Melika Vaez
I build and ship consumer products, from design and strategy to the build itself, across fintech, marketplaces, and games. My real superpower is a feel for a product's beauty: I can tell, almost on sight, whether a screen will win someone over or lose them. I am a details person, I love solving hard problems, and I have a real pull toward building new things from scratch. I welcome new friendships, and I gravitate to people who are smart and a little funny. I love watching series, and I am genuinely a workaholic.
Turned a World Cup marketing campaign into a standalone social-casino platform
Started as a World Cup campaign; when the tournament ended, we turned it into a standalone social-casino platform built on games people play for their own sake. Later, we sold half the business.
Researched, designed, and built a Persian dating app alone, backend to 36 screens, in six weeks
A Telegram mini-app for Persian dating and personality-matching. Solo: market research, an 18-tool personality suite, a real backend, live at elaraa.ir.
Designed the dashboard and bilingual panel for a marketing-automation platform, on a small engineering team
A marketing-automation platform for the Iranian market, built for enterprise scale: segments, campaigns, and a visual journey builder across eight channels. I designed the dashboard and the bilingual Persian/English panel.
Grew a used-phone marketplace to 1.5M monthly users on organic search alone
Inspection, pricing, and resale for used phones. No paid acquisition, ever.
Replaced attendance hardware with a single classroom photo
The teacher photographs the room. Image processing marks everyone present. No scanner, no card, no queue.
Led a 7-person fintech team on a product that never launched
Connecting a bank card directly to a gold account. War, then cost cuts closed the team, but the work merged into WallGold and continued there. Here's the honest account.
Five things a product can ask you to own. This is which of them each job actually handed me, and GoldCup is the first time I have owned the build.
Graphic design. I made things look right and had no say in whether they were right.
PM and designer on a used-phone marketplace. It reached 1.5M people a month without buying a single click.
Product director, designer, and a team at once. Deployed across universities, SAMPAD, and every branch of Iran's largest tutoring network.
My own juice shop, and never a quiet one. No roadmap, no team to escalate to. Just rent, stock, and whether the door opened.
PM for seven to eight people on card-to-gold. Banking rails and regulation. It never launched.
Product, design, and I take the builds and ship them myself.