I build products, and the business around them.
I'm Atif Adam, and building is the part I love most: the messy zero-to-one, the design, the engineering, the go-to-market, the P&L. I'm Product Director at SiFi in Riyadh and employee number two, where we built a regulated payments platform from nothing, won a SAMA Major EMI license from scratch, and scaled it to billions in annual volume. Before this I shipped corporate spend, payroll, and government fintech across Singapore, Sydney, and Bangalore. Have a look at what I've built, how I think, or just say hello.
Zero-to-one in hard, regulated markets. The ambiguity is the fun part.
I sweat the craft: the flows, the pixels, the data model.
Licenses, unit economics, go-to-market. The product is half the job.
Things I've built, and helped build. The part I love.
The products I've built and helped build, and the businesses around them.
-
SiFi Spend management and corporate cards for Saudi businesses. Built from zero as employee number two: a SAMA Major EMI license won from scratch, scaled to billions in annual volume. - Volopay Volopay Corporate cards and spend management across Singapore and Australia. Helped grow the product to roughly two thousand customers in two markets.
-
Bayzat HR, payroll, and benefits across the Gulf. I built payroll, request management, and the Saudi localization. - Companion Companion A meeting recorder I built end to end. Your audio stays on your own machine; only encrypted metadata ever leaves it.
- Alpha Alpha Consulting Designed and shipped the site for a Saudi advisory firm. Trilingual across English, Arabic, and Urdu, fully right-to-left.
- AI tooling Product AI tooling Centralised AI tooling and agents for the product team: shared context, live data access, and faster, better-informed decisions.
I write to figure things out, not to perform.
Working notes from building regulated products. Mostly about what I got wrong the first time.
- What I got wrong about the Gulf I brought a playbook. The market wanted proximity and patience instead.
- Why I stopped treating regulation as a tax It turned out to be the most defensible thing we built.
- The org chart ends up in the product How we were organized shaped what we shipped, for better and worse.
- Notes on selling to a government Procurement is a product surface. I'm still learning to instrument it.
Four markets, one thesis: judgment compounds.
Most recent first-
Product Director, SiFi
What it taught me
Employee number two. We won a SAMA Major EMI license from scratch and scaled the platform to billions in annual transaction volume. Regulation was never the tax on the product. It was the product.
-
Product, Bayzat
What it taught me
Ninety-plus customer interviews, then a forty percent lift in adoption. The features came last. The listening came first.
-
Product, Volopay
What it taught me
Roughly two thousand customers across two countries taught me that entering a new market is a polite phrase for rebuilding your assumptions.
-
Founder, UX Formation
What it taught me
I scaled a consultancy from zero to four million rupees by selling the outcome, never the hours.
What I read, and re-read. It shows in the work.
A short shelf, not a brag list. The operators, founders, and investors I keep going back to.
I talk to people building hard things in regulated markets.
Operators, founders, and investors. Especially when the problem looks impossible from the outside.
Or find me on LinkedIn.