About Maria
Fractional Chief Product Officer with 10+ years building and scaling product platforms across the GCC, EMEA, and APAC.
Most recently I built a company's first in-house platform from concept to the point where it carried 75% of global revenue, and the business grew from £57m to £93m with EBITDA up 15% over that period. Before that I led the automation of repeat-prescription dispensing for a network of 400+ pharmacies, designing an AI-driven workflow and a robotic dispensing hub that now handles 2.1 million items a month, with cost per item reduced by more than a third.
My focus is product and AI strategy that is tied to commercial results rather than kept at the level of presentations.
Areas I work in:
- Product strategy and roadmaps measured against commercial outcomes
- AI product strategy, from prioritising the use cases worth building to delivering models people can trust
- Intelligent automation, digital transformation, and platform modernisation at scale
- Preparing product for boards, private equity, and due diligence
- Building for regulated buyers in pharma and financial services, where compliance and auditability have to be designed in from the start
How I work:
- As a fractional CPO or Head of Product on an ongoing basis, a few days a week
- Embedded for a defined period to deliver a specific outcome, such as a fundraise, an integration, or a platform rebuild
- On fixed-scope sprints, including product and AI strategy, platform audits, and investor readiness
Sectors: fintech, martech, healthtech, pharma, and SaaS. Regions: UAE, KSA, Qatar, UK, Europe, and APAC.
Available 3 days per week. Happy to discuss what you are working on and where I could help.
English
Native or bilingual
Persian
Native or bilingual
Can work on-site
Dubai City (up to 30km)
Experience
- Val-IQ AIFractional COOBANKING AND INSURANCEJanuary 2026 - Today (6 months)Dubai City, United Arab EmiratesVal-IQ is an early-stage company building an AI-native research and diligence workspace for institutional investors: a place where analysts do rigorous, fully source-traceable work across public and private markets, built on a self-hosted orchestrator of around 200 analytical tools.I joined as a board advisor and moved inside as fractional Chief Product Officer when a strategic combination with a data partner added a second data corpus, a second team, and a second roadmap. The technology was strong and genuinely differentiated, but it was ahead of the product. My brief was to answer the question the business could not yet answer clearly: what is the single product, and who is it for?What I did:
- Repositioned the offering from a generic AI copilot to an AI-native research and diligence workspace, changing who it sells to and what it competes against.
- Set the product strategy end to end in one scope document (positioning, ideal customers, jobs to be done, principles, a phased roadmap, moats, and risks), now the shared source of truth across both companies.
- Made Excel the primary surface, on the basis that anything used daily has to work inside the analyst's existing tools, not as another destination app.
- Treated compliance as a product primitive rather than a sales afterthought, pushing audit and traceability into the first release, because in financial services a compliance officer can stop a deal.
- Set a build sequence with early adopters before general release, and metrics that gate each phase, so limited engineering effort goes to what proves the thesis.
This is early adoption stage, so the honest outcome is direction and de-risking rather than banked metrics: two strong but separate technical assets are now one sequenced, fundable product with a defensible position and a credible path to a regulated enterprise sale. - TLC Marketing WorldwideHead of ProductENTERTAINMENT AND LEISURESeptember 2023 - May 2026 (2 years and 8 months)Dubai - United Arab EmiratesTLC Marketing Worldwide is a global marketing rewards business that, when I joined, had no history of building its own technology. Only 10 to 15% of campaigns ran on a basic platform built and maintained by an outside agency, which left the company dependent on a third party and unable to use its own campaign data. I joined as the first in-house product hire to change that, and went on to lead product as Head of Product.I took the platform, COSMOS, from concept to the engine behind 75% of global revenue and 85% of global campaigns. The brief was to turn a marketing company into one that could build, own, and scale its own product.What I did:
- Chose a microservices architecture over a monolith, a decision that let the platform scale toward 1,000+ campaigns and meet market-specific law, such as the requirement in Italy that the winning moments in a campaign are locked and fully auditable once it is live.
- Built and delivered the 2024 to 2025 roadmap that moved 85% of global campaigns onto COSMOS, and left a roadmap funded to 2028 that prepares the business for its next sale.
- Secured board approval for a £12m+ platform investment, which first meant educating a board from a marketing background on how technology products and teams are built and run.
- Guided the product through a private equity investment, owning product performance, vision, and roadmap in investor meetings.
- After the deal, recruited a new CTO, scaled the product and engineering organisation, and stood up a tech hub in Bangalore.
Over this period the business grew from £57m to £93m in revenue, with EBITDA up 15%, and COSMOS went from an idea to the platform the company now runs on. - Numark Digital / Phoenix Medical GroupSenior Product ManagerHEALTH AND WELLNESSJanuary 2021 - September 2023 (2 years and 8 months)London, UKNumark Digital sits within Phoenix Medical Group, which runs Rowlands Pharmacy, a network of more than 400 pharmacies across the north of the UK. Every branch operated differently, all on a decades-old patient medication record system that capped how many items a pharmacy could dispense and how much else it could take on. I was brought in for my clinical and legal pharmacy background to move work away from the pharmacy counter without losing, and ideally improving, the service patients received.The insight the project was built on was simple: a patient does not need to visit a pharmacy to collect a repeat prescription. That can be automated end to end.What I did:
- Designed the workflow for a patient-facing app where patients sign in with their NHS login, request repeat medication, trigger a digital prescription from their GP, and have it fulfilled centrally.
- Stood up a central robotic dispensing hub where prescriptions are pulled from the NHS digital spine, clinically and legally checked, dispensed, and posted to the patient's door via the Royal Mail API in under 48 hours.
- Built the clinical and legal verification model that let a team of 50 pharmacists safely clear 10 million prescriptions, then used that data to partner with a software firm to train the first cloud-based, AI-driven patient medication record system.
- Spent the final stage of the project driving efficiency and reducing errors, cutting the cost per item from £4.19 to £2.57.
The hub now dispenses 2.1 million items a month. Beyond the volume, automating repeat prescriptions freed pharmacy staff to provide frontline clinical services such as diabetes management and minor-ailment treatment, and the approach was taken up by other patient access providers in the UK.
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Education
- Business Management & AdministrationUniversity of SheffieldBusiness Management & Administration
- Pharmaceutical ScienceAston UniversityPharmaceutical Science