The Invisible Architect Of Experience
Manar Elsakka
Vice President, Business Technology Solutions
Universal Creative
The Invisible Architect Of Experience
Manar Elsakka
Vice President, Business Technology Solutions
Universal Creative
Guests walking through a theme park rarely think about wireless architecture, backbone infrastructure, network redundancy, or operational technology layers quietly coordinating everything around them. Yet the difference between immersion and disruption often depends on whether those systems perform flawlessly without ever demanding attention. Manar Elsakka has spent more than two decades building exactly those invisible foundations across some of the world’s most complex entertainment and operational environments.
From managing critical infrastructure and telecommunications projects in Saudi Arabia to building a multi-location electronics business in Florida and later leading parkwide systems for projects such as Universal Epic Universe and Universal Beijing Resort, his career has consistently evolved at the intersection of engineering precision, operational scale, and guest experience. Today, as Vice President of Business Technology Solutions at Universal Creative, he continues shaping the technology ecosystems behind some of the industry’s most ambitious destinations. In an exclusive conversation with TradeFlock, Manar reflects on leadership, systems thinking, and building technology that guests should never have to notice.
What connected your journey from system integration in Saudi Arabia to entrepreneurship and executive leadership in themed entertainment?
Industries changed dramatically across those years, but the underlying work remained surprisingly consistent throughout. Early in my career at ALFALAK, large-scale system integration projects for organizations such as Saudi Aramco and the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu demanded reliability, execution discipline, and operational precision, leaving very little room for error. Running Smart Electronics in Florida introduced an entirely different layer of responsibility, because sustaining a business forces you to think far beyond technology alone. Customer relationships, staffing, cash flow, vendor management, and long-term sustainability all become deeply interconnected almost immediately, and none of them waits for the others to be resolved first. Moving into themed entertainment leadership through projects like Walt Disney World and Universal Epic Universe felt like a significant leap at first, yet the core motivation beneath it all remained the same: solving complex problems through technology while building environments that leave a lasting impact on the people who move through them.
Inside destinations like Epic Universe and Universal Beijing, where does engineering stop and storytelling begin?
In themed entertainment environments, the line between engineering and storytelling is almost impossible to cleanly separate, and in the best projects, it was never meant to be separable in the first place. Parkwide systems, including wireless infrastructure, networking, audio, security, operational technologies, and digital systems, all influence immersion, guest flow, atmosphere, and emotional experience simultaneously rather than independently. Engineering succeeds in these environments when technology becomes nearly invisible while still operating with extremely high reliability underneath the surface of the experience. Guests should never pause to think about the infrastructure surrounding them. They should remain fully inside the story the destination is trying to create, and the moment they become aware of the systems supporting that story, the story has already lost. What made projects like Universal Beijing Resort and Epic Universe so demanding was precisely how closely engineering teams had to collaborate with creative, entertainment, operational, and construction groups throughout every phase of development. Technical decisions were constantly shaped by storytelling goals, crowd movement, visual design, emotional pacing, and operational realities, all pressing against one another at once.
“The best technology inside entertainment environments is usually the technology guests never notice.”
After more than 20 years in technology leadership, what has building strong teams actually taught you?
Early in my career, technical expertise carried more weight in my thinking than it deserved over the long term, and it took years of managing genuinely complex projects to understand why. Overseeing multidisciplinary teams on large-scale work made it clear that communication, trust, emotional intelligence, and adaptability shape outcomes far more consistently than technical brilliance alone, particularly when projects enter periods of pressure and ambiguity that every large-scale effort eventually reaches. Strong teams rarely emerge from micromanagement, nor from leaders who need to have every answer before they can move. Some of the best results I have seen came from giving talented people genuine ownership, supporting their development, and creating sufficient clarity of purpose so they could continue operating confidently even as the environment around them shifted. Leadership in those moments is not about being the most capable person in the room. It is about ensuring capable people never feel alone in their difficulties.
How did building Smart Electronics and your other ventures shape the way you lead today?
Entrepreneurship changes the way you evaluate decisions because consequences become immediate and deeply personal in ways that working inside a larger organization never quite replicates. Expanding Smart Electronics across multiple locations required balancing operations, customer experience, hiring, financial discipline, and long-term planning simultaneously rather than sequentially, and the pressure of holding all of that together at once sharpens judgment in ways nothing else does. Launching ventures in immersive entertainment added an entirely new perspective. Escape rooms operate at the intersection of technology, storytelling, operations, and emotional engagement, and what makes them instructive is that guests never evaluate the infrastructure directly. They respond entirely to how the experience makes them feel, moment by moment, which means technology either supports that feeling invisibly or betrays it the instant something goes wrong. Carrying that understanding into large multidisciplinary teams changed how I think about hierarchy, because authority alone rarely creates strong organizations. Trust, accountability, adaptability, and shared ownership matter far more once projects reach genuine operational complexity.
What was the hardest part of delivering technology at the scale of Epic Universe?
Projects the size of Epic Universe operate almost like living ecosystems because dozens of interconnected systems evolve simultaneously while construction itself continues to change around them. Networking, communications, security, operational technologies, ride integration, vendor coordination, and infrastructure dependencies all move together under extremely compressed timelines, and the interdependencies between them mean a decision made in one area rarely stays contained there. Maintaining alignment across large multidisciplinary teams while requirements continue evolving in real time is one of the most demanding aspects of work at this scale, because a single adjustment can ripple quickly across several other systems in ways that are not always immediately visible. Communication and adaptability become just as important as technical execution itself under those conditions, sometimes more so. What held the team together during the most difficult periods was a culture built around transparency and mutual accountability, not around avoiding difficulty but around moving through it without losing people to frustration or isolation along the way.
