In her previous role at Cedar Money, a fintech providing cross-border payment solutions for African businesses, Titilayo Oluwatosin was tasked with moving the company from an agency-led marketing model to an in-house function.
The transition involved building a team, developing a marketing strategy from the ground up, and positioning Cedar Money as a reliable player in the cross-border payments space.
With the fintech operating across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, the role also deepened her appreciation for the cultural nuances that shape how brands connect with different audiences.
In this edition of Level Up, Oluwatosin shares how she approaches product positioning, builds an in-house marketing function, and works across teams to drive growth.
Product marketing will be defined differently depending on who is speaking, so how do you define product marketing?
For me, I’ll define product marketing as an intersection of product, customer, market, and commercial strategy. It connects what a company builds and why a customer should care.
Product marketing starts before a product is launched. It involves understanding the customer problem, clearly defining the audience and positioning, translating the product’s capabilities into a clear value proposition, and then taking that proposition to market in a way that drives adoption. Product marketing also has a major education and trust part, where you’re often asking customers to adopt unfamiliar technology or change how they handle money, so clarity is as important as the product itself.
Your career has seen you go from brand marketing and communications into product marketing. What differentiates a brand marketer from a product marketer?
Brand marketing asks, “What should people think and feel about this company?” Product marketing asks, “Why should this specific customer choose this specific product to solve this specific problem?”
There is obviously overlap, particularly around positioning and storytelling, but product marketing is much closer to the product, customer and commercial journey. You’re thinking about ICPs, segmentation, competitive positioning, messaging, adoption, launches and how the product ultimately fits into a customer’s pipeline.
My move into product marketing felt quite natural because brand marketing and communications taught me how to simplify complexity, while working closer to products taught me how to connect that communication to customer needs and commercial outcomes.
There are a lot of fintech products in the market today, and standing out can be difficult. How do you approach positioning for a fintech, especially one that is in a space with multiple competitors?
I start with the customer problem rather than the product features. In a crowded fintech market, saying that you have faster payments, better FX or lower fees isn’t enough because competitors can say the same thing. I want to understand what the customer is struggling with, what alternatives they use today, what makes them hesitate, and what outcome matters most to them. Then I look at three things: the customer, the competitive landscape and the company’s actual advantage. The positioning has to sit where those three intersect.
At Cedar, for example, we weren’t simply communicating that we were a cross-border payments company; we had to communicate the specific problems we were solving around settlement, FX, liquidity, reliability and trust and make that understandable to businesses operating across different African markets.
While you were at Cedar, you built the marketing function from the ground up. How did you approach that, from building out a marketing strategy to building a team?
I started with the basics: understanding what we were trying to achieve, who we were trying to reach, what we were selling, and what success looks like.
When I joined Cedar in 2024, the business was moving from a largely external agency approach towards a more structured internal marketing function. My first priority was therefore to understand the business and product deeply, clarify the brand and product narrative, establish the core channels and build a measurement framework.
From there, I structured the function around the actual needs of the business rather than hiring to fill titles. That meant a mix of internal capability and external specialists across areas such as content, creative, digital and PR, with closer alignment between marketing, product, sales and leadership.
As the business evolved, so did the function. We moved from primarily building awareness to thinking much more deliberately about acquisition, product positioning, market expansion, lead quality and GTM.
Cedar serves customers in multiple countries, and the go-to-market strategy will differ accordingly. What are some lessons that process taught you?
The major lesson that process taught me is that you cannot assume that a successful message in one market will automatically work in another market, even if the markets are in the same continent.
The underlying customer problem might be similar; however, trust drivers, regulatory concerns, language, competitive alternatives and purchasing behaviour can differ significantly. Working across African and international markets taught me to separate the core product proposition from the way that proposition needs to be expressed and taken to market.
The product should have a consistent strategic identity, but the customer narrative, proof points, channels and education required might need to change. At Cedar, that meant thinking about different markets and corridors individually while maintaining a coherent global product story. It also reinforced the importance of localisation beyond translation, including messaging, website structure, customer education and market-specific acquisition strategies.
You work with product, engineering, sales and growth teams. How do you keep everyone aligned and pulling in the same direction?
A good starting point is making sure everyone has a shared understanding of the customer problem and the business objective. I try to ensure that every team understands not just what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it and what success looks like.
Practically, that means having a member of each team sit in on customer check-in calls, maintaining regular cross-functional alignment, working from a shared messaging framework and Notion workspace, agreeing on priorities, and making sure Product, Sales, Engineering and Marketing aren’t operating from different versions of the product story.
At Cedar, I worked closely with Product, Sales, Engineering and Operations on product messaging, website positioning and GTM initiatives. My goal was always to ensure that what we communicated externally accurately reflected what the product could actually deliver.
