Studying was not particularly one of his areas of interest. A regular backbencher, he was rather interested in football, which he was pretty good at. He once got an offer to play for Bangladesh National under-15 Football Team. But, Fate had another plan for him. And of course it was not football; nor was it the idea of being a pilot, which, too, he once gave some thought despite his academic background in business studies.

Mehedi Reza may not have been able to invade the sky as a pilot, but that did not stop him from flying high. He is currently working as a product operation manager at China-based e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. One of the most skilled persons in technological arena in Bangladesh, he is also the first in the country to hold a high-ranking post with a globally recognised company such as Alibaba.

Although a business graduate, Reza says his career choice in the field of technology is not just for making a living out of it; it is his passion. ‘I majored in business studies. After my study at the Australia’s Griffith University, I returned home in 2002’, Mehedi Reza said.

He went on talking about how he ended up working in the technology sector in spite of having a completely different academic background: ‘As I was the only son of my parents, they wished me to do something here [Bangladesh]. My career started with Proshika. It was in 2003. Working there as a web developer, I used to work on website development, graphics designing, and flash 2D animation. I had no formal education on these things; just studied a few things myself out of curiosity and gathered some practical skills.’

Reza said it was during his job at Proshika that he learned to work with HTML, CSS and PHP. He worked there for 5 years after which his foothold in the realm of technology grew stronger and stronger as years passed on.

In 2008, Mehedi Reza got a contractual job in Japan where he worked on a local website, apriori.co.jp, which he developed into Japanese Unicode version and maintained it for three months. In the same year he joined US-based organisation Vonair.inc as a creative engineer.

‘I used to work on software UI design, animation, and web design there,’ Reza said about his job responsibilities at Vonair.inc.

For a major breakthrough, however, Mehedi Reza did not have to wait much long. In 2009, he got a job at Wunderman, a multinational network of advertising, marketing and consulting companies, as an interactive manager responsible for leading the organisation’s activities in Bangladesh.

During his 4-year job at Wunderman, Reza assisted in Nokia’s core digital marketing and production activities and maintained its CRM channel. ‘Apart from these, I received several trainings on digital media in Singapore and UAE,’ he said.

In 2013, Mehedi Reza, in collaboration with Impress Group, founded iDigital, a digital agency where he served as the head of digital and CEO. At that time he was able to develop links with several local and international clients such as Hyundai, Nokia, Partex, and Runner. The opportunity to work with Alibaba Group came in 2016 after around a year of service at Bengali Daily ‘Prothom Alo’, where he joined in 2014.

Headquartered in Hangzhou, China, Alibaba Group has grown to be a giant in global e-commerce industry since its inception in 1999. As a product operation manager at this online marketplace, Mehedi Reza is mainly responsible to look into the company’s affairs in Bangladesh and Pakistan. His works are mainly centered on the development of UC Browser.

‘My aim is to make UC Browser likable to the users’, Reza said, ‘so that they can have great experience using it. We want to develop this browser as user-friendly to ensure a minimum data package usage’.

The possibilities of digital marketing in Bangladesh are huge, says Reza who believes contents, especially videos, are most significant in this context.  In his opinion video contents are the future of digital marketing.

Mehedi Reza prefers to consider himself as a tech-enthusiast and an expert in digital media whose eagerness to learn more and more about the world of technology is not just out of mere professional necessity; but also out of passion. For Reza profession and passion delicately intertwine and inspire him to make the scope of digital media vaster and wider.