The CTO vs Status Quo series studies how tech leaders challenge the current state of affairs at their company to push it toward a new height … or to save it from doom.

“It’s a game of building the right things at the right time.”

A quick glance at Muhammed Zaulifqar’s LinkedIn profile reveals his deep interest in Saudi Arabia’s product management landscape.

Muhammed acknowledges the rapid pace of growth the KSA software industry is experiencing but warns of challenges that are impeding its potential. You could be part of the solution if you take into consideration his product management advice.

In this interview, Muhammed:

• talks about recent developments in KSA and why the Saudi software industry is now more competitive than ever,
• reveals both strengths and weaknesses of the local talent pool of product managers and developers,
• explains why having locals on board is still essential to succeeding in KSA and how  Saudi companies can combine local and foreign talent for the best effect.

About Muhammed

Say as-salamu alaykum to Muhammed

Prem Markowski: As-salamu alaykum, Muhammed. It seems that 2024 has been a very important year in Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation. For example, the National Data Bank has centralized hundreds of data services, fostering better collaboration between organizations.

What are your thoughts on this process guided by Vision 2030 so far?

Muhammed Zaulifqar: Thank you for having me.

Vision 2030 is a really exciting initiative. I think that it made the whole world jealous a little. All countries would love a government that invests as heavily in its people as KSA’s.

This is especially true for the world of tech and products. Saudi Arabia is becoming a version of Silicon Valley, and investments are being made in data centers across the country. Meanwhile, more infrastructure is being laid.

There’s also a lot of investment in human talent and experts that can help grow and nurture the next generation of Saudi leaders.

We’ve seen really positive developments in those areas in 2024.

It may be just the beginning. As someone who has so much experience working with both big companies and startups, what do you think will be the main focus of the Saudi IT world going forward?

From a product perspective, it’s getting interesting now because we are in a transition phase.

Prior to Vision 2030, many company applications were considered sufficient as long as they had a product-market fit. It was all about launching a product that fulfills a need. You didn’t need a great product team and user experience. The Saudi market wasn’t really as open to the world at that point as it is now. There wasn’t much competition.

Now, you have to develop high-quality products and user experiences, conduct user discovery and research, and solve real user problems. The bar is being raised.

Food delivery apps like Hunger Station and Keeta have improved their quality. We haven’t seen market-leading applications of this caliber in Saudi Arabia for a while. The same goes for buy-now-pay-later apps like Tabby or Tamara, which have reached a strong maturity level.

In addition to all the investments, this progress in KSA is driven by the highly competitive nature of the current Saudi market. We’re trying to outdo each other, and I believe that this kind of competition is very healthy.

Product management – challenges

Having great engineers is crucial, but you also need excellent product management to build effectively in the long term.

I know that there are some really talented Saudi product managers, but would it be right to say that there aren’t enough of them for everyone? 

Most product managers will tell you this – it takes a lot of time to understand product management.

The learning curve is high because you need to acquire many skills. You need to understand user discovery, product development, and technology. You also need to grasp finances, numbers, a bit of sales and marketing, and data analysis.

What’s more, you need to figure out how to combine all of these skills and use them to work with stakeholders who specialize in any of these fields.

The same was true for me. At first, I had no idea what product management was or what I was doing. It took me five years of launching products and failing for various reasons to gain a better understanding.

My management was happy with me all this time, but I wasn’t. I thought that we could have done so much more. Over time, I identified multiple areas where we could have improved. We weren’t really data-driven. We could have done more in terms of strategy, delivery practices, and user experience.

Product management only really became popularized in KSA around 2023. Of course, there were product managers prior to that, but it wasn’t really a well-known concept or a discipline. For the field to grow as a whole, it’s going to take a lot of time.

Speaking of product management expertise, you wrote on your LinkedIn profile that some managers tend to focus a lot on theoretical aspects of product management. Can you elaborate on that?

Unfortunately, this is what happens when you read about something fairly new and trendy. All these theories and frameworks from globally recognized organizations and leaders sound amazing at first glance. You want to try them out.

But keep in mind that what you see and read in books or courses and what you do on the ground are two different things.

All these theories and concepts sound cool, but you’re under business pressure. There are targets and goals, and the company has aggressive investors behind it. It’s challenging.

