Cohort 5 at the National Incubation Center Islamabad has completed a two-day Design Thinking workshop that organizers and participants alike are describing as a turning point in how the cohort approaches the fundamentals of building a startup. The session, facilitated by Imran Khattak, was held under the broader framework supported by Ignite, the National Technology Fund operating under the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, and forms part of the structured capacity-building programming that NIC Islamabad offers its resident founders as they move through the early stages of developing their ventures.
What distinguished this workshop from conventional startup training was its deliberate focus on the tension between building and validating, two activities that early-stage founders frequently conflate or sequence incorrectly. The first day pushed founders into uncomfortable but necessary territory, centering on a single question that many had not confronted directly before: whether the problem they were solving was one that actually existed in the market or one they had constructed in their own minds. Founders who entered the session defending their ideas with conviction were, by design, made to question those same ideas with the same rigor. The facilitation structure did not allow assumptions to remain unchallenged, and the discomfort that produced was, by most accounts, the point.
By the second day, a visible shift had taken place in how teams were engaging with the material. Rather than presenting or pitching, founders were listening, conducting real user interviews, gathering direct feedback, and bringing that information back into their product thinking in real time. The workshop used tools drawn from the Design Thinking methodology, including the “How Might We” framing technique, which encourages teams to restate problems in ways that open up solution space rather than close it down prematurely. Prototypes built during the session were grounded in findings from actual conversations with potential users rather than internal assumptions about what those users might want or need.
The outcomes varied by team, but the direction of movement was consistent. Founders who had entered with confidence in their product direction left with sharper reasoning to support that confidence, having tested it against real feedback rather than simply asserting it. Founders who had been less certain about their path emerged with greater clarity, with some choosing to pivot based on what user interviews revealed and others doubling down on their original direction after finding that the evidence supported it. In both cases, the shift was from opinion to data, which is precisely the outcome the workshop was designed to produce.
The session reflects a broader philosophy embedded in NIC Islamabad’s approach to incubation, one that treats the ability to learn from users as a skill that must be actively developed rather than assumed. Facilitated by Imran Khattak, the workshop was not structured as a lecture on Design Thinking principles but as a live exercise in applying them under pressure, with real stakes attached. For Cohort 5, which now moves forward with prototypes and user insights grounded in validated learning rather than founder intuition, the workshop appears to have delivered something more durable than a methodology. It delivered a shift in how these founders think about the act of building itself.
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