Shantelle
Awomoyi

From complexity
to clarity.

I work at the intersection of product, commercial and growth, translating technically complex products into clear market narratives that drive real adoption.

Fintech Infrastructure Blockchain & Web3 Developer Platforms B2B SaaS 0→1 Launches
View selected work
Shantelle Awomoyi speaking at Dappcon 2024
Impact
83%
of SME applicants onboarded in 30 min, down from 2 full days at Modulr
12k+
registered active users after narrative repositioning at Circles
100M+
TVL across the Gnosis ecosystem during Gnosis Builders & Studio tenure
3rd
largest Ethereum network by validator count on Gnosis Chain

Built at the
revenue
interface

MEng Materials Science & Engineering
University of Manchester, First Class
Software Engineering
Northcoders, JavaScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL
5+ years in product marketing across fintech and frontier tech
Engineering background, nuclear sector, £50k contract delivery
Podcast & newsletter reaching listeners across 35+ countries

My work focuses on clarifying how products are positioned, introduced and understood in market. I'm particularly drawn to environments where product marketing plays a strategic role, not just in execution, but in aligning teams and accelerating adoption.

I've worked across B2B SaaS fintech and decentralised infrastructure, in roles that placed me directly at the intersection of product delivery, commercial conversations and customer reality. What connects them is the same challenge: products that are technically strong but poorly understood.

My engineering background, a First Class MEng from Manchester and delivery experience in the nuclear sector, gives me an unusual lens. I'm comfortable sitting with technical teams, reading system documentation, and translating that understanding into market narrative. I didn't come to product marketing from brand or communications. I came from structured problem-solving.

I approach adoption gaps as problems of clarity, trust and alignment, and I build the systems and narratives to close them.

Distinctive Edge

"Most PMMs learn to talk about technical products. I started there, and learned how to translate them."

What I
actually do

These are the competencies that run through every engagement. Each one is demonstrated by evidence, not just listed as a skill.

01
Product Positioning & Messaging
Defining where a product sits in market, who it is for, and why it matters, then translating that into coherent messaging architecture across every touchpoint.
→ Circles: full rebrand from UBI to Social Money infrastructure
02
Go-to-Market Strategy
Building and executing GTM plans that align product, sales, and market timing, from ICP definition through channel strategy to launch sequencing.
→ Metri beta at Dappcon; uRamp GTM for Gnosis Pay
03
Product Launches
Coordinating cross-functional teams to deliver launches that generate adoption, not just awareness, with phased rollouts, feedback loops, and iteration built in.
→ 1,500+ beta users across two product launches at Gnosis Studio
04
Technical Audience Communication
Speaking credibly to developers, validators, engineers, and protocol teams, building trust through technical fluency rather than marketing abstraction.
→ Developer narrative for Gnosis Builders; validator adoption campaigns
05
Sales Enablement
Equipping commercial teams with positioning, battlecards, objection-handling, and market intelligence that converts better deals and shortens sales cycles.
→ 11% increase in deal conversion at Modulr via win/loss programme
06
Ecosystem & Adoption Growth
Designing programmes that move users from discovery through activation to sustained engagement, across protocols, developer ecosystems, and builder communities.
→ Gnosis Chain → 3rd largest network by validator count

Four roles.
One
through-line.

Across each engagement the core challenge has been the same: technically capable products failing to be understood.

Click any case study to read the full story. Each one surfaces the PMM decisions made, not just the outcomes.

01
Modulr
CX Product Manager, Embedded Payments
Positioning GTM Sales Enablement Fintech
Trust gap closed at onboarding:
2 days to 30 min for 83% of applicants

PMM Challenge

A regulated payments product with genuine technical strength was losing customers at onboarding, not because the product was wrong, but because the communication of it was.

Goal

Remove the trust and clarity gap between Modulr's infrastructure capability and the SME operators who needed to adopt it quickly, inside a regulated environment that made everything feel harder than it was.

