I didn’t pivot because I was lost. I pivoted because I needed to go deeper.

When I helped launch Openbank U.S., it was bold, fast, and high-stakes. We were building a full-stack digital bank in one of the most fragmented regulatory markets on Earth. I worked on payments flows, onboarding decisions, and fraud protection mechanics. In just ten weeks, we passed $2B in deposits.But still I was aware of something unspoken: There were still layers of the system I couldn’t fully see.

I understood the user flows. I understood the strategy. But when engineering ran into edge cases or when QA flagged issues we hadn’t anticipated, I realized I didn’t know enough about the technical structure behind the story. What happens in that messy middle between “we should build this” and “it’s live”? What breaks when requirements sound right but don’t map cleanly to systems? Where do assumptions sneak in and quietly degrade velocity?

I didn’t want to stay at the surface. I wanted to understand what made product work. So I made the move: I stepped out of PdM and into the trenches of analysis.

I sat with architects to understand where logic actually lived inside APIs, third-party rules engines, or backend platforms, and reverse-engineered how a single user tap might cascade through six systems in less than a second.

I rewrote documentation that had been treated as formalities, and turned it into working models. I broke down business intents (“block suspicious logins”) into logic trees engineers could build from with confidence. I became the person who sat between compliance, engineering, and product, and finally spoke all three languages fluently. That’s where I stopped thinking of product stories as narratives, and started thinking of them as machines

Every requirement, dependency, and data flow passed through my lens. I worked across global vendors, design partners, and Qiddiya Investment Company leadership to translate high-level vision into structured logic, creating epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria that the engineering teams could build from. When priorities shifted, and they often did, I held the line between ambition and feasibility. It meant challenging assumptions, protecting coherence, and ensuring that the product told one consistent story from strategy to release.

Qiddiya taught me what scale truly means, not in size but in consequence.

And somewhere between the architecture diagrams and late-night review calls, I realised that the next challenge was not just about delivering systems. It was about teaching others how to think this way. That is how I found myself leading the Saudi BA Bootcamp, shaping a new generation of analysts to carry the same discipline, clarity, and precision it takes to turn a national vision into something that actually works.