Meet Tooba Durraze, Qualified's product manager for Signals. Since joining Qualified in 2021, Tooba's made an incredible impact to the product organization—and the team across the globe. Read on to learn about how Tooba came to Qualified and what she's most excited about building ⬇️

Tell me about your journey to Qualified?

Tooba: I was working for the World Economic Forum, and I was building this fun little project about chatbots. I was looking at who is in the conversational space and I came across Qualified. At first, I couldn't really tell if it was a marketing company or a tech company, but it looked interesting. The graphics looked super cool. So I reached out and asked to speak to Dan. I applied for a customer success position, and when I spoke to Dan and he told me that I should probably look at working on Signals and that's where it started. So it started as a little bit of like a recon mission and ended up becoming now my home for the last five months.

How did you create this role for yourself?

Tooba: I started as the director of Business Intelligence, which was broadly meant to look at what the data sets said about our business and where the future of our business was headed. From the beginning, though, I had an interest in Signals. It's actually part of the PhD that I'm doing right now, which deals a lot with AI algorithmic models and how they interact with big data sets. As our team was planning out the quarter, this was one of the buckets that was on my radar to think about GTM strategies for Signals and how we could forecast that into our revenue models. As I got more and more involved, I got sucked into the actual world of Signals with the data, sales use cases, etc and I loved it. I quarterbacked it for a little bit and then was asked to join as an official PM for Signals!

What motivates you?

Tooba: That's an interesting question. I think I'm very familiar and tribal. It's motivating for me to be around people that resonate with me and that push me in the right kind of direction...and I like an outlier. I've always been a bit of an underdog, so I like being around people who are working on things that may be considered 'underdog things' or work in atmosphere or surroundings that they wouldn't normally be found in. I think that's why Signals feels like such a home for me, because it's a bunch of people who are really interested in making cool things.*

What excites you most about Qualified?

Tooba: Qualified feels very much like a tribe or family where everyone is in it together. It's not just how great the product is. It's not just about how great our storytelling and narrative is around marketing; it's the people that are underpinning it and that comes across in every department. I have feelings and thoughts about how Qualified will end up being a frontier leader and some of the AI and AI-enabled intent spaces. I think it's super interesting to observe coming in, looking at it from just a conversational perspective, and now seeing the shift of the trajectory towards intent in a broader data place.

What do you want to build here?

Tooba: A community of people who are nerdy and geeky like me. Who enjoy building cool things* and who give room and space to ideas that may not be ideas that are normally thought about. So, like outside ideas, I think it's very important for me to be a part of a space that fosters that culture of innovation and fun alongside innovation. So I think that's something that I'm looking forward to building and fostering here.

Lastly, hit me with a humble brag

Tooba: The entire time I have been working at Qualified, and for the past two years, I've been pursuing a full time PhD while working. I have managed to surf or kayak or do some sort of physical activity almost every day while balancing a job in a full time PhD. I am very proud of that!

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Tooba, thank you for being an absolutely incredible partner, mentor, friend, and employee. We wouldn't be where we are without you!