ICP

Finance and operations leads at UK SMEs: typically CFOs, Finance Managers, or Ops Directors at companies between 20 and 200 people. They were not developers. They were time-poor, compliance-aware, and making a vendor decision that carried personal risk if it went wrong. They needed to feel confident before they committed, and the existing experience was giving them reasons to hesitate.

Key insight: these buyers were not dropping off because of price or feature gaps. They were dropping off because regulatory language was doing the customer communication job, and failing. Compliance copy and product marketing copy had never been separated.

Positioning

Modulr needed to be positioned not as a payments API, but as the fastest path to embedded payments that a non-technical SME operator could trust and act on. The positioning problem was that the product spoke fluently to developers and compliance teams, but not to the operators who had to sign off on adoption.

The shift: from infrastructure product to trusted onboarding partner for regulated payments.

Messaging

Before: feature-led, compliance-forward, process-heavy.

After: outcome-led, confidence-first, with compliance reframed as a signal of safety rather than a barrier to entry.

The core message became: you can be live in minutes, and the regulation is working for you, not against you.

Objection handling was rebuilt around the three questions SME operators actually asked, not the questions the product team assumed they asked. This came directly from sitting on sales calls and win/loss analysis across 30+ deals.

The Key Decision

Most teams would have treated a long onboarding time as a process problem and handed it to operations. I treated it as a communication problem and worked backwards from where customers were losing confidence, not where the workflow was slowest. That reframe changed what we built.

GTM Motion

  • Embedded in sales calls to hear objections in real time, not filtered through a CRM
  • Ran win/loss analysis across 30+ deals to identify the pattern beneath individual losses
  • Translated findings into battlecards and objection-handling frameworks that went directly into commercial team workflows
  • Implemented Mixpanel across the onboarding portal to turn gut feel into testable hypotheses
  • A/B tested onboarding flow copy and structure, treating each iteration as a market signal
  • Led requirements gathering for UK → EU expansion, translating compliance constraints into product and messaging specifications

Outcome

SME onboarding reduced from 2 days to 30 minutes for 83% of applicants. Deal conversion improved by 11% through structured sales enablement. The win/loss programme became a standing commercial intelligence function.

Buyer Insight Sales Enablement Win/Loss Analysis Messaging Architecture Cross-functional Leadership Regulatory Translation A/B Testing
02
Gnosis Builders
Go-to-Market Leadership, Decentralised Infrastructure
Ecosystem GTM Developer Relations Blockchain
Ecosystem built from zero:
3rd largest Ethereum network by validator count

Build the distribution infrastructure for an entire blockchain ecosystem from zero, and translate a technically sophisticated network into a participation narrative that would drive real validator and builder adoption.

Goal

Establish Gnosis Builders as a credible voice and distribution channel for the Gnosis ecosystem. Convert fragmented community activity into measurable adoption: validators running nodes, builders shipping products, partners integrating across the stack.

ICP

Three distinct segments, each requiring a different narrative. Validators: technically literate Ethereum participants evaluating where to stake. Motivated by network credibility, economic incentives, and ideological alignment. Deeply sceptical of marketing. Needed technical fluency and transparency, not product messaging. Builders and developers: early-stage founders and protocol developers looking for a chain with low fees, an aligned ecosystem, and access to infrastructure, grants, and distribution. Needed to understand what Gnosis made possible, not just what it was. Ecosystem partners and protocols: wallet providers, DeFi protocols, and infrastructure teams evaluating integrations. Needed business rationale and proof of distribution reach before committing engineering resource.

Positioning

Gnosis Chain was technically strong but positioned as a secondary Ethereum network in a market with a clear hierarchy. The positioning challenge was to make Gnosis Chain the obvious choice for specific builder and validator profiles, rather than a generic alternative to Ethereum mainnet. The frame: Gnosis Chain as the credible, values-aligned Ethereum network for builders who needed pragmatic infrastructure without ideological compromise.

Messaging

Different audiences needed different entry points into the same story. For validators: network credibility, decentralisation thesis, economic case, and technical stability, communicated with transparency, not persuasion. For builders: speed, cost, ecosystem support, and the pathway from idea to funded, deployed product. For partners: distribution reach, aligned user base, and integration ROI. The Gnosis Builders channel was built to hold all three narratives without becoming incoherent, a harder editorial problem than it appears.

