What I got wrong about the Gulf
I brought a playbook. The market wanted proximity and patience instead.
I arrived in the Gulf with a playbook. I had built corporate spend and HR products across Singapore, Sydney, and Bangalore, and I assumed the work would be the same shape: find the pain, ship the wedge, iterate fast, expand. Most of that playbook was wrong here, or at least incomplete. Here is what I had to unlearn.
”Localisation” is not translation
I used to think localisation was a checklist. Translate the strings, flip the layout to right to left, handle the date format, ship. That gets you a product that technically works in Arabic and is still foreign in every way that matters.
Real localisation in Saudi meant rebuilding assumptions, not labels. Payroll runs against a specific national system and specific expectations. Identity verification leans on local infrastructure. The way a finance team in Riyadh wants to approve a payment is not the way a team in Singapore does. When I worked on the Saudi build at Bayzat, the hard part was never the Arabic. It was discovering all the places where the original product had quietly assumed a different country and a different default, and undoing them one by one.
The lesson: if your localisation work fits in a sprint, you have not localised. You have translated.
Proximity beats the dashboard
In markets I knew, you could learn a lot from instrumentation. Watch the funnel, read the events, talk to a sample of users on a call, and you had a usable picture. In the Gulf, the picture you get from a distance is thin and often misleading.
The signal here is in the room. Decisions move through relationships and trust that do not show up in a product analytics tool. The deals that mattered were not closed by a better feature. They were closed by being present, by showing up repeatedly, by people knowing your face and believing you would still be there in two years. Proximity is not a soft skill in this market. It is a distribution strategy.
I moved to Riyadh, and the quality of everything I understood went up immediately. That is not a coincidence I would have predicted from my old playbook.
Patience is not the absence of speed
The cliché is that the Gulf moves slowly. That is half true and the wrong frame. Some things move with extraordinary speed here right now, faster than anywhere I have worked, because there is real ambition and real capital behind a national transformation. Other things take exactly as long as trust takes to build, and you cannot rush them by being clever.
The skill is knowing which is which. Push hard on the things that can move, and be genuinely patient with the things that cannot. Founders who try to apply uniform speed to both burn the relationships that the slow things depend on, and then wonder why the fast things stalled.
Vision is a tailwind, not a strategy
It is easy to point at the national transformation and treat it as if it were your business plan. It is not. The ambition in the region is real and it lifts everything, but a tailwind is not a direction. You still have to pick a specific problem for a specific customer and solve it better than the alternative. The teams that mistook the macro story for product strategy built things that sounded important in a deck and that nobody actually needed on a Tuesday.
What I would do differently from day one
Move closer, sooner. Whatever you think the right amount of presence is, it is more.
Hire local judgement and give it real authority, not an advisory seat. The person who grew up understanding how things actually work here will save you from expensive, confident mistakes.
Budget localisation as a rebuild, not a feature. Put your best people on it.
And drop the assumption that the market should adapt to your product. It will not, and the assumption reads as arrogance long before you notice you are making it.
The honest part
I got the Gulf wrong in the way most newcomers do: I respected the opportunity and underestimated the difference. The opportunity is as large as everyone says. The difference is larger than the playbooks admit. The work that has gone well for me here started the day I stopped trying to run the same play faster and started trying to understand where I actually was.
Draft. These are my own observations from a few years on the ground, not a survey. Edit freely.