Meet our people: Melis Kayhan, Director of Product Management

Hey! I’m Melis, born and raised in Istanbul. I love travelling, sight seeing — fueled by my passion for local foods and home-cooking. So much so that I usually design my itineraries around where I want to eat and which market to visit. :)

Favorite food depends on the mood but I love baking deserts for sure. Favorite movie is Howl’s Moving Castle and favorite activity is listening to live music & going to festivals.

• Introduce your role to a new joiner!

I work in the product management team — we’re the ones who help decide when to build, what to build and how to build features in the Getir app. We work closely with software development and data teams, as well as different departments within the organization. Think of us as the symphony chief.

• What project are you most proud of?

I have contributed to a better Getir customer experience focusing on missing items in orders. At that time, a high percentage of our orders were delivered with missing items — it was one of the major pain points. We got together with a cross functional team — product management, customer services, operations etc — to better our preventive actions (where we thrive optimizing internal processes) by minimizing missing items and to ameliorate our communications when there actually is a missing item.

• What drives you in your daily work?

Passion for details! I’m curious about why we’re doing what we’re doing and this drives me to consider on where to focus our efforts for maximum impact. I love it when teams come together around problems, come up with and shout their theories. I love creating order from chaos.

• What’s your craziest idea that got implemented?

I would not say crazy, but I have seen a lot of action when I presented my case about how something could be better. I have seen the company hire people, spend a lot money and / or change the organization based on the feedback I gave (along with my team-mates of course) and that makes me proud.

• What a unique industry we’re in! What surprised you the most?

The level of impact any good idea has. Getir is full of smart people who want to do the best they possibly can. Any idea that clearly betters any process — customer facing, the way we do our day-to-day tasks, they way we collaborate in harmony — gets implemented fairly quickly. Everybody is up for trying and that’s really exciting.

• Getir culture in one word!

That’s hard :) One word would be “inquisitive”.

• What empowerment means to you?

It’s true that women can and do get tangled up in stereotypes — we’re seen as aggressive rather than assertive or emotional rather than empathetic. There’s still a lot of sexist behavior and mansplaining going on in our daily life. They’re lessening but they’re there to stay quite some time. The best way to tackle, is to address them clearly and call them out when you see them — almost everybody will try to adjust and fix their behavior patterns. Besides that, do what you do best, shine in the areas you feel you’re strongest at and try to find other strong women who can mentor you and guide you through your journey.

This is part of a series of blogs where we shine the light on some amazing women! We’re proud to have equality high on our radar. Hopefully, you enjoyed the read and stay tuned for more awesome interviews!