Raul Martinez, former CGO at Angaza and CEO at Wabeh, on the CGO as the strategic architect of growth

Growth is often less about generating new ideas and more about aligning the organization behind a small set of choices. Raul Martinez, recent Chief Growth Officer (CGO) of Angaza and CEO of Wabeh, draws on his experience leading growth in emerging markets, where volatility is the baseline, to explain how the CGO role creates leverage by translating ambition into an enterprise-wide growth system that clarifies priorities. He also shares what CEOs and boards need to decide up front so the CGO mandate is clear, and why volatility can create opportunities, not just risk.

Raul Martinez spent the last five years as Chief Growth Officer at Angaza, where he led corporate development, strategic partnerships, and inorganic growth initiatives, and drove growth across more than 25 markets. Angaza supports distributors across emerging markets, working with 200+ partners in 50 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He was also CEO of Wabeh, an early-stage consumer lending fintech within the Angaza group of businesses focused on expanding access to credit for life-changing products.

You spent the last five years as Chief Growth Officer at Angaza, overseeing sustained growth while strengthening the business model. Based on that experience, what would you tell a CEO or board member about where a CGO most materially moves the needle on growth, compared with an approach where growth is shared across functions?

As I see it, the CGO is most effective when it acts as what I would call a strategic architect of growth. It works as a close partner to the CEO and the board to translate an ambition of growth into a coherent growth system.

One of the key challenges when growth is distributed across functions, whether sales, marketing, or product, is that each team is trying to optimize its own metrics. Their understanding of growth can be very specific to their context. Many of these initiatives individually make sense, but collectively can create fragmentation, misallocation of resources, and sometimes even competing priorities between two different areas. The CGO’s role becomes bringing a more holistic, enterprise-level view of growth, grounded in three elements: the competitive landscape, the macro environment, and the company’s strategic assets, and how to maximize them. From that vantage point, the CGO can evaluate opportunities across the organization and ensure growth investments are prioritized where they create the most sustainable value for shareholders.

When I joined Angaza as Chief Growth Officer, the company and the founders had already built an amazing fintech SaaS platform that enabled access to life-changing products for underserved customers in emerging markets. But the business was at an inflection point. They had already raised a Series B, but the company was still in a cash burn mode and trying to refine its growth strategy. My role was to work closely with the CEO and the executive team and conduct a comprehensive review of customer segments, product roadmap, growth investments, and market opportunities. The CGO is there to facilitate a fact-based strategic dialogue across the C-suite, and that led to some critical decisions.

For instance, we deprioritized growth initiatives that were not delivering strong returns on the SaaS side. We refocused the SaaS business toward more enterprise and mid-market customers. We also identified a major market opportunity in embedded finance, which led to the creation of Wabeh. That strategic pivot helped bring the SaaS business to profitability and to be cash generative, while also helping us fund the incubation of Wabeh, a B2B2C embedded finance venture focused on data-driven underwriting.

Overall, my experience as CGO is that the greatest impact comes when growth is managed as a coherent system, rather than a collection of initiatives. That, to me, is the definition that makes the most sense. It is a true partner role to the CEO and the board across areas, not a role confined to one function.

You were also CEO of Wabeh, Angaza’s incubated POS/BNPL fintech venture, and charged with building it into a standalone business ready to scale. With the unique perspective of having served as both a venture CEO and a Chief Growth Officer, what should CEOs, boards, and prospective CGOs understand is the single most important thing to get right from day one so the CGO mandate has real leverage?

The single most important thing from day one is clarity on the company’s ultimate strategic objective and the capital allocation philosophy. If not, growth can mean a lot of different things depending on the priorities. Is the goal a liquidity event or an exit? Is the company optimizing for profitability? Or is it pursuing aggressive expansion into new markets, new products, or acquisitions? Without alignment, that becomes tricky for a CGO, and the mandate becomes ambiguous.

This is very important in the capital environment we are in. Growth leaders must operate with very clear boundaries. Capital is rarely unlimited, especially these days. The role of the CGO is to ensure that growth bets are strategically aligned and financially disciplined based on the envelope that we have.

A practical approach I have found useful is pairing the business case for big growth initiatives with a milestone-based investment framework. Instead of committing a large amount and saying, “We’re going to pursue this pie-in-the-sky, big growth initiative,” you unlock capital based on a series of milestones. We validate this hypothesis. The result is a little different than expected, but we found A, B, and C. Then you decide whether to scale, iterate, or stop. It allowed us to be financially conservative while still pursuing ambitious growth opportunities.

That is what helped us incubate Wabeh. We tested the concept through a pilot, validated the underwriting model, and progressively moved forward as we were proving the unit economics and the hypotheses behind it.

You’ve described operating in a VUCA environment, where volatility and uncertainty are constant. What has leading growth in that context taught you about how you set priorities and make tradeoffs when volatility is the baseline, and what should leaders in more “mature” markets take from that now?

More and more, especially these days, there is volatility and uncertainty across the globe. Operators in emerging markets have been used to it for much longer, and we have developed that muscle. Volatility and uncertainty are not occasional disruptions in emerging markets. They are pretty much a baseline.

