Leader Spotlight: Shifting from product delivery to product thinking, with Hammad Farooqui
Hammad Farooqui is Principal, Digital Product Excellence at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). From early roles in business analysis and call center technology at Unilever to leadership positions in customer experience and operations at Yamaha Motors and Sybrid, Hammad Farooqui has built a career defined by transformation. He draws on 13 years of experience at NielsenIQ, where he spearheaded global initiatives in product strategy, AI-driven automation, and operational excellence, optimizing large product portfolios and driving change across multiple regions.
In our conversation, Hammad explores the mindset shift from project delivery to product thinking at scale. Drawing on his experience leading global product portfolios and driving digital transformation, first at NielsenIQ and now at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, he shares how he balances global standardization with local needs, aligns technology with people and culture, and designs products for diverse user communities.
Developing products across global and regional markets
Earlier in your career, you led a global product portfolio. What was it like to balance local and regional decision-making while managing products across so many different countries?
I supported 110+ countries, and one of the objectives was to make sure that we scale these products across markets. That’s always a challenge because different markets have different dynamics. There’s always some local customization required, but at the same time, you have to keep a level of standardization across the board.
When you’re operating at a global scale, it’s about finding the sweet spot between consistency and flexibility. What we did was anchor everything on a few non-negotiable principles — things like data integrity, security, and platform architecture. Those should remain universal.
Beyond that, we gave room to the regions to adapt since one size cannot fit all. For example, something that works well in Singapore cannot be a copy-paste model in Brazil. They have different cultures and communities within them. So, we built products with a configuration layer so local teams could tailor the experience without breaking the global backbone and principles.
It’s essentially about designing a strong foundation but letting each house have its own personality. From a structure, tools, and principle standpoint, everything remains the same — but the experience can look different.
When working on a data-heavy product like you were in that role, how do you decide between improving infrastructure vs. improving data inputs?
It depends, and it varies. There are data regulations and quality metrics that come into play, and those influence the strategy. In more mature markets, you’re often in a speed and optimization mode, where you don’t need heavy infrastructure investment. In emerging markets, though, reliability and trust take priority. You’re deciding whether the market needs speed and optimization or trust-building first. That decision shapes whether you invest more in infrastructure or data quality.
From project management to product leadership
Across your career, you started out more in project management and transitioned into product leadership. What has that transition been like?
Early on, success was all about hitting deadlines and budgets. That’s very project-focused. Product leadership is different — it’s all about a lot of stakes on the table. You’re looking into how the product would be evolving, so the real success is measured more on adoption, the behavior chain, and long-term business outcomes. It’s not just about pushing the features; it’s more about sustainability and bringing more value to it.
In terms of my career transition, I was always focused on how I could step in and bring additional value. While working on programs, I realized that there is a vacuum where I could learn product development and leadership while working closely with commercial and client-facing teams. That moved naturally over time.
Even in project and program management, product teams are heavily involved, so you get exposure to how products are built. I realized project management is very structured — following timelines and delivering what’s required — but it doesn’t always question why something is being built or how it will impact users. That questioning came naturally to me, and that’s what pulled me toward product.
What parts of project management are best applied to what you do in product now? And on the flip side, what have you had to unlearn from project management that doesn’t work as well in product?
Project management is essentially structured planning, stakeholder alignment, and risk management. What doesn’t translate, though, is rigid scope. Product is about flexibility, learning, and adaptation. I had to shift from delivering predefined outputs to validating certain outcomes.
We brought in the MVP model, then, so that you’re pushing a concept, testing it out, continuing to improve it, and so on. It’s all about the change mindset, which is huge from project to product.
Effective change management and leadership
In your view, there are 2 pillars of digital transformation: tools and products, and personnel management. How do you approach both pillars simultaneously so that they’re working together and not against one another?
I learned this the hard way. When I was more on the software development side, I focused too much on features and not enough on adaptability and behavior change. But to be honest, tech and people have to evolve together. It cannot be that the people are changing, but tech is not changing. Having a shiny new tool doesn’t create value unless there’s a behavior change as well. Every major product rollout has to pair with clear roles and responsibilities as well. That’s where change leadership comes in, which is all about creating a new way of working that feels natural, not forced.