The Key Decision

Ecosystem GTM is not product GTM. You are not selling one product to one ICP. You are creating conditions in which many builders choose to build, many validators choose to participate, and many partners choose to integrate. The key decision was to treat distribution infrastructure as the product, and build editorial, community, and partnership GTM as a system, not as individual campaigns.

GTM Motion

  • Built the Gnosis Builders distribution channel from scratch, scaling to 20,000 followers on X in under 3 months
  • Sourced and closed 10+ wallet and protocol partnerships, enabling $GNO and $xDAI support across platforms with 30M+ MAU
  • Designed hackathon and builder activation strategies to drive sustained ecosystem participation
  • Led validator adoption through targeted messaging, education content, and activation campaigns
  • Executed GTM for joint venture products Mu Exchange and Genome Domains
  • Built repeatable pathways moving builders from discovery through experimentation to funded, deployed projects

Outcome

Gnosis Chain became the 3rd largest Ethereum network by validator count. Gnosis Builders scaled to 20,000 followers in under 3 months. Partnership integrations reached platforms with a combined 30M+ MAU.

Ecosystem GTM Developer Narrative Multi-segment Positioning Channel Strategy Partnership GTM Community Activation Distribution Architecture Technical Audience Communication
03
Circles
Product Marketing Lead, Full Repositioning
Repositioning Messaging Architecture Web3
Full repositioning:
UBI experiment to Social Money infrastructure

PMM Challenge

Reposition an ideologically-framed protocol with an existing user base, into a credible infrastructure product for a completely different ICP, while the product itself was still being rebuilt.

Goal

Shift Circles from a UBI experiment understood only by ideological early adopters, to a Social Money infrastructure layer understood and trusted by builders, developers and ecosystem partners who could extend and distribute it.

ICP

Before repositioning: economic activists, UBI believers, cooperative communities. A real audience, but one with limited growth ceiling and weak product-market fit with where the protocol was heading technically.

After repositioning: protocol developers and ecosystem builders looking for composable social money primitives. Community operators and DAOs seeking trust-based economic infrastructure. The key insight was that the people most likely to drive adoption were builders who would deploy Circles inside other products, not end users who would use Circles directly.

Secondary ICP: mission-aligned partners and grant-making bodies who needed to understand Circles as infrastructure, not ideology, to justify funding or integration.

Positioning

Before: "A Universal Basic Income experiment on the blockchain."

After: "Social Money infrastructure, a protocol for trust-based economic networks."

The old frame was limiting in three ways. It anchored Circles to a political idea rather than a technical capability. It attracted believers rather than builders. And it made the product harder to explain to anyone who didn't already agree with the premise.

The new frame repositioned Circles as infrastructure: neutral, composable, and useful, which opened the product to a builder audience that could deploy it in ways the core team couldn't anticipate.

Messaging

The core messaging shift was from why Circles exists philosophically, to what Circles makes possible technically.

This required building a new messaging architecture from scratch: top-level positioning for external audiences, a technical narrative for developer audiences, and an internal alignment framework so that product, ecosystem and leadership teams were speaking consistently.

Rapid OODA-loop feedback cycles were built into the process: messaging was treated as a hypothesis to be tested, not a document to be approved.

The Key Decision

The temptation in a rebrand is to make the old audience feel included in the new narrative. I recommended against that. Trying to speak to both ICPs simultaneously would have produced messaging that resonated with neither. We committed to the builder ICP and built everything around them. That clarity is what made the new positioning work.

GTM Motion

  • Led full rebrand: visual identity, messaging framework, website architecture, and copy
  • Built shared positioning documentation used across product, ecosystem and leadership communication
  • Launched the Circles Connect newsletter to build a direct channel to the emerging builder audience
  • Established reporting structures to track adoption signals and marketing learning as the product evolved
  • Represented Circles externally including at the University of Oxford, using speaking engagements to test and refine the new narrative in live environments
  • Ran messaging iteration alongside product development, so positioning evolved with the product rather than lagging behind it

Outcome

The repositioned narrative is still in use. Active users reached 12,000+. The Circles Connect newsletter built an engaged community audience. The protocol gained credibility with ecosystem partners that the previous positioning had made inaccessible.

