I’m a product manager who builds, from the first question to the final detail.

Zakaria Kortam

I’m drawn to the whole arc of making something: the ambiguity of a first idea, the discipline of deciding what it should become, and the long, patient work of refining it until it feels inevitable.

Along the way, I obsess over the smallest things. The details most people will never consciously notice, and the ones no one would think to ask for, are where I spend a disproportionate amount of my time.

Attend to those details with enough care and they stop being small. They become the quiet, defining difference between a product people use and a product people love.

How I work

  • ProductFinding the problem worth solving, then holding the line on what matters through discovery, roadmaps, metrics, and launch.
  • DesignInteraction, motion, and systems. I sketch in Figma and finish in code, where the details actually live.
  • BuildingEnd to end, in TypeScript, React, Next.js, Rust, Python, and Postgres, with native apps for iOS, Android, and desktop.
  • AIAgents are part of how I work every day and part of what I ship, from retrieval and evals to MCP and voice.
  • CloudVercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes.

Education

Geisel Library at UC San Diego
UC San DiegoB.S. Electrical Engineering, 2026
Photo: Stephen Bay, CC BY 4.0
The lake at Evergreen Valley College
Evergreen Valley CollegeA.S. Mathematics, A.S. Computer Science, A.S. Physics
Photo: Cristiano Tomás, CC BY-SA 4.0