About

Level 01. New player, big team

Nervous is the honest word. I was a kid handing out directives to people who had been doing this for years.

It was hard to get anyone to take me seriously, and that was fair. A team looks at a kid giving orders and sees a joke waiting for a punchline.

So I stopped asking to be taken seriously and started earning it, one clean result at a time, first at Eternity Corp and then at Dastak Activation. Somewhere along the way the question changed from how old the boss was to what the boss was going to do next.

• Authority that does not depend on age
• Making the point land

Level 02. The Blue Tide

Our panel was blue, so we became the Blue Tide.

SZABIST takes student government about as seriously as some countries take theirs. We campaigned like it: for a cause, for votes, for the trust of thousands of people who owed us nothing. Students had already chosen me as Program Representative twice. This time the job was the whole council.

There was no moment when I thought I had won. Then the results came in, and I felt something I have not found the word for yet. For the record, I have a degree in engineering, not in vocabulary.

Before the presidency I was already everywhere. I ran logistics and marketing for the Literary Society, led the dance wing of the Performing Arts Society and kept the Sports Society's events moving, and three societies named me Best Member. Wherever people needed organising, I turned up with a plan.

Then I became President of the Student Council, speaking for 3,000+ students, and every one of those societies came under me and looked to me to lead.

And I still finished the degree: Mechatronics Engineering, majoring in Industrial Automation and minoring in AI and Computer Vision.

• Diplomacy
• Campaigning
• Rallying people behind a cause
• 3,000+ constituents

Level 03. Teach a robot to follow a line

Line followers. Obstacle avoiders. Kits that snapped together like Lego, next to the ready-made Edvon kits.

Picture a table of parts, a handful of small people and a robot that has not yet learned to do anything. Then it follows the line. Or it stops before the wall. A child who did not know what a sensor was a minute ago has just made a machine think.

I came to it from PLCs, after a summer at SABZ Link programming industrial automation. At Robotics World I turned that into R&D: designing DIY kits that children could build, and teaching with them.

Sharing my enthusiasm for robots with young minds was the most heartwarming job I have had. It also taught me a rule I still sell by: any idea gets across if you build it simple enough, and you can tell it worked by the look on the face of the little people who just understood it.

• Explaining anything simply
• R&D from sketch to classroom

Level 04. The win streak

I came for the paycheck. I kept coming back for the thrill.

Picture the work. Customers arrive already wanting something, and your job is to find the right answer among more than fourteen providers, from cable and internet to home security and phone, and close it before the next customer arrives. That was Digital Globe, in inbound sales, and I hit my targets.

Back-to-back wins, every day a new day, every day a new challenge. It is an addictive rhythm for anyone who likes to win, and it was where I found out that I do.

By 2020, at Grand Insight, the rhythm had moved upmarket. I was leading digital marketing strategy for North American clients and scoping the technical work myself. That was when the two halves of me stopped feeling like separate careers. An engineer who can sell is useful. A seller who can read the spec is a different animal.

• Resilience under a daily target
• Reading a buyer
• Scoping the technical side

Level 05. The word no

The shortest word in sales is also the most expensive to say.

Early at Logicose, a client walked in with a brief and a verdict. This, exactly this, nothing else. It was an easy order to close and the wrong one to win: it would have satisfied the request and missed the goal. So I did the thing that makes most account managers nervous. I said no. Then I came back with a full plan that reached the same goals at a far bigger scale.

They said yes, and the sale grew with the plan. In the same stretch I went from Account Manager to Senior Account Manager to Assistant Vice President. It turns out that people promote the person who protects the outcome.

• Judgement over compliance
• Selling the outcome, not the order

Level 06. The boss fight

Every game has one fight that makes you use everything you picked up in the levels before.

Picture a business that runs entirely on spreadsheets and paper. Customers in one file, staff in another, the books somewhere else. They came to us by referral, which meant the trust was borrowed and I had to prove I deserved it.

So I did the homework: weeks of research before the pitch, with the engineering half of my head working as hard as the selling half. Discovery, scoping, and a plan to put customers, staff and bookkeeping on one platform. Then I went in and made the case.

They said yes, and that was when the real job began, because I did not hand it over. I owned it as product owner. Seven months to the first version. Five more for the second. The data moved across by hand.

The platform came to $178K plus recurring maintenance, and one client reinvested $70K after seeing the app. The sale was recorded as a record-breaking one and earned me Gamechanger and Performer Par Excellence. It was the first time engineering and sales were properly tested together, and neither flinched.

• Engineering meets sales
• Owning delivery, not just the deal
• Gamechanger
• Performer Par Excellence

Level 07. Everything, in one room

Somewhere on the way up I stopped being an engineer, a seller, a marketer or a product owner. I became all four.

The work is no longer choosing between them. It is putting them in one room and leading it: a team of up to six, a $2M+ portfolio, a CRM pipeline I built with generative AI that my team runs every day, and products of my own in Pakistan.

Off the clock I read comics, play more board games than is strictly reasonable and keep a sketchbook. Systems, stories and strategy turn out to be one hobby.

Looking back, the pattern is plain. Each level asked for more than the last, and each time the answer was the same: learn the craft, earn the trust, then carry others up with you. The titles changed. The method did not.

I know now what I did not know at the start. Authority is lent by the people you serve, never owned. The best answer is rarely the one that was asked for. And growth that stops at yourself is only a good year. What I want to build next will keep growing without needing me in the room: teams, partnerships and products that outlast their founder. The stakes have risen at every level, and I have learned to welcome them.

• Multi-disciplinary range
• Judgement
• A team that outlasts the leader