Conversation with Mohammed Emara – MasterMinds

Today on MasterMinds, we meet an operations leader who has spent more than two decades turning business strategy into measurable success.

Mohammed Emara, DBA, MPhil, MBA — and currently Operations Manager at Talabat — has built a career that defines what operational excellence looks like across retail, e-commerce, and Q-commerce in the MENA region.

With over 22 years of experience leading large-scale operations across the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, Mohammed has mastered the art of balancing performance, innovation, and scalability. At Talabat, the region’s leading delivery platform, he oversees dark store operations that drive consistency, efficiency, and growth — ensuring every process contributes to a seamless customer experience.

His expertise spans P&L management, market expansion, data-driven leadership, and cross-functional collaboration, with a proven ability to transform operational frameworks into strategic assets. Beyond business, Mohammed embodies a mindset of continuous learning — currently pursuing a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) focused on Motivation and Leadership, alongside holding advanced degrees and certifications in Strategic Thinking and Management.

From retail floors to boardroom strategy, Mohammed’s journey is a testament to the power of discipline, innovation, and leadership — proving that true operational success begins with people, and thrives through purpose.

I lead dark store operations for Talabat UAE with intensive experience across GCC markets, build scalable last-mile fulfilment systems, and research transformational leadership and employee motivation as part of my DBA, all to deliver faster, more reliable e-commerce experiences while developing teams that sustain rapid growth.

Leading my first cross-functional transformation at Talabat (process redesign + tech rollout) taught me the balance between stakeholder alignment and decisive execution: secure buy-in, simplify processes, then relentlessly measure outcomes. That project sharpened my change-management and prioritization skills.

When I started, retail was inventory-centric and brick-first; commerce moved online slowly. Today it’s customer-centric, data-driven, and speed-obsessed: real-time inventory, micro-fulfilment (dark stores), dynamic pricing, and instant delivery define success. The pace of tech adoption, mobile payments, logistics platforms, and last-mile innovation is the biggest shift.

We used order-level telemetry to identify a peak-time picking bottleneck. By redesigning pick routes and batching orders by zone, throughput increased materially and late deliveries dropped showing how a targeted operational change, driven by data, delivers measurable performance improvement.

Regulation & compliance: Use local legal partners and market checklists. Supply & vendor variability: Local sourcing playbooks and regional supplier scorecards. Labor policies & culture: Hire empowered local managers and standardize SOPs with cultural adaptations. Infrastructure differences: Design modular operations that scale up or down by market. Centralized KPIs + decentralized execution is my core approach.

Rise of q-commerce and micro-fulfilment, consolidation of marketplaces, stronger omnichannel play, embedded finance/instant payments, and customer expectations moving toward sub-hour delivery and hyper-personalization. However the future goes forward reliable fast service.

Grow in waves: pilot, iterate, then scale. Protect customer-facing SLAs while expanding by using capacity buffers, phased launches, automated quality checks, and strict acceptance criteria for KPIs before market rollouts.

Last-mile density in secondary cities, standardized logistics/regulatory frameworks for cross-border trade, advanced talent pipelines for operations/analytics, and returns/refund infrastructure to build consumer trust at scale.

AI improves demand forecasting, dynamic routing, personalized recommendations, and anomaly detection; automation (in warehouses and processes) reduces manual error and cycle time. Together they free people for judgment tasks and improve both CX and unit economics.

Focus on influence over authority: build relationships, document processes early, and treat mistakes as data for improvement rather than occasions for blame. Listen, do new mistakes and elevate.

Cultural empathy, clarity of purpose, consistency, technical curiosity, and coaching mindset. A leader must be decisive but listen first, set transparent metrics, and invest time in local leaders.

A practical combination: I’m inspired by leaders who combine rigor and empathy; book like The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results: Achieve Your Goals With One Of The World'S Bestselling Success Books influenced my approach, systematic experimentation with elite operational discipline.

Master the fundamentals inventory, fulfilment, and customer service then add analytics. Start in operations to learn the system end-to-end. Be curious about technology but prioritize processes that scale reliably.

Go to the Gemba (Visit, identify and improve), measure the right things (process cycle time, error rate, throughput), standardize relentlessly, and invest in people, hire for coachability and give them clear, simple metrics.

Dark stores are retail fulfilment hubs optimized exclusively for online orders, think mini-warehouses arranged like a store to speed picking and packing. They shorten delivery time, increase SKU availability, and are crucial for meeting instant/near-instant delivery expectations.

Standardize SOPs, train pickers with easy visual aids, implement WMS and barcode/RFID verification, run real-time QC checkpoints, use root-cause tracking for exceptions, and align incentives to accuracy (not just speed). Small audits and continuous coaching close the last mile of errors.

I use academic frameworks to design pilot interventions, test hypotheses in operations, and measure outcomes rigorously, turning research into controlled experiments that inform scalable practices.