If you’re meeting resistance in the digital transformation process, how do you determine which pillar is the issue?
There’s no kind of standard governance structure, but transformation requires more than just technology — it needs cultural readiness as well. When there is a shift in willingness to make decisions and prioritize outcomes over activity, which is a product mindset, digital transformation steps in. But if you don’t see those signals, then it’s likely time to start with modernization of the tool and the process, and then take slow steps toward development.
So, when I’m assessing things for a leadership report, I’m evaluating how well leadership is rallying behind the concept of experimenting. Because when you’re stepping into product development, you sometimes do not know how this will be done.
What do you see as true digital transformation for an organization, and what do you look for as a signal that an organization is actually prepared to undergo that transformation?
Say, for example, in an aviation environment like I’m in now, you’re looking into doing a digital transformation via airport navigation improvements. At the same time, you have certain guardrails in place by specific entities, so you have to follow these guidelines and still create a good passenger experience. For this example, you want to add this tool to let people know where they are and how to navigate the airport, but you also have to place it strategically in the physical space so people can access it easily. This is where transformation comes in, and it essentially marries with the digital version of wayfinding.
On the flip side, if you’re just pushing this wayfinding tool on an app but not guiding users through how to use it, it’s going to be too complex for the average person. Essentially, with digital transformation, there are certain ways you can use innovative technologies, but at the same time, you have to optimize the entire experience around the process itself.
Designing for diverse users at scale
You have a unique challenge in that you serve a very dynamic user group made up of people who vary in digital savviness. How do you design for users with vastly different digital comfort levels?
Our passenger demographics are very different. So, when designing products, you have to look into the mix of customers and account for all demographics.
For us, that means offering multiple channels. That means apps for tech-savvy users and in-person support in critical areas for others. This product development also requires both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative data is all about data, but qualitative research is where the rubber meets the road — it shows usage and how people actually experience the product.
Our goal is to meet every traveler where they are, so no matter their background or familiarity with technology, they can navigate the airport confidently and comfortably.
How do you troubleshoot an issue to ensure, for example, that the way you address an in-person wayfinding challenge doesn’t interfere with the digital wayfinding solution? How do you keep those avenues complementary, not combative?
It’s an ongoing learning process. You have to go back to the MVP model, where you push certain features, test them, and improve as you go. That’s all part of learning. Through that, you can make a decision. Developing a customer experience is important for the product in that case.
Driving a product mindset inside organizations
In your role at DFW International Airport, you’ve joined a team driving the shift from a project mindset to a product mindset. How are you contributing to making this transformation impactful?
The biggest signal is redefining ownership around persistent products instead of temporary projects. With a temporary project, there’s a start and an end date, as well as clear timelines. But when you change success metrics to focus on the outcomes, the real signal is that success is about what to build and why. That’s the kind of curiosity that showcases that you’re moving in the right direction from a mindset standpoint. When teams move from asking “When will it be done?” to “What should we build and why?” that’s real progress.
In terms of user reactions, the biggest surprise to us so far has been how much small improvements mattered. Internal teams focused on big technical wins, but passengers clearly valued clarity, predictability, and reduced effort. This was a great reminder for the team that user experience is more emotional, not just functional.
This is something we’re incorporating more into our product development as well — that we have to think through from a user’s perspective completely and emotionally, rather than just viewing it as a tech upgrade on our end.
Looking back at your experience in global organizations and now owning this shift from the project to product mindset, what do you think organizations most often misunderstand about product management and digital transformation? What are people still getting wrong?
The first big misconception is that product management is only about roadmap execution. It’s not — it’s also about continuously problem framing and decision-making in uncertainty. You do not know what lies ahead as you move a step forward.
The second is that digital transformation is like a one-time program or tech upgrade. It’s actually about ongoing capabilities that you nurture over a period of time. And if you treat it like a traditional timeline-based project, they’ll miss the point that transformation is not about a one-time change — it’s about continuous improvement. Three things go together here: digital transformation, innovation, which is part of product development, and continuous improvement.
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