About Yassir Yahya.
Yassir Yahya is an independent digital consultant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the founder of Unsurmeta Media.
Yassir Yahya works with founders, CEOs, and senior teams at growing businesses, in Malaysia and abroad.
Yassir's work spans digital strategy, product management, user experience design, technical SEO and AI search, front-end development, web design, and AI automation. He has worked in digital since 2007, in e-commerce, financial technology, enterprise, real estate, education, and the public sector. He has worked with clients in Malaysia and abroad, such as Australia and the United States. He speaks English and Bahasa Malaysia.
Early life and education
Yassir Yahya was born on 28 March 1983 in Kuala Lumpur. He has been interested in web design and development since the late 1990s, when he first used the internet on a dial-up connection, and he taught himself HTML from a book. From 2000 to 2003 he studied at Sunway College in Petaling Jaya, where he completed an Advance Diploma in Computer Studies, with a major in networking and PC support.
Career
Yassir Yahya began his digital career in 2007 as a web developer at Pulse Group, where he made survey tools for a market research firm. He then managed the website and marketing materials at CieloVision. From 2008 to 2013 he was a senior user interface consultant at IVIS Group, where he built accessible, responsive interfaces and a reusable front-end framework for client projects. At PETRONAS ICT, from 2013 to 2015, he led the switch to responsive design on websites built on Microsoft SharePoint.
In 2015 he joined 11street, a Malaysian e-commerce platform, and was promoted to UI/UX architect later that year. He led technical SEO and web performance initiatives across the platform, and led the implementation of its Google Analytics e-commerce tracking. From 2018 to 2023 he worked at HelloGold, a financial technology company for retail investors in precious metals, first as product manager and then as product lead. There he led teams that built a service for other businesses to let their customers buy and sell precious metals.
Independent practice
Since 2023 Yassir Yahya has worked as an independent digital consultant through Unsurmeta Media, the practice he founded in Kuala Lumpur. He runs his service, Digital Consulting, with a method he calls the Scaffold Method.
Other activities
Yassir Yahya has supported books such as Web Typography and Smashing Book 5, among other projects.
Where Yassir Yahya has worked
What you can expect from me
I say what I see.
When a problem comes from how the website is built and the design gets the blame, I say so. I also tell you when a vendor's proposal has a flaw.
You work with me directly.
I write the proposal you receive and do the work myself, on the calls and in the documents. When a task needs a specialist, I bring in someone I trust.
Your team owns the result.
In the last stage of the Scaffold Method, I write down how everything works, so your team can run it without me. Your accounts and files stay in your name.
I work across disciplines.
I have worked in web design, technical SEO, and product management. A problem that crosses two disciplines often goes unfixed, because each vendor sees only one part of it.
I tell you how I use AI.
AI helps me with research and first drafts, and I review everything before you see it. Your confidential data never goes into an AI tool, as my AI policy explains.
I find the cause first.
Each engagement starts with a diagnosis of what is broken and why. You get my findings as a prioritised list, with recommendations, before any fix begins.
A dial-up modem and an HTML book
I got my first taste of the internet through Jaring, Malaysia's first ISP, on a dial-up connection. I remember watching images load one line at a time. I was hooked. I knew straight away that I didn't just want to visit other people's sites. I had to have a page of my own.
I begged my late dad for a copy of Microsoft FrontPage. He gave me some tough advice that ended up shaping my entire career.
If you want to do it, learn it yourself.My late dad, on Microsoft FrontPage
So I did. I pooled my duit raya (the money children receive at Hari Raya) and bought my first book on HTML. My first creation was a GeoCities site, and I quickly learned the realities of web development back then. If you wanted something to work, you had to write for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Years later, while working in a UI consulting role, a project was stuck. A specific piece of JavaScript was making the page slow on older browsers like Internet Explorer 6. I was stumped until a senior colleague pointed out something I'd missed about how the browser was rendering the code. That was the moment it became clear that how you write your code has a direct effect on performance.
That insight shaped everything that followed.
Along the way.
Photos of Yassir
Studio headshots and casual portraits.
