NIC Sialkot is hosting an intensive Design Thinking Workshop today, Thursday, October 8, 2026, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM at the incubation centre, with its startups stepping into a session aimed at refining their value propositions and putting user experience at the heart of what they build. The workshop is built around the framework of design thinking, with the goal of helping founders create products that their users actually want rather than products that only make sense inside the team that built them, a gap that accounts for a good share of early stage failures.
The session is led by Shajia Khan, Unit Head of Product Design at Bank of Punjab, who brings years of experience in designing products for a large financial institution and will deliver practical strategy alongside hands-on guidance for the cohort. Her background gives the workshop a grounding in how a major organisation approaches product design for real customers at scale, which is a useful counterpoint for early stage founders who are often working from instinct and limited user feedback. Bank of Punjab is also among the supporters named alongside the session.
NIC Sialkot has framed the case for design thinking around three benefits for its founders. It helps them pinpoint the exact pain points their users face, it accelerates feature validation and prototyping, and it saves time and resources by failing fast and iterating faster. For a startup with limited funds and a short runway, the ability to test an idea cheaply and discover early that it does not work can be worth more than months spent building a full product on an untested assumption, which is the practical logic behind the iterative approach the workshop teaches.
The session is the latest in a run of skills workshops at NIC Sialkot, following recent sessions on personal branding and, tomorrow, storytelling and pitch practice, and it reflects the centre’s approach of pairing technical and business support with practical sessions on how founders design, present and sell their products. The programme is backed by the Ministry of IT and Telecommunication Pakistan and Ignite National Technology Fund, together with Bank of Punjab, CyberVision International and Mobilink Bank.
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