mE IN A NUTSHELL
I'm Nada.
I grew up in Tunisia asking why things worked the way they did.
I still haven't stopped.
I'm a strategist, researcher, and designer. I work across contexts that don't usually talk to each other — public policy, community economies, brand strategy, deep tech startups — and I bring the same practice to all of them: read deeply, surface what's missing, and make it usable.
What I mean by "read deeply"
I don't trust surface data. It usually reflects whoever had the power to collect it. When I researched Latvia's residence permit process, the government's metrics said the system worked. The students navigating it in a language they didn't speak, missing documents they didn't know they needed, feeling unwelcome in a country they'd chosen, told a different story. When I worked with deep tech startups, investor priorities consistently counted as evidence while user needs held less weight. When I researched women's entrepreneurship in Tunisia, the barriers weren't individual ambition. They were structural: stigma, funding gatekeeping, gender norms.
The pattern is the same (almost) everywhere: the people closest to the problem are often furthest from the decisions about it. I go into that gap.
How I work
I research, qualitative and quantitative. In-depth interviews, co-design workshops, behavioral analysis, systems mapping, surveys, cultural observation. I've done this with government officials in Latvia, startup founders in Tunisia, residents in Tallinn's Lasnamäe district, children in Latvian schools, and communities designing their own economies.
Then I translate. Into strategies, service blueprints, brand narratives, prototypes, policy recommendations, pitch decks, whatever the decision-maker needs to act. I speak the language of research and the language of business because the gap between them is where most insight gets lost.
What shapes my thinking
I grew up in Tunisia. I studied business analytics. I co-founded a startup remotely from my dorm. I worked with deep tech ventures in Tunis. Then I moved to Europe for an Erasmus Mundus master's in service design, across Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
Each move reshaped how I see systems. Being an outsider navigating European bureaucracy isn't just biographical context; it's a research lens. Knowing what it feels like to not be the assumed user of a system makes me a better designer of it.
I kept noticing the same thing across every context: the knowledge that mattered most was rarely the knowledge the system was designed to hold. That pulled me toward decolonial approaches to design and more-than-human thinking, as live questions I was already asking about whose knowledge counts and what gets lost when we don't ask.
What I'm looking for
Work where deep thinking is valued. Where curiosity about culture, systems, and people is the core of the job. The sector matters less than whether the organization is willing to look past its own assumptions.
If you're building something that asks hard questions about who it's really for, I want to be in that room. I bring research rigor and strategic instinct, the view from inside a system and the view from outside it, Arabic, French, and English, and the lived experience of navigating four countries in two years without ever being the assumed user.
