Noora Shanak on building for people, not just platforms
Twenty years between the technical and the human sides of e-commerce, and why the second one is the harder problem.
Noora Shanak has spent more than twenty years moving between the technical and the human sides of e-commerce — as a consultant, as Co-Founder and COO of ShopGo, where she helped over 1,000 businesses across MENA launch and grow online, and now as the co-founder leading Umbrella500's technology practice.
That range is the subject of her appearance on episode 6 of Parachute16 Podcast, where she is introduced as someone who wears more than one hat — comfortable moving between the technical questions a platform raises and the very human ones underneath them: who is this actually for, and what do they need that they have not said out loud yet.
Building an online store is usually talked about as a technical problem. The harder problem sits one layer up.
The platform, the integrations, the checkout flow — those are the parts that get specified. Twenty years suggests the part that decides the outcome is understanding the person on the other end of the transaction well enough to build something they will actually use. That is the thread running through ShopGo, through the training she co-delivers with Saleem Najjar across our programmes, and through every store the team builds today.
It is also why the episode is titled the way it is. Woman of the people is the show's framing, not ours, but it names something real about how the work gets done here: the technology is the easy half.