Nahla Gamil was once unsure of her future. She now heads a tech team.

Nahla Gamil was once unsure of her future. She now heads a tech team.

The story of Nahla Gamil’s tech career cannot be told without her foundation: school.

Though a citizen of Egypt, she was raised in Saudi Arabia and after graduating from high school there in 2013, she appeared set for a conventional path in engineering

She moved to Qatar in 2013 to study Electrical Engineering at Qatar University, a public research institution, but she says the environment did not suit her.

“I did not really like it over there,” she recalls. “So I transferred to Eastern Mediterranean University [EMU] in Cyprus, and this is where I continued the rest of my studies.”

In 2015, when Gamil transferred to EMU to continue her studies, she chose to continue the Electrical Engineering program. She specialised in Power, but admits to feeling adrift regarding her long-term career aspirations.

“People my age did not know what they wanted to be,” she says, reflecting on the period before she found her niche.

Despite her uncertainty, she says she excelled academically and feared that if she entered the workforce immediately, she would never return for further study.

“I always heard stories of people who start working, and it’s harder for them to continue their Master’s after they start working,” she says.

She transitioned directly into a Master of Science (MSc) in Electrical Engineering at EMU in 2018. During her postgraduate studies, Gamil shifted her specialisation to Communication Engineering, a field she says she preferred over Power.

To support herself, she says she worked from 2018 to 2020 as a research assistant, a role involving academic support and teaching, at EMU. She taught C and C++ programming language courses. That immersion in programming development created an initial bond with software, though she remained unsure of how to translate this into a career.

“I wasn’t really sure where I wanted to go with that [degree],” Gamil says.

The global COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 redefined Gamil’s trajectory just as she finished her final academic papers in EMU.

With the world on hold, a friend at Microsoft, the US tech giant, advised her that the tech industry was the least influenced by the health crisis.

“No one knows how the world would go; however, the tech world is very strong, and it’s full of positions that you can actually [fill],” she says.

That conversation got Gamil thinking. She decided to “see what was happening in the tech world,” since it was related to what she had taught as a research assistant. In 2020, she started searching for a job in project management even before her Master’s graduation.

“In a month, I got two interviews—one in the company I’m working in now, and then another at a company that happens to be our partners right now,” she recalls.

In September 2020, he landed a role as a Project Manager (PM), a professional responsible for leading a team to achieve project goals, at Bit68, a Cairo-headquartered software development company. Bit68 had just 12 employees and a PM team of two at the time, according to her.

“I got hired one week after my graduation, and I had this agreement with my manager that I would work remotely until I came back to Egypt,” she says.

During her three-month probation period, which ended in December 2020, Gamil felt an immediate connection to her work.

“Something clicked with the place; with the position; with what I was actually doing,” she recalls.

She relocated to Egypt, her home country, in March 2021 to begin on-site operations, and to bridge her technical gaps, she took some online courses. She says she completed a Product Management Tech Fellowship at Knowledge Officer in August 2021 and an Agile Fundamentals course via Udemy in November 2021 to understand Scrum and Kanban methodologies used in project management.

She says she completed a Full Stack Web Development Diploma at Route, a technical training centre in Egypt, in September 2022. While she had no intention of becoming a developer, Gamil wanted to speak their language to better understand blockers.

“I knew how to speak the client’s language perfectly fine,” she says. “ I understood what they were saying. I understood the business side. But I also wanted to speak the developer’s language. I wanted to be able to understand when they had a problem.”

That expertise, according to Gamil, helped her progress from managing two people in 2021 to becoming the Head of Project Management in January 2022.

By 2023, Gamil was promoted to Vice President (VP), while retaining her leadership of the PM team. In September 2025, she became an official partner at Bit68.

Gamil’s career started out as a sharp learning curve that began with her own initial misunderstanding of the profession.

“I thought it was time to learn new languages and new things, because [project management was] very easy,” Gamil admits.

She made the “rookie” mistake of treating project management as a purely administrative task of asking for updates and setting meeting invites.

This personal experience helped Gamil identify a significant misconception in the industry: the confusion between a PM and a Project Coordinator (PC). She notes that many people think the job is simply about “telling the client, ‘we will be delivering the sprint by next Tuesday’,” but she argues that “a project can go down the hill, even if the developers are very good… if the project manager is not good.”

For Gamil, the myth that a PM does not need technical or business depth is dangerous. She argues that a true PM must understand the “business objective of the client” and “speak the language of the developers” to ensure the product’s future viability, rather than just coordinating requests.

Reflecting on her six-year tenure at Bit68, Gamil advises against leaving a company simply for a change of scenery.

She believes the only time to leave is when you feel that “you’re in a routine, you’re not learning anything, you’re not adding up anything to your skills.”

As someone who has worked in one company since her graduation, Gamil identifies two primary concerns that drive professionals to change companies very often: the fear of being perceived as “outdated” or unable to face new challenges, and the worry of stagnating by not being exposed to new skills.

Regarding her own decision to remain at the same firm, Gamil notes, “I was not worried about both options. I had made the choice back then that I wanted to stay in this place.”

She argues that staying in a growing firm offers a level of breadth and influence often missing in larger organisations.

“If you go [to a bigger organisation], there will be 100 of you, but here [a small organisation], there’s only you. You will learn so much here.”

Apart from self-learning and growing within an organisation, Gamil attributes her success to a lifelong work ethic, having worked on event organisation since the age of 16.