Abu Dhabi · Product & AI practice

I turn complex problems into AI products people actually use.

Werk Studios is my practice. I help organisations figure out what to build and then help them build it — from the first research through the design and, more and more, the working product itself.

The hard part isn’t the The hard part isn’t the interface, the model, the data, the demo, or the dashboard.

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Point of view

AI made execution cheaper. It didn’t make judgment cheaper.

The bottleneck moved upstream: finding the right problem, deciding what should exist at all, knowing which evidence to trust, and making the product fit how people actually work. That is where I work.

BeforeJudgmentExecutionNowJudgmentExecutionwhat AI gave back
Execution got cheaper. The constraint moved upstream, to deciding what is worth executing.

How I work

Watch the work. Find the decision. Build enough to prove it.

01Watch the work02Find the decision03Show something real04Test it properly05Ship, then watch
The sequence is ordinary. Step 2 is where most engagements are won or lost.

The order is ordinary. Step 02 is the one that matters — most projects are won or lost on whether anyone found the real problem before the building started.More detail on the studio page.

What I do

Four ways I get brought in.

  • 01

    Working out where AI actually helps

    I watch how the work really gets done, map the decisions people are making, and separate the ideas worth building from the ones that only sound good.

    Before asking where AI fits, ask whether the process should exist at all.

  • 02

    Deciding what to build

    Who it is for, which decision it improves, what the AI does and what it should not touch, and how someone checks or overrules it when it gets things wrong.

    Executives do not need more dashboards. They need better decisions.

  • 03

    Building enough to test it

    A working version rather than a slide deck — enough of the real thing to put in front of the people who will have to use it every day.

    I build far enough to test the hypothesis instead of handing over a deck.

  • 04

    Getting it used

    Keeping everyone pointed the same way, translating between the business, the engineers and the people doing the work, and making sure research keeps happening after launch.

    A technically successful product that people avoid is still a failed product.

The name

Werk is German for factory.

A factory is not a romantic place. Things get made to spec, on a schedule, and measured afterwards. That is the standard I hold this work to.

Who runs it

One person, named.

I’m Yusuf Algan. More than a decade of product work — Shopify, eBay, Tajawal, DaWanda — and now product and AI work in the Gulf. You deal with me directly, because there is no one else to deal with.

The full record is at yusufalgan.com

Got a problem that isn’t really about the screens?

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