17 Key Insights from Muhammad Raza Saeed's Podcast: Leadership, Innovation, and Pakistan’s Growth

 Just watched a podcast of Muhammad Raza Saeed, CEO Confiz and PakWheels at Thought Behind Things. It was around 2 hours session, here are my 17 take-aways.

1. Everything must be done in a propey way. Processes, not individuals, should drive a company to ensure consistency and quality management.

2. Whatever you do, identify patterns in your service, its where you would find new ideas to work on, areas to innovate by creating products.

3. Software is means to an end, and that end is "the problem it solve". Focus on problems identification and then building solutions to fix them. Digitalization globally is only at 15-20%, offering abundant opportunities for software businesses.

4. Large software platforms are complex and every business is different in operations, even when they are doing same stuff. People are needed to customize platforms to meet specific requirements. Here is the opportunity you can tap.

5. Business opportunities lie not only in grand challenges but also in solving simple problems and optimizing business units like supply chain, sales, and operations costs, etc. Individuals should focus on niches and capitalize new software platforms, large companies may lag in adopting them.

6. Pakistan has a significant quality gap in products and services across various sectors, presenting opportunities to build trusted brands. Whether its tyre shop, car workshop, showrooms or something else.

7. Raise funds only for clear and proven ideas needing scale. Remember, outside money brings accountability and higher responsibility.

8. Take new technologies (e.g. AI, 5G, Web 3, etc.) as tools to solve problems or build (better) solutions.

9. Waking up early is valuable and "I split day and week in different stuff to be done"

10. In professional services companies, the real asset are their people.

11. Instead of focusing on small projects, getting aligned with big platform providers pays back better e.g. Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS, etc.

12. Focus on revenue, instead the head count. Revenue per person is better metric. Higher, the better. Staying lean is valuable in itself.

13. Companies should get use to work remotely in most effective way, after all, we work for remote clients. Then, distributed team should not be an issue.

14. Future belong to specialization, more specialized you are, higher margin area you can discover.

15. Technical skills are important at individual level, but at company levels, its more important to focus on problem you are solving. You can't sell Python Developer to Fortune 500 companies but you can sell them solutions.

16. There is continuous innovation and development in different areas, the point is, are you on the treadmill or off.

17. For stable and sustainable economic development, Pakistan needs economic policy stability. Depoliticizing economics is required to foster growth and activate self-correction in system. Its where all political parties must agree on.