When you have product managers who are overly theoretical and want to spend two or three weeks making discoveries, and then you have the product owner who’s got all these investors chasing him – it just doesn’t scale up or align.

This theoretical product management is causing a lot of frustration for businesses. It needs to be far more pragmatic and result-driven. It needs to work at the speed the organization is going.

As a product manager, your challenge is to find ways to adapt to such a fast-paced environment. Your style needs to be more streamlined and effective.

For example, rather than taking two weeks to do discovery, you can do some solid discovery that gives you 80% of the answers in a day or two. Then, you can do an effective product requirements document (PRD), communicate well, make a decision, and move on to development.

The same goes for user discovery – instead of doing a fixed number of interviews and spending mandatory time on discovery, you can find quick and still effective ways to do it. You can even break user discovery into phases.

We’ll get back to quick wins soon. For now, I wanted to ask you about another challenge.

Many of my Saudi friends confirm this opinion: Saudi employees really value face-to-face interaction and may not always enjoy remote work. Is this a big obstacle for Saudi companies to overcome to get the most out of local talent?

It’s definitely true for product management because the highly stakeholder-led nature of the role means you’ll be interacting with all these departments. You’ll be the main PoC for requirements, updates, issues, discovery, data, and so on. You should be there in person to handle all that.

But it’s also about the nature of KSA. People here really value personal relationships. It’s a very family-centric culture.

In many organizations, people like to ask each other how their families are doing and what they’re up to. They tend to eat together and go out together. That really helps to unlock a lot of doors in terms of collaboration.

When you work remotely, especially as a product manager, a lot of that gets lost. This approach would work better in European cultures. In Saudi culture, it’s important to be on-site as much as possible.

Reimagining product management

Please tell me more about what any product manager can do in 2025 to deliver software better and faster.

First, how can a product manager better understand the company vision and focus efforts around it?

It’s really important for the product manager to engage with the leadership, the department’s leads, and the middle management team.

You have to be proactive as a product manager to align with leadership. And you must do this in a pragmatic rather than a theoretical way. That’s how you drive quick results.

But you don’t need to use complex scoring methods, such as the RICE framework or OKRs. Keep it simple, streamlined, and pragmatic.

Just do a list of 20 things to do in order of priority. Get everybody in a room and have them agree on the priorities. Then, work around these priorities in terms of your discovery to understand their impacts, complexity, strategic alignment, and benefit for the user.

Then, present the solution to management. Explain its impact and the time it will take to deliver. Based on that list, you can reprioritize and continue to rethink how it influences key business metrics. 

Also, to keep things streamlined, avoid doing pet projects and things that you think are cool.

A whole different aspect of product management I wanted to talk about is user experience and the depth of how you build your features.

I would love for people to start thinking a bit more about MVPs, not as Minimal Viable Products but as Minimum Lovable Products. What is the minimum I need to do to make this particular feature or product easy to use and fulfilling, a product that I enjoy using? It doesn’t need to have all the functionalities, but whatever it does, it must do really well.

What I don’t want MVPs to be are horrible feature-first experiences. It just becomes a cause and a reason for complaints and churn to happen.

Instead, I’d focus on investing more time in making products and features adoptable. Even if a product is limited, it should do what it’s supposed to do effectively and provide a friction-free experience. I would advise against a heavy-friction MVP due to the maturing nature of the consumers in the market now.

To sum up, just solving a problem isn’t enough anymore. Focus on two things – delivering value quickly and providing friction-free UX.

I agree – my experience also tells me that product management is about seeking product-market fit from the start.

But for a manager to deliver value quickly, they may need a whole new attitude. How can you foster a mindset that contributes to achieving quick wins in product management? 

Frameworks such as RICE and OKR are great, but it takes significant time for the organization to properly adopt and understand them. What you need to do is reduce the adoption cycle and have people aligned and working towards a singular goal right now.

Getting quick results is about having your teams orbit around the top 10-20 initiatives. You can get the whole team to focus on this rather than having a squad of PMs, various engineers, designers, and QAs work on a product that isn’t a high priority. It could be put in maintenance mode, and the resource could be put somewhere else.

In the early phase, in a market full of aggressive investors who want returns and with a lot of immaturity in the product domain, you need to be laser-focused on getting short-term results.

