I run product for the enterprise data platform at Ververica, the company behind Apache Flink. It ships into banks, trading firms and insurers who run it inside their own Kubernetes clusters, so most of the job is deciding what not to build, and then being able to defend that call six months later.
I came to product from engineering. I started writing iOS apps in Lahore in 2010 and worked on the first location-based loyalty app in Pakistan, then moved to Germany for tour operator software and an augmented reality hotel finder built before ARKit existed. I was the first engineer at Weekend.com: wrote the first commit, shipped it to the App Store, and grew the team to seven. It passed a million downloads and was later acquired by trivago. After that I ran product at eKomi, where a sentiment engine I first hacked together myself became a real line of business with the German insurers.
I still build. Most ideas I take to customers start as a prototype I put together over a few evenings, because customers react to something they can click and they don’t react to a document.
Outside of work I’m usually out biking or hiking with my two kids, or tracking down street food somewhere.
The writing here is mostly about product management. What I’ve built is over here.
