Telecom & Media
What it takes for a telecom company to genuinely transform into a technology-first organization.
Every major telecom company in the world has declared its intention to become a technology company. The ambition is right — the path is harder than the press release suggests. Genuine digital transformation in telecoms is not a rebranding exercise or a new product launch. It is a fundamental change in how the organization thinks, makes decisions, and builds.
Telecoms have been built on engineering excellence in network infrastructure — a culture that prizes reliability, precision, and risk avoidance. Digital product development requires a different cultural operating system: tolerance for ambiguity, rapid iteration, customer-centric prioritization, and the willingness to ship something imperfect and improve it based on feedback. These cultures are not incompatible — but they need to coexist, not compete. The most successful telecom digital transformations create separate organizational units with distinct cultures for digital product development, while preserving the engineering discipline that keeps the network running.
Attracting software product engineers, UX designers, data scientists, and AI specialists to a telecom in competition with technology companies and startups is genuinely hard. Compensation structure, speed of decision-making, and organizational politics all work against telecoms in the talent market. The practical answer is a hybrid model: build a core internal team of product and data leaders who understand the business, and partner with specialized external teams for execution. RTG's Octopus Hubs model deploys specialized digital talent into telco environments, accelerating delivery without the full cost and complexity of permanent hiring.
Telecoms measure network uptime, call completion rates, and ARPU. Digital product companies measure daily active users, retention curves, feature adoption, and NPS. The transformation requires building new measurement competencies alongside existing ones — and, critically, using digital metrics to make commercial decisions. An organization that builds digital products but evaluates them only on revenue contribution misses the compound benefits of engagement, data, and platform leverage that are the real prize.
How leading telecom players in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are building digital product ecosystems beyond connectivity.
MENA’s media and streaming landscape is booming. The region’s OTT market grew 35% year-over-year in 2025, driven by local original content, sports rights, and improving broadband penetration. Shahid,
For decades, the MENA telecommunications sector defined itself by a single metric: network coverage and call quality. The business model was straightforward—own the pipes, sell minutes and data. By...
