Story
I learned design by making things.
From a small town in Pakistan to products used by more than 70 million people.
It started in Matiari
I grew up in a small town in Pakistan where product design was not an obvious career. I studied Computer Science and started closer to programming, but I was always more interested in why something should work a certain way and how it could make a difficult task feel simple. With no design community around me, I learned by making things, sharing them, getting them wrong, and trying again.
Building became my education
I created Design Lobby to help design teams organise their assets. It did not become the company I imagined, but it taught me how closely product, design, engineering, and business depend on one another. Later I designed and built Layover, a place for designers to share work and find collaborators. It grew to hundreds of designers without paid marketing and gave me the confidence to keep turning ideas into working products.
Then the canvas got bigger
At WebHR, I learned to think in systems across web, mobile, and wearables. AtCareem, I worked on subscriptions and food for a platform serving 48 million people across 13 countries. At SadaPay, I designed core banking features, including biometric verification that helped clear a compliance bottleneck blocking growth. The work was no longer only about making a screen clearer. It was about making complex systems hold together.
Scale made trust part of the design
At Majid Al Futtaim, I led product design for SHARE Rewards through hypergrowth, as the business reached $38.5M in revenue and 1.4 billion points redeemed. At Revolut in Madrid, I designed 16 financial crime processes across fraud, scams, AML, sanctions, and screening. Those roles changed how I think about product design: a simple experience matters most when the system behind it is complicated and the consequences are real.
Today, I design and build
I’m now at Mal, helping build an AI-first Islamic bank and leading design for core banking. My work increasingly continues beyond Figma: I prototype in code, build internal tools, and work directly with engineers to test ideas as working software. I am a product designer by title and a design engineer by habit. The thread through every chapter is still the same: curiosity, care for the details, and learning by making things.