Agile Product Manager
2021 - PRESENTUnwynd- Co-created the first pitch for an activities-based social network that raised the initial $100,000 angel funding.
- Conducted user research to explore customer pain areas.
- Created the backlog, hired the team, and built the first MVP.
- Crafted the company persona and drafted the first marketing copy.
- Established a high-performance team culture with an emphasis on accountability and ownership.
Product Manager | Business Analyst
2021 - PRESENTASU Preparatory Academy- Built productive working relationships with key stakeholder groups.
- Documented the current state of learning management system (LMS) and student information system (SIS) operations from a people, process, and technical perspective.
- Defined and documented requirements for the proposed system.
- Recommended optimal solutions to business requirements that best leverage the current products.
- Compared existing LMS and SIS functionality with other leading LMS and SIS systems.
Technical Writer
2022 - 2022Boston Consulting Group- Generated both user-facing and dev-facing documentation.
- Captured the knowledge in meeting recordings and calls and codified them into structured documentation.
- Extracted the Q&A and known issues lists from the resolved issues logged in Service Now and incorporated this into the knowledge base.
Product Management Consultant
2021 - 2021Orange Basket LTD- Performed tech research and comparison to select the optimum tech platform to build a grocery shopping eCommerce business for CPG items in North Africa.
- Performed time and cost estimation and created a product roadmap.
- Led the off-site development team in executing the development roadmap.
Project Management Consultant
2021 - 2021A Fortune 100 Tools Manufacturing Business- Worked with senior executives to build a project roadmap.
- Coordinated efforts across multiple teams to support the launch of new eCommerce properties: Business owners, content, marketing, development, and more.
- Performed a status information collection and rollups to present an accurate picture of the project regarding progress and P&L.
Chief Executive Officer
2019 - 2020Vintage Technologies- Secured a contract with a leading African edtech platform to produce thousands of educational videos.
- Set up a production pipeline to produce dozens of videos every day.
- Recruited a team of 30+ top industry professionals to deliver high-quality video content ten times faster than traditional production studios.
Head of Product
2019 - 2020Technology Rivers- Spearheaded a social network with an emphasis on learning and onboarding as the product owner of an enterprise. Developed for iOS, Android, web, and desktop.
- Created a communications platform that involved audio/video calls, live streaming (including recording and transcriptions), chats/news feed functionalities, and a homebrewed learning management system (LMS).
- Led the development of low-, mid-, and high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for the same.
- Oversaw a HIPAA-compliant remote patient monitoring IoT solution.
Consultant for New Product Verticals
2019 - 2019Bykea- Crafted new lines of business—in line with food and CPG grocery shopping—for a successful eCommerce shopping and delivery business with over two million users.
- Performed extensive competitive research, ranging from Western to Chinese apps, to craft a unique value proposition for Bykea, congruent with the unique socio-ethnic nuances of the local consumers.
- Led a team of experts to create low, mid, and high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for the proposed food and grocery shopping workflows.
- Recruited a team of highly accomplished specialists in UX design, product psychology, and UI design.
Startup Mentor | Coach
2018 - 2019National Incubation Center- Coached a home tuition marketplace, a micro-tutoring platform, an eCommerce platform with thousands of daily customers, a footwear eCommerce brand valued at $1+ million, and an electromechanical VR motion platform that won the National Startup Cup.
- Collaborated with founders to develop go-to-market plans and growth strategies resulting in up to 100% month-over-month growth.
- Helped founders raise capital, such as equity or grants, by crafting a masterful story for their business and creating a concise pitch deck and the accompanying financial model.
- Assisted the founders in delivering a compelling pitch by leveraging the right tone, timbre, posture, positioning, and eye contact.
- Aided startups in formulating their product development and technology roadmap, including documenting the functional specifications to a level of granularity that enabled accurate time and cost estimations.
- Provided founders with counseling to maintain morale and team cohesion and cope with the immense pressure that comes with startup life.
Consultant for Growth and Scaling
2018 - 2018IconBunny- Designed and executed a Kickstarter campaign for a digital design eCommerce store built using Magento, which raised $24,000.
