Sportserve / Senior Digital Projects and Marketing Operations Manager / Mar 2014 - Feb 2021
Building the Payments Operations Division
Payment launches were fragmented across 8 departments with no single owner. I made the case for a dedicated division and built it from scratch.
The read
Sportserve operated payment launches across 12 countries, and every launch touched Product, Engineering, Compliance, Creative, Customer Support, and external payment providers. None of that was coordinated. Each team only saw their own piece of the work.
Launches kept slipping, timelines kept getting missed, and the instinct around me was to fix each launch as it came up. I looked past the individual launches and saw the same failure pattern repeating every time. The problem was never any single launch. It was that no system existed to connect the people who had to work together to ship one.
Nobody had named that gap, because from inside any one department, it just looked like a slow launch.
The decision
Fixing one launch at a time would have meant doing this forever. I decided the business needed a dedicated function, not another workaround, and made the case to leadership for a standalone Payments Operations Division built from zero.
I designed it as an internal agency model: one team owning project management, B2C campaign execution, B2B onboarding coordination, creative production, vendor management, and customer issue resolution for everything payments-related, across all 12 markets.
The metric I chose
Launch throughput and production error rate across the full portfolio of launches, not any single one. If the system was working, every launch would get faster and cleaner, not just the ones I personally touched. That was the only way to prove the diagnosis was right: that the problem was systemic, not isolated.
The build
I hired the initial team of 5 from scratch and defined the operating model myself: Agile sprint cycles, RACI models for ownership clarity, centralized project tracking, and a data-driven prioritization framework that sequenced launches by market impact instead of whoever asked loudest.
I built the SOPs, the QA processes, and the standardized launch templates so the team could execute consistently without me in every decision. Then I traveled to new regional offices to train local teams in person and set up the same systems on the ground, since the model only worked if it held up the same way in every market, not just the one I was sitting in.
The Payments Operations Division I built sat inside the broader MSOps department, which grew from 5 to 36 over the same stretch, as four other leads built out their own divisions in parallel. That wider growth wasn't my build. The 5-person division was.
0 to 5
Team built from zero
2x
Campaign throughput
~40%
Production errors reduced
The read held. Once the division existed, launches stopped depending on whoever happened to notice a problem first. Throughput doubled, errors dropped by about 40%, and payment method adoption improved by 20 to 30%, depending on the market, because launches were finally running through one system instead of eight uncoordinated ones. The structure outlasted me. It became the standard model for how Sportserve ran payment launches going forward.
Tech
Jira, sprint planning and backlog management
Agile and RACI, delivery governance and ownership clarity
Confluence, SOPs and operational documentation
Creative production tooling, merchant assets and campaign creative
Miguel N. Monzones
Vancouver, BC, Canada
