The National Incubation Center Karachi will host a Primary Track session on design thinking titled Building Products Users Want on Thursday, October 29, 2026, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM. The session is part of the curriculum for Cohort 16 and is led by Furqan Qureshi, a consultant. It is designed to help founders understand user needs, identify real world challenges, and apply design thinking principles to develop solutions that address genuine market demand.
The session is practical in format. Participants will work on a design thinking empathy map for their own startups, a tool that sets out what a user thinks, feels, says, and does, and which helps founders see a problem from the customer’s side. They will then develop a validated solution prototype based on the insights they gather from users. The aim is to move each startup closer to product-solution fit, the point at which what a company builds matches what its customers actually need and are willing to use.
Many startups fail because they build a product before they understand the problem, and design thinking is meant to prevent that. By starting with the user, founders learn where real pain points lie, test their ideas early with simple prototypes, and change course before they have spent heavily on development. For founders in the early months of an incubation program, a session built around exercises on their own companies can turn general principles into concrete next steps, and it gives them a chance to get feedback from a consultant who works with products across different fields.
Founders can register through the event page. The National Incubation Center Karachi is funded by Ignite and the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, and the session is one of a series of Primary Track sessions covering the core skills of building a startup. The announcement did not say whether the session is open to people outside the cohort, so interested founders should check the registration page. With the session two days away, participants should come prepared with a clear picture of the users their startup serves, since the exercises are built around that information.
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