Product Marketing & GTM Lead · Dubai · 2025–2026
Building a new checkout category from zero.
SECTOR
Payments and fintech
STAGE
Pre-launch, stealth
MARKET
UAE
ROLE
Product Marketing & GTM Lead
PERIOD
2025–2026
Stages covered
01
Research
02
Competition
03
Segment & position
04
Message
05
Launch & enable
06
Measure & maintain
The same six stages as the PMM Operating System.
The situation
A strong product idea, and no agreed way to explain it.
A UAE payments startup had built a checkout-native incentive: a way for merchants to reward customers who buy at full price, funded by the startup rather than out of merchant margin. Technically it worked. Commercially, nobody could say what it was.
Every conversation described it slightly differently. There was no category it obviously belonged to, no defined merchant segment, and no shared answer to the first question every merchant asked, which was some version of "so what is this, exactly?"
The mandate
Build the marketing function, and define the category it sells into.
I joined as the founding marketing hire. No function, no positioning, no merchant narrative. The remit ran from category definition through segmentation and messaging to merchant-facing assets and onboarding.
Function
Built from zero
Stakeholder narratives
6
GTM surfaces
2
merchant and shopper
The diagnosis
The market would have filed it under lending.
Left undefined, a payments product that changes what a shopper pays gets read as buy-now-pay-later. That reading has a budget line, a set of expectations and a regulatory conversation attached to it, and all three were wrong for this product. It is not credit. There is no debt, no affordability check and no balance-sheet exposure for the merchant. Accepting the default category would have made the product easier to explain in one sentence and impossible to sell in the second. The harder path was to define a category that did not yet have a name.
Sell into the category that exists
Instantly understood, wrong buyer, wrong objections, a regulatory conversation the product doesn't need.
Define a new one
Slower to explain, but it puts the product in front of the growth budget rather than the credit committee.
When I arrived
When I left
No agreed category
A defined category with explicit boundaries
Every conversation different
One narrative, six stakeholder versions
No merchant segmentation
ICP defined by basket value and drop-off behaviour
A product to explain
A product to deploy
Compliance raised late
Compliance answered first
What I built
Five workstreams, from category to onboarding.
01
03 Segment & position
Category definition
A checkout-native incentive, not a payment method.
- Positioned as an incentive layer sitting on the existing checkout rather than a new way to pay
- Explicit category boundaries, including what the product is not
- A narrative that puts checkout hesitation, not affordability, at the centre of the problem
02
01 Research · 03 Segment & position
Merchant segmentation and ICP
Who this is worth deploying for.
- Merchant segments defined by basket value, category and checkout drop-off behaviour
- Buying triggers and the internal path a merchant follows to approve something new at checkout
- Disqualification criteria, because a checkout incentive is wrong for a large share of merchants
03
04 Message
A six-stakeholder messaging matrix
Nothing gets added to a merchant's checkout without six people agreeing.
- A distinct promise per stakeholder, each with its own proof and its own objection
- Written so that no two stakeholders are given contradictory reasons to say yes
- Deliberately handled Risk and Compliance first rather than last, because that is where this category dies
Six people have to agree
One product. Six different reasons to say yes.
CEO / GM
Grow revenue without new risk
No debt, no discounts, no regulatory exposure.
Growth & ecommerce
Turn checkout into a growth lever
Measurable uplift at the moment of decision.
Finance
Predictable economics
Fixed expected cost, no balance-sheet exposure.
Payments & engineering
Zero disruption to checkout
Integrates with the existing payments stack, no new payment flow.
Risk & compliance
Not credit. Not lending.
No consumer debt, no affordability checks.
The one that matters
Enterprise
Additive, not a replacement
Works alongside what the merchant already runs.
The product didn't change. The reason changed six times.
04
05 Launch & enable
The merchant hub
The pitch, built as a product rather than a deck.
- A merchant-facing site carrying the full stakeholder narrative, integration story and FAQs
- A separate shopper-facing surface, because a two-sided product needs two GTM surfaces
- Built and shipped rather than specified
05
05 Launch & enable
Sales and onboarding enablement
Understandable is not the same as adoptable.
- Merchant pitch narrative, one-pagers and an ROI framing finance would accept
- A CFO-grade commercial model, kept deliberately separate from the investor narrative
- Onboarding flow designed to reduce the friction between interest and integration
The judgment call
Refusing the category the market was ready to hand us.
There was an easy version of this. Describe it in the language buyers already use, accept the comparison, and get a meeting quickly. It would have worked right up until the risk and compliance conversation, which is where products in that category go to have a very different discussion.
Defining a new category is slower and costs you the shortcut. It also puts the product in front of a growth budget rather than a credit committee, and lets the compliance answer be a differentiator rather than a defence.
What this proves
Four things, if you're deciding whether to hire me.
I work in ambiguity.
No category, no ICP, no narrative on day one.
I define categories rather than position inside them.
Including turning down the obvious one.
I write for the whole buying committee.
Six stakeholders, six promises, no contradictions.
I ship the assets, not just the strategy.
Two live GTM surfaces, not a deck.
What I can't show you
This engagement is under NDA. The company, its pricing, its commercial model, its partners and its results stay off this page. What's described here is the shape of the work, not the numbers behind it. If you want the detail, ask me on a call and I'll tell you what I'm able to.
Frameworks installed