Senior Product Manager - GCC Expansion

Role Overview

Senior Product Manager - GCC Expansion at Salla. This role owns product decisions for expanding Salla's platform across the Gulf Cooperation Council region and beyond, with each market entry requiring deliberate adaptation rather than replication of the Saudi Arabia model.

Company Overview

Salla is a commerce platform serving over 100,000 merchants. The company is entering a phase of expansion across the GCC and beyond, with each market presenting distinct payment rails, regulatory requirements, logistics realities, and merchant expectations.

Role Purpose

Own the product roadmap and execution for GCC expansion and beyond. Diagnose where the product must change in each new market, decide what gets built, adapted, or deferred, and drive improvements from diagnosis to shipped product. Ensure Salla works as effectively for merchants anywhere in the GCC and beyond as it does in the home market.

Key Responsibilities

Activation & Onboarding

• Own the product roadmap for expansion across the GCC and beyond, one market at a time, with clear visibility into subsequent markets.
• Diagnose where and why merchants in each market drop off between signup and first order.
• Ship the product changes that close activation gaps.
• Drive merchant activation dynamics: identify drop-off by market and implement product changes that move activation rate.
• Track record of improving time-to-value in self-serve, low-touch environments where the product handles onboarding.

Payments & Compliance

• Drive payment and compliance product work per market: know-your-customer flows, payment gateway integrations, and regulatory requirements.
• Own payments and know-your-customer as a product problem, not a compliance checkbox: gateway integrations, document flows, and their product implications.
• Understand Gulf market payment methods and their merchant adoption patterns.

Product Strategy & Architecture

• Decide which parts of the core product require per-market adaptation and which remain shared infrastructure.
• Own investment decisions on market-specific versus shared product work.
• Build the expansion infrastructure: shared product primitives and playbook that make the third market entry cheaper than the first.
• Define market-specific product fit: payments, logistics integrations, compliance workflows, and localization that make Salla feel native rather than imported.

Measurement & Analytics

• Define and monitor metrics that reflect real market progress: time to first order, activation rate by market, ninety-day retention, and share of merchants expanding regionally.
• Build the measurement framework from scratch where benchmarks do not exist.
• Separate real activation signal from noise.
• Develop strong analytical instinct and comfort building measurement for a market with no benchmarks.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• 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.

Qualifications & Experience

• Proven experience owning product for market expansion or geographic rollout at a software, fintech, or commerce platform.
• Ideally worked on platforms requiring adapted payments, compliance, or onboarding across regulatory environments.
• Deep understanding of merchant activation dynamics: diagnosing drop-off by market and identifying product changes that move activation rate in practice.
• Five or more years in product management with meaningful ownership in an ambiguous or early-stage context.
• Track record of improving time-to-value in self-serve, low-touch environments where the product does the onboarding.
• Experience leading cross-functional work without authority over the teams involved.
• Familiarity with Gulf market realities: payment methods, logistics infrastructure, value-added tax, commercial licensing, and how merchant behavior differs across the region.

Skills & Competencies

• Payments and know-your-customer fluency as a product problem, not a compliance checkbox.
• Gateway integrations and document flow expertise.
• Strong analytical instinct and ability to build measurement frameworks for markets without benchmarks.
• Arabic fluency is required.

Additional Information

• Gulf residency or prior regional experience is preferred over theoretical market knowledge.
• Willing to relocate to Saudi Arabia.