Studio
A practice, not an agency.
There is no team behind this page. That is the point, not an omission.
I’m Yusuf Algan. Werk Studios is my product and AI practice — the company I use to take on advisory and product work, and to build products of my own.
I spent more than a decade on product and design at Shopify, eBay, Tajawal and DaWanda before moving into product and AI work in the Gulf. These days the work runs from the first research through the design and, more and more, the build itself. That last part matters: if I can build a rough working version, I can find out whether an idea holds up instead of writing a deck arguing that it will.
Most of the time I am called in by organisations with an ambition, a pile of data, and a product nobody is using. The useful question is almost never which features are missing. It is what someone is supposed to do differently — and whether they actually will.
How the work runs
Watch the work. Find the decision. Build enough to prove it.
- 1
Watch how the work really happens
I sit with the people doing the job and watch what they actually do — the spreadsheets, the WhatsApp threads, the workarounds. What gets described in a meeting is rarely what happens at the desk.
- 2
Find the decision that needs to get better
Nearly every request is a symptom of something else. I work out which decision is actually going wrong, before anyone argues about what to build.
- 3
Show something real, early
A map, a sketch, a working slice. People cannot disagree usefully with a description — they can disagree with something in front of them.
- 4
Test it properly
Does anyone understand it, trust it, and change what they do because of it? What happens when it is wrong, and who is allowed to overrule it?
- 5
Ship it, then keep watching
Launch is not the finish line. Who uses it, what it saves them, and where people still quietly go back to the old way of doing things.
On confidentiality
Most of the work cannot be shown.
Client work here is mostly under NDA — government, sovereign and enterprise projects where the screens, the data and often the client's name are not mine to publish.
Rather than fill the work page with invented dashboards, each case describes the shape of the problem: what everyone assumed, what turned out to be true, and what changed. Every diagram is labelled as an illustration, because a portfolio that quietly fakes its evidence is worth less than one that admits the limit.