Shehab Abdelwahab, regional director for the Middle East at Sensei Labs: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the business community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of business questions for fun. Speaking to us this week is Shehab Abdelwahab (LinkedIn), regional director for the Middle East at Sensei Labs. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I'm Shehab Abdelwahab and I'm a professional in digital transformation IT services. I've been working in this sector for around 10 years now. I started off in Cairo; had a small stint trying to work in politics, but that didn't really work out. I later moved to the family business, working with software localization. I spent well over four years there, developing digital solutions for banks, then I moved to consulting with global system integrator Capgemini as a consultant mainly for digital transformation of financial services, and then I ended up getting approached by Sensei Labs to spearhead their growth in the region.

Sensei Labs originated as a product within a company called Klick Health in Canada. It was a product management and workflow platform, and after a couple of years, it was spun out as its own thing.

The business problem that it tries to solve is the challenge many organizations face in orchestrating large-scale, complex transformation initiatives, like M&As, cost transformations, procurement programs, and enterprise-wide transformations. Many organizations struggle with fragmented tools, manual processes (often Excel-based), limited visibility, and ineffective reporting. They run in a siloed manner with different platforms and teams. But Conductor by Sensei Labs — our flagship product — offers a central source of truth for programs and projects, as well as collaboration tools and real-time reporting.

Regionally, the companies and institutions that we align with the most are either semi-governmental or utility companies, like water and electricity companies that are focused on growing their core business. State-owned or semi-governmental entities are very mission-oriented, and I think it’s a very untapped sector here, because most of them are looking to IPO, and are trying to become more corporatized (take Salik or Dewa, for example). For them, it’s not about margins but about scaling the service, and this is the sweet spot for us, because we're about long-term sustainable impact.

There’s a big push towards what we call “fail fast and fail forward” in the tech world right now. It means that we have to try a lot of different things, and we have to have the agility to release a feature, test it in the market and see the response to it, and then come back to tweak it. This year, we’ve rolled out a project manager experience that we’ve already received a lot of good feedback on. It stems from a lot of requests for our Conductor product to have some project manager-specific functionality.

One key element is Harmony AI, which is our homegrown AI component. It trains on your own data as a customer with our own best practices and intellectual property, and it becomes like a coach for you that advises on where you should spend your time, and helps you identify inconsistencies in your projects.

Working at a startup — we’re 10 years old — means that despite the titles, I sometimes work as a solutions engineer, sometimes as an account executive or as a finance person. The main goal is I need to grow the book of business that I have here, and to do that, I need to constantly be providing value.

Every day, I block some time to think about how I can unlock more value for my customers. I think through new use cases, extra sets of features that could work for them, or new dashboards. With my prospective customers, it’s more about using my experience in transformation and transformation management to provide what we call thought leadership. The other part is prospecting for new customers, checking out market news and trends or acquisitions that are happening.

I try to be an early riser, but I'm not. I like to get my eight hours of sleep, so I usually start my day around 8am. I like my first 30-40 minutes to be quiet — I don’t touch my phone, I go make coffee and turn on some music.

The first thing I do after that is I read EnterpriseAM. I also check my emails quickly to see if there's any escalations or something that needs to be addressed right away. Because we’re a remote company, my office is at home, so I usually try to leave my apartment and get some sunlight and around the block a bit before getting back on my laptop and starting the day.

We’re actually a 4-day workweek company, so I would say Sensei Labs manages the work-life balance piece very well. Of course, some weeks require that I work on a Friday or a Sunday for a client depending on where they are in the region, but it’s always flexible.

I like to play football three times a week. That’s something that I dropped for a while in my life but have picked up again ever since I moved to Dubai. There’s apps here that you can use to just find a team and go play, which is really nice. I also usually spend 30 minutes in the morning reading.

The latest book that I read is actually an old one, but it’s been on my list for a while. It's called Range. It’s one of several books that Bill Gates had recommended a few years ago, and it talks about why the world needs more generalists than specialists now. The idea is: you can get so much out of AI now in terms of specialized knowledge, but it takes a lot of brain capacity to be able to connect the dots together and to think of the big picture. Then my favorite book of all time is called The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett. He's a neuroscientist and he talks about how the brain operates, how it collects information and builds memory, and how it responds to certain things.

One thing I try to instill in my daily habits is helping other people by being a soundboard that people can bounce ideas off of. I have a problem-solving brain, so these conversations really help stimulate it.

There’s two pieces of advice that have stuck with me. One was from one of my closest friends, who told me — in the context of a story he was telling — that the biggest lie is that life gets easier, and if you grasp that, you’ll be able to keep on going. What actually happens is you grow thicker skin and learn how to handle the difficult stuff.

The second was from my mother, who’s my idol, and she told me when I was working with her and found it challenging to sometimes have to do other people’s work, and she said everything that you get in life is a result of something you’ve done before, without thinking of the return you’ll get from it.

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