Eventually, as the organization matures and organizes its priorities, it can start to structure things more formally. Then, you can look at OKRs and all the other frameworks. 

To achieve those quick wins, product managers may have to work closely with developers and other specialists to understand their perspectives. In the CTO vs Status Quo series, we discussed cross-collaboration a lot, especially between product and tech.

What is your advice for product managers who want to understand and communicate with developers better? 

There is a whole spectrum of engineers out there. Some just want to put their headphones on and code all day. They’re not interested in why you do certain things. They just want to work on cool coding problems.

But then, there are engineers who are on the other side of the spectrum – they are very interested in the product. They don’t want to write any code until they understand why you do these things, what’s the problem and what impact their work has on it.

I would really recommend that everybody, both product and tech people, always have their camera on and be engaged.

Developers should ask how they can be product engineers, not just plain engineers. They should think of how they can empower their organization to build something that is not just the technically cleanest solution but something that helps a company achieve its goals. For example, they can think of how they can help reduce the implementation time from 6 weeks to 3 or from 3 sprints to 1.

It’s all a part of a culture and mindset where everyone focuses on solving business goals and improving business metrics rather than just building technically proper solutions.

Of course, you can’t build a broken app either – you want quality. The point is that every time you tackle a technical problem, like API integration, you need to ask yourself questions such as: “Why do we need to build this?” or “Do we need to build such a competency, or is there a better way to use our time?”.

A company may choose to expand its team to find the right people to work in such an environment. To do that, it may need to balance local talent with expats and even remote foreign teams. Is that a big challenge?

For sure. When you look at the unicorn companies here, their number one problem is product management. It’s not an easy problem to solve due to a number of reasons.

First, there’s a lack of expertise in the market. It’s a fairly new domain here. The demand-supply imbalance results in people with two or three years of experience in lead or senior positions. Typically, you’d expect five to seven years of experience from a senior PM, seven to nine from a principal, and at least 10 from a head.

In engineering, when you get a computer science degree and learn fast, you could become a big contributor quite quickly. It doesn’t work like that in product management – due to its holistic nature and all the little complexities of it; you need at least five years to grasp what product management is.

However, while there isn’t enough local talent, you still need all the local experts you can get. You can’t replicate the localized understanding of KSA, which in many ways is its own bubble. It has a really unique people-centric culture.

What’s more, KSA is experiencing rapid changes now. We just had the Saudi Founding Day (February 22), and they announced a new symbol for the Saudi riyal currency. Riyadh is also undergoing a transformation – there’s a lot of construction work and a lot of traffic. It can be overwhelming, especially for a foreigner who doesn’t speak the language.

A lot has changed, and so much transformation has happened. These dynamics did not exist elsewhere. You really need someone local who can guide you through all these things. That’s really important, as you’re dealing with Saudi users.

There are approaches you don’t want to copy. For example, Careem didn’t do particularly well in KSA. They were super successful in the UAE. They tried to copy and paste the concept here in KSA, but it didn’t work out. These are two completely different markets and two completely different types of users – UAE has 90% expats, and KSA is a very proud traditional Saudi country and nation. You need that localized understanding of users.

Due to the challenges with the domain, you also need experienced product people who can ensure that products are built correctly, discoveries are made properly, there’s a strategy, and results are achieved pragmatically, as we’ve mentioned.

It’s about balancing local and foreign talent and making them work together. The issues include localization, quality product management, and working in tandem – they aren’t easy to solve.

Reinforcements from the outside

It’s often repeated that the knowledge of local Saudi end users is vital for a product’s success. Therefore, you believe that having at least some local talent on board is essential.

What would you say to Saudi leaders who want to enter cooperation with foreign product managers? How can they help foreigners learn more about the user efficiently?

Foreigners really just have to embrace the culture.

For example, our ministers recently talked about the 2034 World Cup to be hosted in Saudi Arabia. It will be an opportunity for people to see the amazing Saudi culture – a family-friendly event without drinking, alcohol, or drugs. We want families to be able to enjoy the event safely. 

Being on-site is helpful, but it isn’t always enough. A lot of expats live in isolated compounds, away from the locals. They live in a bit of a bubble.

