Company
Klarna
Year
2021 – Present
My Role
  • Strategic Operations
  • Organisational Design
  • Leadership Enablement
  • Cross-functional Execution
  • Change Management
  • Scaling Systems

Bringing order to scale and momentum to strategy.

At Klarna, Europe’s biggest fintech unicorn with 85 million customers, I worked across strategic operations, organisational transformation, and change management during a period of intense hypergrowth. I led a cross-functional team to improve how Klarna hired at scale, supporting 25 Talent Acquisition teams to make 3,700 hires in a single year. Alongside that, we helped refine Klarna’s operating model—reworking team structures, ways of working, OKRs, and planning rhythms to support faster, more aligned collaboration and decision-making.

We overhauled broken processes, streamlined workflows, and introduced AI-powered tools that improved speed, quality, and collaboration across 600+ global teams.

I worked directly with the CEO and COO on a high-priority taskforce, translating their vision into a new end-to-end approach to recruitment. We designed, tested, and iterated solutions to address urgent hiring challenges, ultimately creating a handbook that significantly improved time-to-hire by standardising processes across the company. I also built and delivered training programs on topics such as on GenAI, stakeholder engagement, design thinking, and project management.

This was a hands-on role at the heart of a high-growth business—solving complex problems, connecting dots, and helping Klarna move forward while everything around it was moving fast.

Operating Model 101

Klarna’s operating model had splintered as the company scaled, with teams doing things their own way and no central source of truth. We mapped what worked, fixed what didn’t, and documented the best of it. I helped design Operating Model 101 as a clear, human-centred guide for how we work—complete with videos, quizzes, and text-to-speech features to make it easier for teams to align, onboard, and move fast without losing structure.

Klarna Ways of Working

I redesigned Klarna’s rituals and routines—standups, planning sessions, offsites, and more—to actually support how teams worked in real life. We turned these into AI-powered tools that made everything easier: from agendas that built themselves to badges that gamified team habits. Leaders saved time, teams worked better, and 600+ global teams finally had systems that scaled with them.

Staffing Playbook

Hiring at Klarna was high-volume and high-speed. We’d already hit 3,700 hires and exceeded every target, but we wanted to do it better. I was selected to rethink our recruitment process alongside the CEO and COO—building a step-by-step playbook with candidate profiles, templates, checklists, interviewer guides, scoring rubrics, and more. We tested it with one pipeline, iterated quickly, and turned it into a system the rest of Klarna could use and trust.

Randy Heyrowky—Chief Operating Officer, Bonmoja

“Shermaine is an exceptional generalist and project manager with a keen ability to solve problems strategically. Her adaptability and structured approach to execution allowed her to take on a variety of high-impact initiatives. She can break down ambiguous challenges, create scalable solutions, and deliver measurable results. Beyond her business skills, Shermaine is a natural leader who thrives in cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management. She worked seamlessly with senior leaders and C-Levels, aligning teams toward common goals, and was a coach to many colleagues along the way. Her ability to build relationships, influence without authority, and drive operational improvements makes her a perfect fit for strategic leadership positions.”

Frida Jones—Chief Enterprise Officer, Epidemic Sound

“Shermaine joined as an individual contributor but was quickly recognized as a future leader in the Staffing Domain and stepped into a leadership role in a team responsible for driving innovations and creating end-to-end processes for engaging with candidates. Shermaine has a unique skillset where she is both deeply creative and innovative whilst having a strong ability to deep-dive into details and applying an analytical mindset. Furthermore, Shermaine was a much appreciated leader guiding, coaching and engaging her team during a challenging hypergrowth period; always maintaining a positive, can-do attitude and managing demanding senior stakeholders with professionalism and grace. I truly appreciated working with Shermaine and would be happy to work with her again in a heartbeat.”