- Performed exhaustive research on successful and failed crowdfunding campaigns to identify best practices and pitfalls to avoid.
- Surveyed hundreds of digital content creators to identify their needs, wants, pains, and workflows to handcraft a unique value proposition in the crowdfunding campaign.
- Leveraged the insights obtained by the user research to design optimal and easy-to-understand rewards for backers.
- Created a project plan for the Kickstarter campaign, including the financial plan, marketing partnerships, and content creation plan—such as the video, graphic, and text elements that make up the campaign design—and executed it.
- Developed the post-campaign communications plan for timely relay of project milestones and rewards delivery with the backers.
CEO
2013 - 2018Touch'd- Grew Touch'd, a personal relationship manager, from just an idea germinating in my mind to the Google Play Store by raising over $100,000 in angel money, building a rock star team, and creating a world-class product.
- Secured a partnership with Google to promote Touch'd on various Google properties.
- Oversaw the creative side, branding, UI, UX, gamification, product roadmap, recruiting, sprint planning, and the relationships between design, engineering, and marketing.
- Pitched the product to local and international pitch competitions and garnered international press coverage.
- Created a world-class team culture with a high development velocity while offering unlimited leaves, telecommuting, flexible timings, and free snacks while maintaining the right degree of accountability for the team and mission.
- Gained recognition out of thousands after being selected as one of the top 50 startups globally to join the FounderX investor roadshow in Silicon Valley.
Director
2016 - 2017The Founder Institute- Empowered young founders coming into the program with vague ideas and knowing little about entrepreneurship—usually with a full-time job—into becoming confident, highly focused leaders geared for success.
- Assisted the founders in distilling a germ of an idea into a robust business model, complete with a concise, one-page business plan and a crisp, clear, and sellable elevator pitch.
- Drilled the founders into upping their game by making them data-driven and accountable and forcing them to either level up or quit.
- Helped founders deliver a compelling pitch by leveraging the right tone, timbre, posture, positioning, and eye contact.
- Provided founders with counseling to cope with the immense pressure that comes with startup life.
Product Manager
2006 - 2013LMKR- Created two successful interactive 3D visualization products, an experiential learning simulation for oil and gas exploration used by Petronas University to train graduate students, and a financial training simulator to train Halliburton executives.
- Acted as the product champion by traveling worldwide (from Houston, Texas to Saudi Arabia), acting as the business developer, sales lead, and pricing specialist.
- Recruited world-class teams for the two products, including a Ph.D. in real-time rendering and a Fulbright scholar from Carnegie Mellon.
- Created a highly cohesive team culture with an off-the-charts development velocity that led us to develop the most advanced oil exploration simulator in the world, years ahead of our closest competitor.
- Oversaw the technical decision-making, creative side, branding, UI, UX, gamification, product roadmap, recruitment, sprint planning, and the relationships between design, engineering, and marketing.
- Aided the pioneering team working on the Gverse (https://www.lmkr.com/gverse) 3D visualization platform.
Head of Department
2002 - 2006NESCOM (A National Public Sector Organization)- Defined and documented the requirements for a large-scale information system for the Defense Department, a mission-critical C4I2SR system involving spatial RDBMS for defense assets, GIS, and real-time messaging on strat communications channels.
- Led the technology comparative analysis effort for the selection of an enterprise content management system (ECMS), including the likes of IBM FileNet, Laserfiche, and Documentum.
- Supervised the execution of three tightly coupled sub-projects within the program, from requirements gathering, analysis, development, deployment to maintenance.
- Acted as the primary liaison between the development team and stakeholders from the strategic defense forces.
- Defined software quality assurance policies for the organization and tailored the IEEE/EIA 12207 standard and the Rational Unified Process to match the requirements of the organization and the project.
Senior Software Engineer
2000 - 2002NetSol- Developed the front-end UI based on user requirements for NFS, NetSol's (NASDAQ: NTWK) flagship finance and lease management product, used by customers in three continents.
- Led the effort to translate user requirements into software design for the Contract Management System (CMS), one of the core modules of the financial suite of applications.