Mujtaba Ayub

Selected work, told as case studies.

Enabling decision support and operational improvement across organizations.

Category Growth, Brand Strategy

Where can a tired category grow next?

Repositioning your brands into whitespaces

Triangulating how your brands are currently segmented in the market and how they are perceived by target groups|Working out new moves to reposition by identifying opportunities in communications, price point, packaging, and profitability

Perceptual map: a gum and candy portfolio migrating from crowded breath-refreshment into oral health, fun, and mood-enhancement whitespace. Two-axis positioning map with arrows carrying brands outward from a commoditized functional space into three differentiated territories. emotional benefit functional benefit premium / adult everyday / youth breath refreshment crowded · undifferentiated oral health fun mood lift

A Gum and Candy portfolio crowded into commoditized breath refreshment, undifferentiated, with little room to grow on a functional benefit everyone else also claimed.

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Purpose-built AI tools, Sentiment Analysis

Can you quantify what users feel about your games?

Tracking Player Sentiment Across Local APAC Languages

Reading thousands of posts in Traditional Chinese, Tagalog, and other regional APAC languages with Natural Language Processing|Weekly sentiment/mood signals for publishing strategy

Regional-language forum posts converted into a tracked sentiment and mood signal over time. On the left, a stylised terminal-style bulletin-board forum of multilingual posts. On the right, those posts resolve into a sentiment and mood spectrum tracked week over week. regional forums · BBS > 推 板上有人玩新角色嗎 > sobrang lakas naman nito > patch ニ​ュ​ー​フ​が強すぎ > nerf juga dong ini > 這次活動還不錯啦 > matchmaking ramai bug > skin 太貴了吧 > ang ganda ng bagong map > esports 賽程什麼時候 > lemot banget servernya multilingual NLP weekly sentiment / mood signal negative positive patch dip themes: patch · skins · esports · matchmaking wk 1 wk n

Community mood over our games was dispersed over niche local forums and sites which were not tracked by enterprise sentiment trackers, and spread across many languages over 8 APAC territories (Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, INSA, Australia and New…

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Market Entry, Consumer Behaviour

Can a homegrown, hyper-local startup travel across borders?

Porting a Celebrated Local Startup Abroad - Expansion into MENA

Assessing macroeconomic and cultural fit for a startup porting from abroad|Deciding on what Operating Model & Revenue Streams to Deploy

MENA market assessment: markets plotted by digital readiness and used-car market size, bubble area showing opportunity scale and colour showing used versus new orientation. A bubble chart positioning MENA automotive markets. The horizontal axis is digital readiness, the vertical axis is used-car market size, bubble area reflects market value, and colour distinguishes used-led from new-led markets. UAE sits far to the upper right as the clear lead opportunity. digital readiness → used-car market size → lower higher used-led market new-led UAE $20B used KSA $4.6B Kuwait Oman Bahrain Qatar Egypt bubble size = used-car market value · multi-market opportunity scan

A profitable classifieds, marketplace, and services startup, one of the few PnL-positive VC-funded firms in its market, was looking for its next growth vector beyond home turf.

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Data Strategy, Executive Reporting

What do change-makers need to see, in real time?

Building Data Pipelines that Lead to Transformational Insights

Streamlining data management, building decision-grade dashboards, transforming operations across functions

Data flowing from databases and data lakes, transformed through SQL into a Tableau dashboard of charts. Left to right: source databases and a data lake feed a SQL transformation layer that shapes tables, which then populate a Tableau-style dashboard containing a line chart, bar chart, donut, and map. sources databases data lake SQL transform SQL SELECT ... JOIN tables GROUP BY AGG, CAST tables Tableau Performance Dashboard A B C

Leadership, brand, sales, finance, and ops teams each needed a real-time, coherent view, but the data was fragmented and the metrics weren't agreed.

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Document Intelligence, Semantic Search

What do fifteen years of journal entries say?

Conversing with 15 Years of Journal Entries

Using natural language processing to tag and semantically analyse unstructured content. Making it queryable through LLM models.

Journal archive pipeline: fifteen years of raw entries are tagged, embedded, and made searchable and queryable through an AI assistant. Three stages left to right — a stack of dated raw entries, a tagging and embedding step, and a query interface returning a cited answer. raw corpus 2011-03-14 2017-08-02 2024-11-19 3,500+ entries tag · embed career travel family health + semantic vectors ask anything… When did I first write about moving abroad? First mention: 2013 — cites 3 source entries tagged · searchable · queryable

Fifteen years of writing, drafts, entries, and notes, locked in formats that can't be asked anything. The same problem every organization has with its customer feedback, meeting notes, and research archives.

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Market Entry, Strategy

Should we enter this market?

New Game Segment: Using Human + Signals Intelligence in Tandem to Evaluate Market Entry

Integrating research approaches for a fuller picture of reality|Combining Human & Signals Intelligence

Trading-card-games segment entry analysis combining signals intelligence with human intelligence. On the left, a fanned set of trading cards over a market-sizing bar build. On the right, two intelligence streams, signals and human, converge into a single go or no-go decision. TCG segment market sizing Signals Intelligence sizing · scenarios · models Human Intelligence manager interviews no-go at this time defensible decision

A category-entry question with real capital behind it, and no structured basis to say yes or no beyond enthusiasm.

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Field Strategy, Market Sizing

Is your sales force deployment strategically justifiable?

Strategically Reallocating 950 Sales Reps Across The Country

Re-architecting field-force geographic allocation around strategic priorities, demand, and market potential

A field force allocated across a grid of geographic territory cells, weighted by potential. A stylised map grid where each cell represents a territory, shaded by market potential, with rep markers distributed across the cells and a legend. Territory potential low medium high rep allocation proposed reassignment province → city → cell demand · share · priorities

A 950-strong medical rep field force allocated on legacy logic that no longer matched where the strategic value was.

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Purpose-Built AI & Decision Tools

What would a savvy financial analyst flag for the GM this week?

The Monday Morning Brief - Brought to you by Your AI Agents

Agentic market intelligence that triages signal from noise|An auto-updating executive brief with anomaly investigation

AI agents detecting an anomaly, investigating it, and assembling an executive brief. On the left, data streams feed a set of agent nodes that detect and investigate an anomaly. On the right, the agents assemble a finished one-page executive brief. market data anomaly detected detect agent investigate agent draft agent Monday Brief decision-ready · every Monday

Most market monitors aggregate news. Very few know what a GM actually cares about: what is material, what is noise, and what deserves a second look.

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Operations, Demand Modelling

Can a more relevant menu board lead to faster service?

Reducing Drive-Thru Service Times

Demand-driven dynamic menu rotation to reduce drive-thru service times

A dynamic drive-thru menu board adapting to demand, shortening the queue and service time. On the left, a digital menu board whose items change by time and demand. On the right, a queue of cars and a falling service-time trend. DYNAMIC MENU rotates by time · demand · promo shorter queue service time trending down

Drive-thru times dragged because the menu shown didn't match what people actually ordered at a given moment.

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