Qasim Zafar

The Lunar Gateway, a vital component of NASA's Artemis program, is a planned outpost orbiting the Moon that supports the long-term human return to the lunar surface and serves as a staging point for deep space exploration. Robots are proposed as long-term tenants of the Gateway, which can switch between fully-autonomous and human-in-the-loop teleoperation.

Led product discovery as a subcontractor for control and monitoring dashboards for a mixed-autonomy platform, enabling fully-autonomous and human-in-the-loop teleoperation, keeping in mind data loss, compression, and latency constraints encountered on lunar missions.

Fresh Tracks, one of Canada's leading luxury travel providers, required a complete overhaul of its web presence. This included a web app, admin panels to manage content and site administration and search intent retention strategies to mitigate the loss of SEO during the site changeover. Built a completely-revamped digital presence for the $50,000+ ARR company that led to a 15% increase in revenue. Work included web app, admin panels, email retention campaigns, and 3rd-party vendor inventory and integration.

I led the product and business development teams of Cricingif. Cricingif provides the world's fastest live cricket scores, as well as the world's first play-by-play highlights and in-stream gamification.
The company is now official partners with several cricket boards and leagues around the world and has strong B2B and B2C revenue streams. As Cricingif grew, my role evolved from more hands-on product management to product strategy while leading the product team.

I led the technical development and strategy for Savaree, an on-demand ride-hailing, and ridesharing app. The company was the first of its kind in Pakistan, and I was responsible for leading product development, including trust-building features that increased user confidence in a skeptical and security-conscious market. We were successfully able to bootstrap the company to 200 rides per day, following which a larger regional competitor acquired the company. As the technical lead, I implemented state-of-the-art scheduling and route-matching algorithms and was able to develop features for the local market that larger global players, including Uber, implemented much later.

Blockskye, a travel expense management startup, required building a product while coordinating with startups like Kayak and enterprise stakeholders, including United Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, and the like. I Led the product and technology architecture for the team.

Fresh Tracks Canada is the premier Canadian train vacations expert that required a revamped, modern website to drive traffic. They also wanted a completely modular design system and web components to refine and optimize their sites over time. I oversaw this project from conception through launch.

Conception:
• Helped build site architecture based on conversion goals and user journey maps.
• Liaised with sales, marketing, and product teams to define requirements and document how they will use the new digital platform.
• Worked with a designer to create a modular, reusable design system.

Development:
• Led the development of the website in an agile environment.
• Implemented headless CMS (DatoCMS) and modular front end in React.
• Oversaw CI/CD pipeline set up.
• Booking management system integrations to help product manage site.
• Asset management system, CRM integration for marketing and sales teams.
• SEO optimization with CDN and page speed optimizations.

Launch:
• Oversaw content population of a new site.
• Oversaw A/B testing for verification of site conversion.
• Documented site switchover and redirection to a new website.
• Documented requirements to set up additional sites using design system and tech architecture.

PakWheels is Pakistan's largest used car classifieds and is a Frontier Digital Ventures company. Assisted the company in evolving from a classifieds to a managed-transaction business model. As the product manager, I led a team of seven engineers and one designer in formulating and rolling out a used car certification program and assisted used car buying and selling programs. Collectively, the programs resulted in a 2.5% conversion rate for users opting to let PakWheels manage their used car sale/purchase vs. listing their ad on the website.

Pukaar Community is a startup that enables users to seek therapy and counseling from the comfort of their homes. Additionally, it allows users to book in-person sessions seamlessly. The mobile app matches users to the best-fit qualified psychologists and psychotherapists with counseling sessions through video calls. I oversaw the existing user requirements, developed product designs, and managed the development team in building out the app.

ABS & Co. is one of Pakistan's pre-eminent law firms. The partners are members of various committees of the United Nations and represent high-profile clients such as national governments and corporates, including Porsche and others. The firm wanted to build a digital presence in line with modern standards. I conducted market and user research, gathering stakeholder needs and requirements, and formulated an architecture and wireframes for the website. Following approval, I oversaw the design of the app and then personally developed it.

The product aimed to help small family businesses manage their payments more smoothly and efficiently. I led the product development from the ground up, which included understanding what to build. We did this through preliminary surveys, followed by user research, including user interviews and focus groups. We then synthesized data from our research into insights, including customer personas, user journey maps, user emotion maps, and core problems to solve.

We then prioritized these insights based on the impact on the business and the effort required, laying the groundwork for a product roadmap.

I worked with an outsourced design agency to design the application with the product roadmap in hand. I worked with two in-house engineers to develop the application and upload it to Apple and Google Play Stores.