Over 100,000 merchants run their businesses on Salla, and our next phase is expanding across the GCC and beyond. That expansion is not a copy-paste of what we built in Saudi Arabia. Each market has different payment rails, regulatory requirements, logistics realities, and merchant expectations. The product has to be adapted deliberately, not translated.
This role owns that work, and it is the kind of seat that usually doesn't exist: The product decisions that make or break a market entry run through one person. You. You will make Salla work as well for a merchant anywhere in the GCC and beyond as it does in our home market: diagnosing where the product needs to change in each new market, deciding what gets built, adapted, or deferred, and driving the work from diagnosis to shipped improvement.
You will drive impact across three major domains:
- Activation in New Markets (signup-to-first-order friction diagnosed and closed, with payments and know-your-customer compliance as the primary battleground)
- Market-Specific Product Fit (payments, logistics integrations, compliance workflows, and localization that make Salla feel native, not imported)
- Expansion Infrastructure (the shared product primitives and playbook that make the third market entry cheaper than the first)
Responsibilities:
- Own the product roadmap for expansion across the GCC and beyond, one market at a time, with a clear line of sight to subsequent markets.
- Diagnose where and why merchants in each market drop off between signup and first order, and ship the product changes that close the gap.
- Drive the payment and compliance product work per market: know-your-customer flows, payment gateway integrations, regulatory requirements.
- Decide which parts of the core product need per-market adaptation and which stay shared infrastructure, and own where to invest.
- Define and monitor the metrics that reflect real market progress: time to first order, activation rate by market, ninety-day retention, share of merchants expanding regionally.
- Build the measurement framework from scratch where benchmarks don't exist, and separate real activation signal from noise.
- Lead cross-functional work across engineering, design, operations, legal, and local market teams without direct authority.
- Communicate tradeoffs, sequencing, and what is deliberately paused to protect focus.
Requirements
- Proven experience owning product for a market expansion or geographic rollout at a software, fintech, or commerce platform, ideally one requiring adapted payments, compliance, or onboarding across regulatory environments.
- Deep understanding of merchant activation dynamics: diagnosing drop-off by market and the product changes that move activation rate in practice.
- Payments and know-your-customer fluency as a product problem, not a compliance checkbox: gateway integrations, document flows, and their product implications.
- Familiarity with Gulf market realities: payment methods, logistics infrastructure, value-added tax and commercial licensing, and how merchant behavior differs across the region.
- Track record improving time-to-value in a self-serve, low-touch environment where the product does the onboarding.
- Strong analytical instinct, comfortable building measurement for a market with no benchmarks.
- Experience leading cross-functional work without authority over the teams involved.
- Five or more years in product management, with meaningful ownership in an ambiguous or early-stage context.
- Arabic fluency is a must; Gulf residency or prior regional experience is preferred over theoretical market knowledge. Willing to relocate to Saudi Arabia.