What do these teams misunderstand about each other?
Marketing sometimes assumes that Product and Engineering understand the customer’s language simply because they understand the product. Product and Engineering sometimes assume that if the product is genuinely good, customers will naturally understand its value. Sales can sometimes want messaging that works immediately in a customer conversation, while Marketing may be thinking about consistency at a broader market level.
None of those perspectives is wrong. The real issue is that each function sees the product from a different point of view. That’s where a good product marketer comes in, acting as a translator between these perspectives.
When have customer insights changed your plans? What was the insight you uncovered, and in what ways did it change your plans?
One example was our acquisition strategy at Cedar. We realised that traffic volume wasn’t necessarily translating into the quality of leads we wanted. Instead of treating more traffic as automatically better performance, we started looking much more closely at intent, engagement and conversion quality.
That contributed to a shift away from some lower-quality acquisition channels and towards a more deliberate focus on organic acquisition, ICP-led pages and clearer product messaging. Our 2025 reporting reflected that shift: overall acquisition volume declined, but engagement time increased by 66%, while lead generation increased by 90%.
How do you localise a product across African and international markets? What travels well, and what never does?
What travels well is the underlying customer problem and core product value. What doesn’t always travel well is the way you communicate it. Language, cultural context, regulatory expectations, trust signals, purchasing behaviour and even the terminology customers use to describe their problems can change from market to market.
At Cedar, this meant thinking carefully about market-specific messaging and localisation while preserving a consistent global proposition. We also worked on localisation at the product-marketing layer, including additional languages and market-specific website experiences to support expansion.
What skills do modern product marketers need that nobody taught them at the start of their careers?
I think modern product marketers need to be much more commercially and technically fluent than the traditional definition of marketing suggests. You need to understand data, customer behaviour, technology, business models, sales, product development and increasingly AI.
But one of the most important skills is asking better questions. You need enough curiosity to understand how a product actually works, enough commercial awareness to understand why it matters, and enough customer empathy to explain it in a way that makes sense. I’d also add stakeholder management. Product marketing sits across multiple functions, so your ability to influence without directly managing everyone involved is critical.
AI is changing how we work. Which parts of product marketing is it already changing?
AI is already changing several parts of product marketing, including how we execute, research, competitive analysis, content production, messaging variations, segmentation, campaign experimentation and increasingly how teams analyze customer feedback.
However, I think AI actually raises the bar. The value changes from simply producing content to deciding what should be said, to whom, why it matters and how it connects to the product strategy. At Cedar, I also worked with Engineering on messaging around an AI agent supporting Kenya-focused outreach. That experience reinforced for me that product marketers need to understand emerging technology well enough to communicate its value accurately without overstating what it can do.
What is your approach to GTM for emerging-market technology products, where trust, infrastructure, and regulation play major roles?
I’d start with what needs to be true for a customer to trust and adopt a specific product. In emerging markets, GTM accounts for more than product-market fit. You need to understand infrastructure realities, regulatory considerations, customer education, existing alternatives and the trust barriers that might prevent adoption.
Also, in fintech, credibility is part of the product experience. Customers need confidence that their money is safe, that the process will work and that the company understands their operating environment. So my approach is usually to understand the market, define the ICP, identify the adoption barriers, establish the positioning, build product education, and then design the acquisition and launch strategy around that reality.
What do you see as the biggest change coming to product marketing in the African fintech space?
In my opinion, African fintech is transitioning from an era where being innovative was enough to create visibility to one where fintechs will have to show evidence of adoption, economics and value creation. I think we’ll see a much more strategic approach to product marketing.
With increased competition, there will be a greater need for clearer positioning, sharper ICP definitions, better customer education and much more intentional go-to-market strategies. I also expect to see a much closer relationship between product marketing and product development, with marketing becoming involved much earlier in how products are positioned, launched and taken to market.
When you come to the end of your career or you choose to move out of marketing, what do you want to be remembered for?
I want to be remembered as someone who used technology and marketing to solve real problems and create practical value. My career has always been driven by a passion for providing solutions. I started in brand marketing, which taught me how to understand audiences, build trust and communicate value, and later pivoted into product marketing to apply that same problem-solving instinct more directly to helping businesses position, launch and grow technology products.
I want to be remembered for helping businesses across Africa serve their customers better, whether that means helping them communicate their products more clearly, adopt better technology, enter new markets or ultimately deliver a better customer experience.
I also want my work to help good technology products reach the people and businesses that need them.
Beyond the campaigns and companies I work with, I hope to be remembered as someone who created lasting value, helped businesses grow, and contributed to making African businesses and technology more globally competitive.