About

Every organization promises people something. People live something else with it. Between the two lies a gap I have spent nearly twenty years working in, trying to turn what organizations promise into what people actually live.

One Question Leading to Another

I didn't move between fields because I couldn't find my place. I moved because each field answered one question, then left me with a bigger one. I began with design, then audio engineering, then web development, and each time I was chasing a problem I hadn't fully solved. I designed beautiful interfaces, then discovered that UX/UI was not enough: a beautiful screen cannot save a product that doesn't solve a real problem. That led me to Thinking in Product: asking first about the problem, and about the solution the product offers, before asking how it should look.

Praise followed me at every stop, until some people knew me as a designer, others as a web developer, and others as a brand strategist. And that praise was exactly what unsettled me: if I am all of this, who am I, really? So in 2015 I decided to look for the answer, and to choose one field to master completely. I thought it would be a month-long journey that would bring me back with an answer. It lasted three years. It was not a break from work, but a journey of thinking that walked alongside the journey of work: during it I co-founded Wasla, and the question stayed with me in every project.

In those years I didn't find the single field I had set out to find. I found the threads that connect all of them. I kept asking: what is the relationship between art, design, business, and technology? And why does each of them feel incomplete when it works alone? I went to Web Summit to test my intuition, and found it pointing in the right direction. In 2017 I wrote a presentation called "What Will the Future of Marketing Look Like?" In it I predicted that marketing, technology, art, the human, and business would converge, and that new specializations in experience design would be born. I also wrote: "Creative agencies will turn into product-innovation companies, not service companies! I'm betting on it!" Years later, I found myself living that bet.

Then in 2019 I was at the voco hotel in Dubai. Behind the reception desk I saw the IHG logo: the group behind voco and many other hotel brands, each with its own personality, all running on one operating system. In that moment the threads connected, and I asked myself: what if there were a brand that runs inspiring brands, the way IHG runs its hotels? I opened Miro and drew the map. At its center was a small circle with a single letter in it: X. Above it I wrote: "Because everyone deserves the chance to live a great life, the chance to reach their true potential. And brands have the power to help!" And on a pink note beside it I wrote: a project for years.

Many threads branched out from that circle. One of them I called "Leading Experiences | Brands," and under it, five: thinking about the business model, the brand identity, the product and user experience, marketing and sales, and overseeing execution. Looking at it, I understood that the answer to "who am I?" was not any one of these fields, but the role that brings them together.

A few months later, in December 2019, I met Hamad Ali. He was looking for someone to build his brand with, and every firm he met offered its service from its own angle: one for identity, another for marketing, a third for technology. I told him he would find himself spread across these firms, carrying alone the burden of bringing together what does not naturally come together, and that what he needed was not another provider, but someone to lead the whole brand experience with him, someone he could trust with it. Zados became the first real test of the answer I had found.

It began at Wasla, which I co-founded. My colleagues there helped build inspiring stories we called "Zados Stories," and together we built the visual identity and the strategic direction. Then in 2023 I became certain that leading this kind of brand requires a different working model, so I chose to pursue it independently, and I remain a partner in Zados to this day. Since 2020 I have practiced this role with change-makers in government, nonprofit, and commercial settings.

The journey of thinking that began in 2015 has not stopped. And I am still working on that same pink note: a project for years.

What I Believe

• A brand is a living being, with a vision, values, a personality, and a behavior. People judge it by how it behaves, not by what it says about itself.

• A real brand grows from the inside: from a meaning its founder and team believe in, extending into identity, experience, and impact. Brands that begin with campaigns remain a voice without a body.

• Experience doesn't know your org chart. People see one organization, however many departments stand behind it. The article

• Brands don't create people's needs, but people entrust their needs to a brand every time they choose it. The article

• Brand strategy is not marketing strategy: the first creates the being, the second decides how, where, and with whom it grows.

How I Work

I don't offer a standalone service, and I don't start from the logo or the campaign. I work as a partner to the leader: we begin with the meaning their organization believes in, then build from it the value, the identity, and the experience at every point where people meet the brand, in the product, the digital platforms, the marketing, and in the team's own behavior. And I stay with them after that, because a brand is not delivered once; it is led every day.

That is why I work with only a few leaders at any one time. Leading a brand experience cannot be divided.

From Al-Rustaq

I am from Al-Rustaq, and today I live in Muscat. From my father I keep a sentence he once told me at an iron gate, which I thought at the time was only about the gate: "Not everything you deal with needs force; sometimes it only needs wisdom." Today I know it applies to brands too. Many organizations try to win people over by force: a louder campaign, a bigger budget, a wider screen. What they usually need is the wisdom to unite their departments around one meaning, and then let them act on it every day.

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