There are two principles that are increasingly relevant for companies and CGOs everywhere. First, strategy and major goals should be stable, but execution should remain very flexible and adapt to volatility and uncertainty. Annual operating plans are governance tools. They should focus on a small number of strategic priorities, three to five big priorities, but the specific initiatives need to remain adaptable as conditions evolve. A framework we have used is OKRs, where you have quarterly OKRs at the company level with frequent check-ins. That allows the organization to adjust quickly while maintaining strategic alignment.

Second, volatility should not automatically lead to retrenchment. When uncertainty increases, a lot of companies shift to defensive mode. Cost cutting, slowing investment, “let’s not do this.” Discipline is important, but what we see in emerging markets is that volatility also creates a disproportionate set of growth opportunities.

At Angaza, we called it “divest to invest.” We systematically reviewed areas where growth capital was intensive but margins were not great. We reallocated resources to higher-return opportunities or new emerging growth bets. By doing that, we brought SaaS to profitability and freed up capital to incubate a new growth business without raising a penny of capital. The SaaS business continued to grow. It was profitable, but we were also able to invest in a new business.

The lesson is that uncertainty is not simply a trigger for cost cutting. It should trigger a strategic refocusing to understand which are the best growth opportunities in the current context.

Conversely, which assumptions from mature-market go-to-market models tend not to hold in emerging markets, and what do you substitute in their place when you’re designing a growth motion that will scale?

There are clear differences. One major difference from a market perspective is that in emerging markets the challenge is often market creation rather than market share capture. In mature markets, growth often comes from taking share from competitors or legacy incumbents. You are trying to migrate someone to a different platform or a different way of doing things, but they were already doing that. In emerging markets, the opportunity often comes from expanding the addressable market itself by enabling an entirely new customer segment to access products and services they were not using, such as financial services, credit, or clean energy.

That has implications across the growth engine itself. Customer segments are younger. They are rapidly growing. They are underserved by traditional institutions, or they have not had the product. Growth strategies are much more on education, building trust, and product adoption, not just pure acquisition.

This also impacts the channels you use. Digital channels are increasingly important, but offline distribution and hybrid models are critical, especially reaching different segments of the population and SMEs on the B2B side. Some segments are not as technologically savvy. You need education, and you need to pair what you are trying to do as a business with the level of digital literacy and financial literacy.

Another difference is the availability of market data or public data. I can give you the example of consumer credit underwriting. In emerging markets, it often requires companies to build their own data sources and decision frameworks. When we were building Wabeh, we relied heavily on transactional data from bank accounts or mobile money statements because credit bureau coverage was very limited. That is something you take for granted in a more mature market.

A final difference is that infrastructure gaps create opportunities to leapfrog legacy systems that were not there in the first place. Payments and telecommunications are good examples. Mobile became first, and in payments several emerging markets are building modern payment infrastructure from the ground up, rather than migrating off legacy systems.

If you were advising a CEO and board operating in emerging markets on how to shape the CGO role over the next three to five years, what non-negotiables would you insist on in capabilities, operating model, and governance so growth is managed as a coherent system rather than a set of initiatives? And what mental models about growth ownership and accountability should they leave behind?

The role of the CGO is still evolving, and in emerging markets many organizations still assume growth will happen naturally because of underlying market expansion. But sustained growth comes from deliberate coordination, facilitated by a CGO. If a company does not have a CGO, it should seriously consider one, especially if it is entering a new phase of scale and grappling with inflection points.

For the next three to five years, the first principle is clear strategic alignment. The company must define the overarching corporate objectives and the role that growth plays in achieving those objectives. That includes agreeing on boundaries of growth: strategic focus, financial boundaries, and investment boundaries.

Second is the CGO having a dual capability of strategic thinking and operational depth. That means understanding how the business works, how the markets work, competitive positioning, and long-term opportunities, even beyond the core business, and matching those together. You need a strong base of operational knowledge so that when you talk to the organization you are not perceived as a strategist or a management consultant who comes and tells people what to do. You are vested in the growth of the business, and you have probably done it at some point.

Third is the governance model. The CGO is what I call the growth catalyst, rather than the sole owner of growth. Growth should remain a shared responsibility across the executive team. The CGO ensures initiatives are evaluated holistically and align with company priorities. That comes from having OKR processes that make sense and review processes to understand how investment decisions are made.

Finally, organizations need to evolve mental models around planning and resource allocation. A bottom-up approach, where each function proposes initiatives and advocates for resources, often leads to fragmented priorities and inefficient investment. A more effective approach is strategic alignment first on company-wide objectives, typically agreed within the executive team and facilitated by the CGO. That is followed by company-wide OKRs that are driven top-down. Then the “how” becomes bottom-up. Teams focus on how they contribute to the OKRs. In my experience, the OKR framework helps because every team needs to be contributing to an OKR, and if what they are proposing does not fit, they should rethink what they are trying to do.

When done well, it transforms growth from disconnected projects into an integrated system. The role of the CGO is not to be the sole owner of growth, but to ensure growth is managed through a coherent system rather than a collection of initiatives.