Souq7 – Digital Mall App (KSA)

Souq7 | Building a Digital Mall Experience for One of Saudi Arabia’s Largest Markets
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During my time at Builder.ai, I spent six months leading the product development of Souq7, a digital companion app built for one of Jeddah’s largest and most visited marketplaces. The goal was bold: take a massive physical shopping district — divided into seven major retail zones, and convert it into a seamless digital experience that helped visitors discover brands, navigate categories, explore promotions, and receive real-time notifications as they moved through different areas of the mall.

Souq7 wasn’t simply an app project. It was a full transformation initiative, where the physical and digital worlds needed to merge into a single, coherent customer journey. Over two quarters, I led the vision, structured the product architecture, redesigned the user experience, wrote every user story, and collaborated with the development team to bring Souq7 to life.

Digitizing a Physical Market Into a Modern App

When I joined the project, Souq7 was little more than a raw idea. There was a mall with thousands of visitors and hundreds of shops, but no digital structure to represent it. My task was to define how people should explore the mall digitally and how merchants, zones, and promotions should be organized in the app.

The first challenge was translating the mall’s seven physical zones into a meaningful digital ecosystem. Each zone represented a category of retail experiences, fashion, electronics, accessories, food, home goods, and more. I designed the product so the user journey always began with the zones, inviting visitors to discover what each area offered, explore store lists, and browse detailed brand pages.

To help users understand the mall intuitively, I structured Souq7 around three pillars: zones, brands, and discovery. This structure became the backbone of the product, enabling effortless navigation inside a retail space that physically spans hundreds of stores.

Building the Core Experience From Scratch

The Souq7 app needed to feel simple and familiar, yet powerful enough to handle thousands of listings and multiple content layers. I redesigned the entire experience, ensuring every screen flowed logically into the next: from the home interface into zones, from zones into brand listings, and from brand listings into detailed store profiles.

Each store page became a digital storefront with brand information, location details, working hours, ongoing offers, and events. For a mall as large as Souq7, this was transformative. Visitors no longer depended on physical signages or guesswork. They could open the app, browse what interested them, and plan their visit before arriving.

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Integrating Offers, Promotions, and Events

One of the strongest demands from the mall management was to bring more visibility to events and promotions happening across Souq7. I built a dedicated promotional layer inside the app, ensuring that brands could highlight discounts, seasonal offers, and special activities all surfaced contextually where users needed them.

This transformed the app into more than just a directory. It became a live communication channel between the mall and its visitors, strengthening engagement and driving real footfall to stores depending on the time of day, week, or event schedule.

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Introducing Zone-Based Notifications With Smart Triggers

One of the most defining features of Souq7 was the notification system, which I designed to push relevant updates to users based on the zone they entered.

When a visitor walked into a different area of the mall, the app would send a targeted push notification highlighting promotions, events, or brand-related information specific to that zone. This dynamic behavior required careful planning:

• a clear trigger logic
• precise zone mapping
• message personalization
• avoidance of notification fatigue

The result was a smart, context-aware communication layer that made the app feel alive and reactive to the user’s real-world movement.

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Writing All User Stories and Product Documentation

Over the two quarters, I wrote every user story across the entire Souq7 ecosystem. Each story followed an INVEST structure with clear acceptance criteria, ensuring the development team could build quickly without ambiguity. The stories covered all features: zones, brands, offers, events, notifications, home screen, filters, search, onboarding, and user settings.

This documentation became one of the strongest assets of the project, giving Builders.ai’s team a precise blueprint of what needed to be built, tested, and delivered.

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Delivering an End-to-End Digital Mall Experience

By the end of Q2, Souq7 had evolved into a fully defined and fully structured digital companion app for one of Saudi Arabia’s largest shopping markets. It provided visitors with a seamless browsing experience, gave the mall control over promotions, and introduced real-time zone-based notifications that elevated the physical shopping experience.

Even though Souq7 was built under Builder.ai’s umbrella, the product carried your signature as the Product Manager who shaped the ecosystem from the ground up — defining the vision, structuring the user experience, architecting the flows, and delivering a complete end-to-end product.

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