Instead, they have to immerse themselves as much as they can in the local culture. In Riyadh, you’ve got the modern areas in the north and the older parts of the city in the south and east. You can see the kind of people who will use your product, explore trends, and even pick up a little bit of the Arabic language.

They’ll experience a lot of kindness. However, at times, they’ll also be part of events they have little to no understanding of, but even that’s alright. They have to get themselves out of their comfort zone.

So it’s about staying open-minded and interested in experiencing local culture and its behaviors.

On the other hand, you once wrote that there are many learning opportunities for Saudi product managers to gain know-how from big companies and projects in the European and US markets.

How can Saudi managers best use that experience locally?

I thought there were universal rules for product management. But I found out that in KSA, you have to break them a little – they’re just not going to work out of the box.

Don’t get me wrong. There are product management skills such as how to communicate effectively, how to write good PRDs, how to build a strategy, and how to analyze data – all of those core skills that you can learn from mature markets in the West are still very relevant, but you may have to adapt them to the Saudi market.

For example, in a typical marketplace concept, where you have buyers and sellers, I would typically trust sellers to create high-quality content. I wouldn’t invest in or be involved in content quality control.

But in KSA, you actually need to invest to ensure that the content created by these sellers is of proper quality. You really need to double down on content quality support and educate vendors in this field.

If you have localized knowledge of the Saudi market, you can find unique ways of growing your product that no product management book can teach you. If you could combine that localized knowledge with product management expertise to bring those two worlds together, you would be a game-changing asset for KSA.

When would you say it is a good idea for Saudi companies to work with remote teams from abroad?

It definitely makes sense for engineering. Many startups want to control their purchasing costs, and the talent here in KSA is quite expensive and not easy to source.

From a product management perspective, it could work in more technical roles, such as a platform product manager or a payments or integrations PM. In such instances, when a company struggles to find local talent, more accessible global PM talent on a remote basis could be an option.

But if the product is heavily stakeholder- and user-centric in its nature and requires a lot of interactions with both groups, as a PM, you may need to be on site. I don’t think that’s going to change. It’s just the DNA of the Saudi market. You have to embrace it.

General advice

To sum things up, could you share some advice for companies based in Saudi Arabia who want to make sure that their product management helps deliver quality software most efficiently?

Make your priorities clear and easy for the team, like with the 10-20 prioritization list. Empower them to make necessary changes and hold them accountable for results.

Ensure that you have the right blend of talent – bring in smart young Saudis who are willing to learn. They’ll help you understand the local market. Help them grow by pairing them with experienced product leaders. But have realistic expectations. As I said, it takes five years for one to develop proper PM skills.

Invest in learning what product management is. Unfortunately, not many leaders understand it. They think it’s all about listening to requests from leadership and making sure that engineers build it. There’s so much more to it. It’s a complex domain that can give you a major competitive advantage. It’s about understanding users and the impact of your product on key metrics. It’s a game of building the right things at the right time.

So I’d say those are the three main things that come to mind in this regard.

Resources

Your LinkedIn profile is a well-known source of knowledge about product management in Saudi Arabia, especially in Riyadh. Are there some other learning resources that you’d recommend?

You have a local product Meetup community, Montajat. They have several initiatives, including a recently launched product training program. They are a good community to network with, and in many ways, they are the center of spreading product management.

I believe that Muntajat is even translating some books. A few books, like Inspired by Marty Kagan, have recently been translated into Arabic. More content is coming to the Arabic language.

A few new leaders are also entering the market. Pay attention to specific companies that have new leaders coming in from abroad and try to network with them.

What’s next? 3 rules for IT leaders in Saudi Arabia to follow

What do you think? Do you consider yourself ready to build successful products in KSA?

For best results, make sure to combine the best aspects of pragmatic product management and cooperation with local talent:

• Have clear short-term priorities – instead of focusing on fancy frameworks, make a list of 10-20 priorities to focus on, especially early in the organization’s life.
• Emphasise user experience – today, Saudi users want more than just an app that solves a problem. They want a friction-free experience.
• Balance out the best local and foreign talent – you need localized knowledge to understand the intricacies of the Saudi market. Foreign talent can still be hugely helpful, but it will rely on locals to gain a better understanding of KSA. In turn, they can contribute their product management experience. 

Make sure to follow Muhammed’s LinkedIn for more expert advice on product management in Riyadh!