How Jacqueline Karlin Turns Purpose into Products at PayPal, Meta, Amazon

How do you turn mission into products that actually work?

In this episode of Between Product and Partnerships, Pandium CEO Cristina Flaschen sits down with product leader Jacqueline Karlin to unpack how mission-driven thinking translates into real-world execution across vastly different scales.

From small business lending at Amazon, to global expansion on Alexa, to early conversational commerce at WhatsApp, Jacqueline shares concrete examples of how anchoring on customer problems shapes better decisions, especially when navigating new technologies like AI and agentic commerce. The conversation goes deep on how product teams move from conviction to action, turning “why” into repeatable, defensible “how.”

Who we sat down with

Jacqueline Karlin is a senior product leader with experience building and scaling products at Amazon (Lending & Alexa), WhatsApp, PayPal, Expedia, and more. Her work spans financial inclusion, commerce, AI-powered interfaces, and international platform expansion.

Across roles, Jacqueline has focused on:

• Working backwards from real customer problems
• Launching and localizing products globally
• Building trust-first experiences in regulated, high-stakes domains like payments and commerce

Today, she’s deeply engaged in the evolution of agentic commerce and how AI agents are changing how consumers discover, decide, and transact.

Key topics

Mission-driven product building and defining “why”
How Jacqueline’s personal mission shaped her career choices, and why understanding what motivates you as a product leader is critical to building products with long-term impact.

Specific use cases Jacqueline has worked on
Real examples from Amazon Lending, Alexa’s international expansion, and WhatsApp’s early commerce tooling, showing how different customer problems emerge at different layers of scale.

Getting from “why” to “how”
How strong teams translate mission into execution through hypotheses, customer conversations, localization, experimentation, and fast feedback (without chasing trends or shipping for novelty’s sake).

Episode highlights

02:20 — Choosing roles based on mission, not momentum
06:36 — Learning from small business sellers and reshaping lending products
11:34 — What it really takes to launch Alexa in new countries
21:36 — Early lessons from conversational commerce on WhatsApp
22:50 — Defining agentic commerce and where it’s already showing up
25:12 — Why explainability matters when AI touches money
29:23 — Using hypotheses to move from intuition to execution

Key takeaways

1. Mission creates clarity when decisions get hard
Mission acts as a decision filter, helping product leaders prioritize the right problems and navigate tradeoffs with confidence.

2. Customer insight beats assumptions at every scale
Direct conversations with users consistently surfaced constraints and opportunities that dashboards alone couldn’t reveal.

3. “Why” must survive contact with reality
Strong teams treat ideas as hypotheses, testing and refining them quickly based on real feedback.

4. Global products are built locally
Successful international launches depend on cultural relevance, local partners, and thoughtful defaults.

5. Trust is foundational in AI-driven commerce
Explainability and transparency become core requirements as agents take on transactional responsibility.

For more insights on partnerships, ecosystems, and integrations, visit www.pandium.com