MAFRA, a.s.
Portmonka
The Czech loyalty-card wallet with millions of downloads. I took over a product in crisis, stabilised it and led two years of growth.
- 2× monthly unique users
- 50k → 110k MAU over two years
- 1 h → min client publishing workflow
The product
Portmonka is a Czech mobile wallet for loyalty cards, promotional flyers and discount coupons, built by MAFRA for the local market. Users scan their cards once and carry every store’s loyalty programme in one place, browse flyers from supermarkets and popular chains, and pick up exclusive coupons and interactive stories.
The situation
When I stepped in, the original delivery team had broken up and the product was in a fragile state: unstable releases, an unhappy client and a roadmap nobody owned. My brief was simple: stabilise it.
What I did
- Rebuilt the team and delivery rhythm and brought the app back to a healthy, predictable release cycle within a few months.
- Led two years of product development as the client’s day-to-day partner, owning scope, schedule, budget and risks.
- Delivered a client-managed paid banner system: CMS-driven scheduling by date range with impression caps, so the client could sell and run campaigns without developers.
- Drove a full refactor of the heavily used Promos module, which serves hundreds of thousands of users a month. The client’s publishing workflow dropped from about an hour to minutes.
Outcome
Monthly unique users more than doubled, from roughly 50 thousand to 110 thousand. I handed the product over to an internal colleague in a healthy state to take on a higher-priority project.