Business degree, engineer's hands

I am SM Saimul Islam, a product lead and full-stack engineer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I spent two and a half years as Head of Product at Upturn building Flow, a business operations SaaS, and before that led the technical side of StuDays, a student discount app now live on both the App Store and Google Play.

Since October 2026 I have been a Project Associate at Invest Bangladesh, working part-time on BanglaBiz - the government's business starter and management platform. It is deployed but not yet in use, which makes the job a mix of everything: UI/UX analysis, facilitating integrations, user research, sitting on the hiring team, and finding the policy gaps that would stop a real business owner from getting value out of it.

My background is deliberately double-sided. I am a BBA candidate at the Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka, and I have written production Flutter and Next.js for over five years. That means I can size a feature against its business case in the morning and ship it in the afternoon, without a translation layer in between.

Three years of teaching IELTS at Mentors - on the back of my own Band 8 - is the other half of the story. Standing in front of a room full of anxious students every week is the best training there is for explaining a hard technical tradeoff to people who do not write code - founders, clients, and boards included.

I work across the whole lifecycle: architecture, build, release, and the production support after launch. Linux system administration, relational databases, and data analysis are the parts I enjoy that most product people outsource.