> product manager · community builder · average writer
Ten years of figuring out what to build, and then building it right.
A decade of work tends to leave a paper trail.
Hundreds of articles written. Dozens of products shipped. A few expensive lessons that didn't make it into any case study.
That's probably the best summary of how I work — obsessive about understanding things before I claim to know them.
Before the career, there was just a kid taking apart hardware, trying to understand how machines talked to each other. Got certified as a technician before I had a first real paycheck. That curiosity is the only thing that stayed constant through everything that came after.
The path followed a logic that only makes sense in reverse. Tech support. Marketing. Project management. Product. Consulting. No clear roadmap existed for most of that work in Pakistan when I started — so I drew one as I went. Learned product by shipping the wrong thing first. Learned business by getting it wrong deliberately, until right became obvious. A decade of that produces a certain kind of judgment you can't get from a course.
The work eventually split in two. One half: helping founders build what should exist, not what sounds good in a pitch deck. Discovery before development — that's the whole philosophy. The other half: helping people figure out tech and career without a playbook. The way I had to.
Neither half makes sense without the other. Both came from the same thing: seeing a gap and building something rather than complaining about it.
If I have an idea, it tends to have a .com at the end of it. Some are still standing. Most taught me something.
Both count. And there are probably a few in the queue as you read this.
Every generation stands on the shoulders of the one before it.— Saqib Tahir
I hope to be someone helping the next.
Building products and building people — two sides of the same mission.
Not a typical agency, not a full product company. An in-between that bridges figuring out the right product and building it right.
Hire my product brain directly. Selective consulting for founders who need product leadership without the overhead.
Breaking down tech for everyone — in plain language. Explaining things that took years to learn so the next builder doesn't have to.
Pakistan's first mentorship community for tech builders — shortcuts earned the hard way, shared the easy way.
Saqib is a true pleasure to work with. He's an incredibly talented product owner and keenly knowledgeable on all facets of product development. And more importantly, he's a person of great character. The energy he brings to projects, his wit and sense of humor, his ability to work cohesively with any team, and his limitless creativity — Saqib brings his A game each and every time. Hire him, and good luck keeping him because a talent like Saqib is going to be in hot demand.
Saqib has been instrumental as our product partner for Payroll Standard. His leadership in product discovery, combined with exceptional workshop facilitation and structured methodology, drives outstanding results. His strategic approach to understanding user needs and prioritizing what actually matters makes him invaluable to our team. Highly recommended.
Saqib got up to speed quickly and became an integral part of the team in no time. A strong cross-functional collaborator, he worked seamlessly with everyone and earned universal respect. He produced high-quality discovery work that moved the project forward with confidence and precision.
I hired Saqib to manage product discovery, market research, and project management for one of my U.S.-based clients building a CRM. Saqib has been terrific so far and helped the client raise a $250K seed discovery round. 100% recommend — and I'll be using him to manage my other client projects.
Saqib was crucial in helping my agency grow and scale. We did over $300K in sales in 2022 and he was a big part of it. A versatile partner who made significant contributions as product strategist for enterprise clients, and helped build repeatable, scalable discovery processes.
I worked with Saqib directly at Crowdbotics, where he managed a couple of high-importance projects. He's great at research — able to collect information from various sources and strategize the best path forward for complex projects. I was also impressed by his ability to build trust quickly with clients and internal stakeholders.
When I think of self-motivated, Saqib embodies this. He came in as a product partner and excelled at learning the domain and requirements in record time. He partnered with our existing product team to map out our discovery process and identified gaps and solutions. We wouldn't have made the progress we have without his knowledge and leadership.
Always a pleasure working with Saqib. Excellent work ethic, and he always goes above and beyond expectations. As a CEO/Founder of a web agency based in the US, there's no one more versatile and reliable for product strategy and discovery work.
Products shipped across B2B SaaS, fintech, AI, and marketplaces — where I led product and directed delivery.
A U.S. eLearning enterprise managing tens of thousands of students across regions was held together by four disconnected systems. I led discovery and architecture to replace all of them — one unified, HIPAA-compliant CRM that saved $500K annually and gave the ops team actual control of their data.
A smart community solutions company needed a platform that could simultaneously serve residents, service providers, managers, and admins — without making any of them feel like they were using enterprise software. I defined the multi-role architecture and product experience that turned fragmented community ops into a single connected system. Service utilization jumped 40%.
Australian payroll teams were interpreting hundreds of pages of industrial law manually — and reaching different conclusions every time. I led the product definition and build of a SaaS platform that turns award interpretation into visual compliance logic: traceable, auditable, and defensible. Audit prep time dropped 70%.
A boutique vacation rental company generating six-figure annual revenue was handing a significant cut to Airbnb and VRBO with no access to their own guest data. I defined and led the build of a direct booking platform with live marketplace sync, dynamic pricing, and a brand-aligned guest experience. Direct bookings up 40%, platform fees down 25%.
A geospatial technology company needed to make professional-grade land measurement accessible to anyone — realtors, homeowners, field surveyors, outdoor professionals. I led discovery and product design for a cross-platform mobile app that delivers GPS-accurate plot measurement, offline mapping, ownership lookup, and contour visualization in one intuitive interface.
Business lending was running on email threads and PDFs. A fintech company came to me to build the platform that should have existed: a three-sided marketplace where borrowers submit structured requests, lenders filter and respond with offers, and administrators have real-time visibility across every deal. Managed through full beta launch.
PaCEO, a non-profit advancing employee ownership as a succession strategy, needed a free, self-serve platform to reach business owners before the advisor conversation ever started. I led product strategy and development for an ESOP pre-feasibility SaaS with browser-only financial modeling, readiness assessments, and advisor matching — zero data leaves the device until the owner is ready.