Narrative Repositioning ICP Definition Messaging Architecture Category Framing Internal Alignment Community Strategy Newsletter Strategy Stakeholder Communication
04a
Metri
Metri · Sole PMM, 0→1 Launch at Gnosis Studio
0→1 Launch Stablecoins B2C
0→1 launch: 750+ beta users
from a standing start at Dappcon

Launch a new B2C stablecoin spending product into a market where most potential users don't yet understand why they would want it.

Goal

Define Metri's initial market position, identify the ICP most likely to adopt first, and execute a launch that generated real user data, not just awareness.

ICP

Crypto-native users with existing stablecoin holdings who were already moving between wallets and DeFi products, but lacked a simple, consumer-grade way to spend in the real world. Early majority adjacent: willing to experiment, but expecting a product that worked without friction. Key insight: the barrier was not awareness of stablecoins. It was confidence that spending them would be as simple as spending fiat. The product needed to feel inevitable, not experimental.

Positioning

Metri as the simplest way to spend stablecoins in everyday life, not a crypto product that happens to let you pay, but a spending experience that happens to run on stablecoins. The positioning deliberately avoided technical language. In a market where most competing products led with infrastructure, Metri led with outcome.

Messaging

Core message: spend what you hold, without converting it first. Messaging was designed to be testable at beta stage, not finalised. Each element of the launch was treated as a hypothesis: who responds, on what channels, with what language. The Dappcon launch was specifically chosen as a live testing environment with a high-signal audience, not a mass awareness event.

The Key Decision

Launch at a conference rather than a digital-first launch. The reasoning: Dappcon audiences are high-intent early adopters, and in-person activation generates the kind of qualitative signal (conversations, objections, questions) that digital launches compress into metrics. It was a deliberate trade of reach for insight at beta stage.

GTM Motion

  • Defined initial positioning and value proposition from scratch with no existing playbook
  • Designed a phased rollout treating the launch as a learning environment, not a product debut
  • Led Metri beta launch at Dappcon 2024 through combined in-person activation and digital distribution
  • Built Dune Analytics dashboards to track wallet adoption, activation rates, and campaign performance in real time
  • Used post-launch data to refine ICP and messaging before broader rollout

Outcome

750+ beta users onboarded at and following the Dappcon launch. Early activation data informed ICP refinement and second-phase messaging.

0→1 Positioning Launch Strategy ICP Definition Hypothesis-led Messaging Data & Analytics GTM Sequencing Event-led Launch Execution
04b
uRamp
uRamp · Sole PMM, Feature GTM at Gnosis Studio
Feature GTM Fiat On-Ramp Regulatory
Feature GTM: fiat-to-stablecoin
rails for a $150M+ card network

Define and execute the GTM for a regulated fiat-to-stablecoin on-ramp feature, sitting inside a multi-party system, with compliance, payments infrastructure, and growth teams that had never been coordinated around a single market narrative.

Goal

Enable cardholders to move from fiat to stablecoin without leaving the product ecosystem, and take that capability to market in a way that made the regulatory complexity invisible to the end user.

ICP

Gnosis Pay cardholders who held stablecoins or wanted to, but were hitting friction when converting from fiat. Also: payments and compliance partners evaluating whether to integrate Gnosis Pay rails, who needed a credible GTM story, not just a technical specification.

Positioning

uRamp as the missing link in the Gnosis Pay stack: the piece that made a regulated, real-world spending card into a complete stablecoin financial product. For external partners: a compliant, ready-to-integrate on-ramp with distribution through an established card network. For end users: a seamless way to fund your Gnosis Pay card without leaving the app.

Messaging

The messaging challenge was that different stakeholders needed to hear completely different things about the same product feature. Compliance partners needed regulatory assurance. Product teams needed integration clarity. End users needed simplicity. Building a messaging architecture that served all three without contradiction was the core PMM work, and required holding the complexity internally while presenting simplicity externally.

