Product Centric Mindset | Teacher Stories
Rafael Mkrtchyan is the lecturer of our very first Product Management course. He has a strong engineering background and a huge passion and love for product management. In this article, I will share some of his thoughts both on product management perspectives in Armenia and the importance of tutoring.
Rafael majored in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He had the opportunity to work for several Silicon Valley companies while studying. His last job as a developer was at Google.
What was the reason to move from engineering to product management?
In my nine years of engineering experience, I was mainly developing technology from the engineering perspective. The reality is: you can build great technology, be super excited about it, and when it eventually reaches customers, it fails as a product, it meets reality. Exciting projects can quickly fail the needs of customers.
That was one of the driving factors for me to move from engineering to product management to be involved in all aspects of product management, which involves engineering but also involves the design, marketing, and bunch of other things.
“Engineering is fun, but for me, it’s exciting to have a general approach to building technology than just writing code. “
My first experience as a product manager was at CodeFights. I was one of the early hires, their first product manager. We managed to create an awesome product, exciting for engineers, but also a product that became successful for our target customers. It was quite hard to change from an introverted engineer to an extroverted product manager, but the opportunity was priceless.
At what point in life have you decided to tutor?
I was tutoring as a Teaching Assistant at the University of California, Berkeley. My primary responsibility was to help students to learn the main aspects of computer science. My primary audience was students with no prior programming experience.
When I was in Berkeley a year ago, I met Karen, the CEO of Armenian Code Academy, and we had a long discussion on our shared vision to run an experiment in Armenia. We wanted to transform Armenia from a country that provides outsourcing services to a country that builds products. One major step we both highlighted was the importance of educational and rotational programs like big companies have in Silicon Valley. That was something that excites us both and something in which we believe in, which can transform our IT ecosystem in general. I was confident with this decision to travel to Armenia and start working on the course of product management.
Why did you decide to teach future professionals in Armenia? What are the problems in the industry you think should be addressed?
The transformation from a project-centric and delivery centric mindset to a product-centric mindset is vital. When consulting my friends working in Armenian companies, I have noticed an interesting issue. People are used to celebrating product launches. People launch a feature, product, something, and right then they celebrate that. On the contrary, in Silicon Valley, in many companies, the celebration was towards the valuable outcome of the customers. It is nothing to blame. The problem is there was no bridge between great companies in Armenia and abroad, mentorship programs, and experience sharing.
“Output driven ideology is different from outcome-driven one, as outputs don’t mean you did something successfully. In project management, maybe it, but in product management, it doesn’t mean anything.”
What is the funniest experience you remember when tutoring at ACA?
Have you seen friends? There is a scene when one of the friends asks to move a couch to the third floor. He was consistently repeating “pivot, pivot pivot..”, the couch was huge. Eventually, friends were like, “you are annoying.”
I used to repeat “pivot” pretty much every day during the first stage of the training because product managers pivot a lot.
The funniest part was when I received a bottle written “pivot” on it. “Friends” fans and my students will get it.
What are the benefits of tutoring at ACA?
Freedom. Even though you get consulting from the experts here from the academy, you have the freedom to create your syllabus from scratch, and that comes from their hiring perspectives. They hire very qualified candidates and don’t try to micromanage them. It is a critical operations psychology; if you hire someone for something, you should trust that person to manage their jobs. I genuinely enjoy the operational and educational freedom to choose my schedule — also, support. ACA was quite helpful in finding great professionals, even from silicon valley, to come to Armenia to teach product management.
Please give one piece of advice for people who think to change their career to tech, and particularly to product management.
My main advice would be to be open to experiment-driven approaches because product management is the occupation where you have to do the most amount of experiment to get your desired results. There are so many uncertainties involved in your entire product work. You have to know the idea to get to the desired point of a successful product, new feature, and eventually desired metrics if you are not someone who has an experiment centric approach.
“My main advice would be to be open to experiment-driven approaches because product management is the occupation where you have to do the most amount of experiments to get your desired results. “
There are so many uncertainties involved in your entire product work. When you fail something, you feel like you lost something. When you have this approach of treating everything as experiments, you are psychologically putting yourself in a safe zone when you are not afraid to fail — being someone that trait your entire product journey as a set of continuous experiments. This approach is something that can help product managers to be more risk-takers. Product managers should be able to run quick experiments to reach their goals and metrics.
