
That changed when she moved into the payments and gateway space. "Now I have moved under the hood to the engine and transmission. I am working with the team that actually makes the car move."
This offers a compact summary of a product journey that has given her a holistic view of how payabl.'s platform works. Few people in the organisation have worked on both the user experience layer and the core payment infrastructure underneath it. This perspective, which Priyanka describes as being both a macro and micro thinker, is central to how she approaches her work today.
In addition, her earlier work on payabl.one gave her an intimate understanding of how merchants interact with the platform day to day. Now in the gateway domain, she is solving problems that make those experiences possible in the first place.
"In the gateway space, we are solving the complexity gap," she explains. "For a merchant, taking payments should be simple, but the reality is a minefield of technical hurdles. Fraud prevention, reducing global friction and security and compliance. We provide the stability and trust that merchants need while optimising the payments lifecycle."
The product that came first: Dispute Center
Ask Priyanka about a release she is proud of, and she points to the Dispute Center on payabl.one. It’s the product she led from concept through to launch.
The challenge was familiar, but far from simple. Disputes are a persistent drain on merchants. They’re time-consuming, technically complex, and often resolved in favour of the issuer as the merchant lacked the tools or knowledge to fight back effectively. The goal was to change that dynamic.
"We built a self-explanatory, intuitive interface that guides customers through a step-by-step dispute resolution process," she says. "We have empowered merchants to respond faster, while leveraging our expertise and win more disputes, directly protecting their bottom line."
The launch exemplifies Priyanka's wider approach to product, which applies the same philosophy to everything she builds: start with the merchant's real problem, remove complexity, and deliver something that earns trust by working exactly as it should.
That commitment to end value has shaped how she thinks about priorities too. "Regulatory and compliance in our industry is non-negotiable," she says. "If the rules of the road change, we adapt immediately to keep our customers safe. Beyond that, we prioritise features that solve problems for our most critical user personas. We balance speed with stability, and will not sacrifice the engine's reliability for a shiny new feature."
A culture that shares knowledge
Priyanka is quick to talk about the environment that has made her product knowledge sharper. At companies of payabl.'s scale, the natural tendency is for information to be gatekept by individuals and teams. She found the opposite here.
"The most refreshing surprise was the lack of information hoarding," she says. "In many tech companies, people are very protective of their 'lane', but at payabl., the boundaries are beautifully loose. Knowledge is freely shared. People are not confined by their job titles. If you see a problem, you are empowered to fix it. We operate with the discipline of a global financial institution but the soul and speed of a startup," she says. "We can bypass the red tape and get the right people together to make a call – not weeks later, but now."
Day to day, that translates into a working method she calls the Product Squad model. This sees product, engineering and QA working in unison, with collective ownership over both success and failure. "A win belongs to everyone, and a bug requires a huddle," she says simply. "We are in constant communication to ensure we deliver the most value for our customers."
Agentic commerce and what comes next
Priyanka's profile inside payabl. has grown well beyond internal product delivery. In March 2026, she took the stage at the Baltic Payment Forum in Vilnius, representing payabl. in a conversation about one of the industry's most pressing questions: why agentic commerce fails without unified payments data.
The argument she brought to that audience speaks directly to her work on payabl.one and Gateway; making available data clean and contextualised across the entire platform. It is a challenge that maps neatly onto what she is already building.
"Gateway is one of the core services powering payabl.one," she explains. "One of the key challenges is intuitive data translation. We have multiple, highly specialised backend services that generate complex technical data. Our job is to take that raw data and present it in a way that is intuitive based on the person – or system – using the platform."
The ambition she describes is a platform that feels custom-made to whoever uses the platform, whether an accountant needing granular reconciliation data or an agent acting autonomously on a merchant's behalf. "We are focused on building a true one view that feels personal, without the complexity getting in the way," she says.
Looking ahead, the roadmap is broad. When asked about what’s next, she says “we definitely are not slowing down. We’re adding more card scheme connections, while also expanding to new markets and digitizing the onboarding experience to be faster and more seamless for our clients. Essentially, we’re “turbocharging” our engine for global performance.”
Curiosity as a professional principle
A mainstay throughout Priyanka's career is something that doesn’t show up in a job description. It’s a yearning for the unfamiliar, and the willingness to be curious. This means stepping into domains she doesn’t fully understand, and trusting that the knowledge gained is worth the discomfort.
"What drew me to payabl. was the chance to dive into the payments space – a field that offered a steep learning curve and a company that was hungry for new ideas," she says. "I have managed a BAU product, I have had the thrill of building a new product, and now I am diving deep into the technical complexities of payments. At payabl., you have the agency to actually shape the future of the product."
This curiosity has also built her skills as a product builder, and instilled bravery in her everyday work. "We value curiosity over comfort," she says. "You have to be willing to dive into the unknown, ask questions that feel dumb, and be brave enough to make mistakes and learn from them. You have to be truly ready to own your product. It's a culture of radical accountability where your impact is limited only by your own initiative."
What her work is really built for
For Priyanka, the next phase at payabl. is about proving that all the work done quietly ‘under the hood’ is ready to handle serious scale. It is demanding work, but it is also, she says, exactly the kind of challenge that makes the role worth doing.
"It is a high-velocity environment where no two days are the same. I’m fuelled by a brilliant team and a culture that constantly challenges you to step outside your comfort zone."
In a company that has made a habit of promoting from within and rewarding high-quality work, her trajectory reflects something important about how payabl. builds both its products and its people. The foundations come first, and the speed comes after. The real performance only shows when you have a properly built engine underneath it all.
Priyanka Lehmann is Principal Product Manager at payabl., leading Payments and Gateway product strategy.