The Key Decision

In multi-party product launches, the biggest failure mode is each team communicating independently with their own stakeholders. I pushed for a single integrated narrative before anything went external, which required getting compliance, product and growth into the same room around the same document before launch. That alignment work is invisible in the outcome but it's what made a clean launch possible.

GTM Motion

  • Delivered full GTM strategy for uRamp including positioning, messaging, and launch sequencing
  • Coordinated payments, compliance, partnerships, and growth teams across multiple organisations around a shared launch narrative
  • Built partner-facing materials that translated technical integration requirements into business-case language
  • Designed user-facing messaging that made regulatory process feel like product quality, not bureaucratic friction

Outcome

uRamp launched as part of the Gnosis Pay product ecosystem, which has processed $150M+ in transaction volume. New fiat-to-stablecoin distribution pathways opened for regulated European card users.

Feature GTM Multi-stakeholder Messaging Regulatory Translation Cross-functional Coordination Partner Enablement Positioning Under Complexity

Building

Senta

A live PMM environment

Alongside my PMM practice I'm building Senta, an AI-powered decision room for first-time founders navigating capital decisions before they give away equity.

The idea came from time spent in VC, watching the same problem repeat: founders signing term sheets without fully understanding what they were agreeing to, giving away more than they expected, and losing control of companies they built. I wanted to fix the information asymmetry before it happens.

I built the first version during a 60-day public challenge, using AI as a technical co-pilot throughout. After shipping it I redesigned the product entirely, moving from a recommendation engine to a decision room built around the three questions founders actually struggle with: whether they have real traction, whether they should be raising at all, and what they're agreeing to when a term sheet arrives.

Building Senta in public is where I apply my PMM thinking in a live environment. Every positioning decision, ICP refinement, and messaging iteration is documented. It also sits at the intersection of two things I care about: making complex decisions more accessible, and understanding how AI changes the way people navigate high-stakes choices. The full build log lives on my Substack.

Early access is open now.

Join the waitlist Follow the build on Substack →

How I think
out loud

Alongside my PMM practice I write, podcast, and build communities exploring frontier capital, human skills in an AI era, and the intersection of technology and adoption.

Newsletter · Substack
Kora Notes
Field notes on frontier capital, exploring how complex financial and technological systems are adopted, understood, and shaped by the people building them.
Read on Substack
Podcast · Co-host
Glowing in Tech
A podcast exploring the intersection of technology, careers, and human potential, co-hosted and produced as a long-running community voice in the tech space.
Visit site
Podcast · Spotify
Get To Gnosis
Conversations with the builders, researchers, and operators shaping decentralised infrastructure. Reaching listeners in 35+ countries, making Web3 accessible without dumbing it down.
Listen on Spotify
Shantelle Awomoyi speaking at the University of Oxford

How I
think about
the work

01
Start with customer reality
Win/loss calls before positioning decks. Always.
02
Translate complexity into shared understanding
The bottleneck is almost never the product.
03
Build systems, not one-off campaigns
Repeatable frameworks outlast individual launches.
04
Operate upstream, shape strategy not just execution
PMM's most valuable seat is at the product table.

I see product marketing as the discipline responsible for connecting product development with market reality, not as a downstream execution function, but as a strategic one.

My work typically centres on identifying where adoption slows, whether through unclear positioning, fragmented communication or organisational misalignment, and helping teams establish clarity, alignment and momentum.

I'm drawn to environments where product marketing contributes upstream to strategic decisions. The most interesting problems sit at the boundary between what a product can do and what the market is ready to understand.

Across fintech and decentralised infrastructure, the pattern has been consistent: technical quality is rarely the bottleneck. Understanding is. That is the gap I work in.

My engineering background means I can sit with technical teams without losing the plot, translate what I learn into commercial narratives, and hold the complexity honestly while still making it accessible.

Let's talk.

I'm currently open to PMM roles at companies building complex, technically sophisticated products. If you're a hiring manager, founder, or collaborator, I'd be glad to connect.

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