How UBERization of Technology can raise a quality of providing service

Last two weeks Mike has been traveling to Yerevan, Armenia. 

First of all, Mike would like to share some historical and tech industry related information about Armenia as a brand maker.

For those who have never heard about Armenia (it's AR-ME-NIA, not Romania, not Albania, it's ARMENIA) - it is a mountainous landlocked country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia with own huge cultural and historical heritage. Also, Armenia is a first country in the world who adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301.

As from product/brand creating perspective you probably know a lot of Armenians by origin, but more famously as representatives of other countries, like:

1. Andre Agassi - Tennis player (USA)

2. Garry Kasparov - Chess Player (Russia)

3. Charles Aznavour - Singer (France)

4. Alexis Ohanian - Entrepreneur (USA) 

In a few words it's a really interesting country that's full of discovered and undiscovered (yet) talents and amazing people.

As a part of a tech world (small yet, but still growing) Armenia is involved in tech with startups as well as tech leaders (Cisco, Oracle, VMware, Microsoft)

Mike was amazed by startup guys, who passionately promote their own ideas and beliefs.They try to make positive changes or as someone said about Alexis Ohanian, "Make the world a bit less suck."

There are several very successful startups like: 

Teamable.me - Next Generation recruitment platform, using B2B SaaS model, and

PicsArt.com - Last Year was named as an official partner of Google, during the Google IO 2015

There are more, but Mike will inform you about them next time, so be patient and you will get a cookie :)

A particular startup Mike wants to share about is called ggTaxi, which is an Armenian based startup, that's doing doing pretty much like Uber, but with taking into consideration national, cultural and economical aspects. If Uber is giving a chance to everyone to make extra money by driving their own vehicles, ggTaxi is using service of professional taxi drivers, who want to join the company in order to drive a cab under an umbrella of the company.

And here ggTaxi is solving more important problems than just giving an ability to drive and earn money:
1. ggTaxi is creating a competition among taxi drivers, who are forced to constantly improve the quality of the provided service. (clean cabs, faster services, no noisy music, etc)
And it's not about the price, because ggTaxi has the same prices as any other cab in Yerevan and generally, it's cheap.

2. Second, ggTaxi is against tips, which became an integrated part of our society in USA. It's ridiculous when you see on your bill options to tip 12% 15% or 18%. Why? why? why? Tips should be my natural will for good service, not an obligatory part. Back to ggTaxi driver insisted to give back 300 Armenian drams, which is less than dollar. Still money for Armenian reality but another perception of mindset change.

3. Last, but not least, ggTaxi has direct line of customer support, and they are glad to hear your concerns,  feedback and improvement requests.


In other words startup is a social influencer.

Teamable.me next time...

Good vs. Bad Product Manager

Mike was reading interesting book of Ben Horovitz, called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" and this article is really remarkable and worth to read.

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

A good product manager is the CEO of the product. (It's actually enough said to don't read rest of the article, but please DO)

A good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of the success of the product. The are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails. A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no excuses).


Bad product managers have lots of excuses. Not enough funding, the engineering manager is an idiot, Microsoft has 10 times as many engineers working on it, I'm overworked, I don't get enough direction. Barksdale doesn't make these kinds of excuses and neither should the CEO of a product.


Good product managers don't get all of their time sucked up by the various organizations that must work together to deliver right product right time. They don't take all the product team minutes, they don't project manage the various functions, they are not gophers for engineering. They are not part of the product team; they manage the product team.

Engineering teams don't consider Good Product Managers a "marketing resource." Good product managers are the marketing counterpart of the engineering manager. (This is one of the most misleading things in StartUps)


Good product managers crisply define the target, the "what" (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the "what."

Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out "how". Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally.

Good product managers don't give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally. (Another rule to note down)


Good product managers create leveragable collateral, FAQs, presentations, white papers. Bad product managers complain that they spend all day answering questions for the sales force and are swamped. Good product managers anticipate the serious product flaws and build real solutions. Bad product managers put out fires all day. Good product managers take written positions on important issues (competitive silver bullets, tough architectural choices, tough product decisions, markets to attack or yield).

Bad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament that the "powers that be" won't let it happen. Once bad product managers fail, they point out that they predicted they would fail. Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus team on how many features Microsoft is building.


Good product managers define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that can't be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest problem). Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the market place during inbound planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during outbound. Bad product managers get very confused about the differences amongst delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity. Good product managers decompose problems.

Bad product managers combine all problems into one. Good product managers think about the story they want written by the press. Bad product managers think about covering every feature and being really technically accurate with the press.

Good product managers ask the press questions. Bad product managers answer any press question. Good product managers assume press and analyst people are really smart. Bad product managers assume that press and analysts are dumb because they don't understand the difference between "push" and "simulated push." Good product managers err on the side of clarity vs. explaining the obvious.

Bad product managers never explain the obvious. Good product managers define their job and their success. Bad product managers constantly want to be told what to do. Good product managers send their status reports in on time every week, because they are disciplined. Bad product managers forget to send in their status reports on time, because they don't value discipline. (Soooo True)

Top-5 soft skills for good product manager (PRM)

Mike was wondering about "what's the human qualities for good product manager" and after spending hours on variety of different product lines he came up with a list of top-5 for product manager.

Here they are:

1. Ability to listen  and hear the team.

This is sounds a bit naive at first to lot of people, who will immediately say something like: I can listen, I'm a good listener. No, that's not what I mean, and see you already missed that part if you thought so. Usually professionals are experiencing two type of challenges:

a. ability to listen and hear,
Sometimes it's a bit hard to listen opinion of junior software engineer, who can be fresh grad from college, and be passionate about making the world better. Sure, your opinion as experienced product manager is more deep with a more comprehensive understanding of possible obstacles, but junior PRM has this unique ability to think out of the box for the first 2 years after joining to new company/team. Unfortunately, this quality is something we lose with a years of working in company, like the ability of new born kids to swim.

b. ability to digest/process the information

Often, when PRM hear the feedback from all those people, who are contributing for the prosperity of the business, can lose the track of ideas with a challenge to vet them from not very useful suggestions afterwards. What is why it's important for PRM to make a notes (as much as s/he can) in order to add them to roadmap. This is a bit unique quality, which is coming by default for some of us after we born. for rest of us, it's something we should gain in school or college.


2. Enthusiasm and ability to inspire people 

Mike can talk about this for hours, because he knows that it's vital for leaders (managers) who can be full of energy to infect (inspire) people with own enthusiasm. and he is not separating these two as 2  independent qualities, because, you can be Enthusiastic to get stuff done, but with absolutely terrible ability to inspire people, even if you right for 100% and can really bring a value to product. In that case, your enthusiasm might be considered (this is actually sad :) as micromanagement. Or totally opposite situation, when you have born quality to inspire people (maybe it's your Quan), but you just don't have enough enthusiasm to inspire people (maybe you busy, maybe you tired, maybe you married :) Just kidding #NoIntent2offendMarriedPeople)


3. Good proposition of politeness and ethic

 Mike intentionally made a joke on #2 to make a point that PRM should be polite enough to clearly see the line s/he should never cross. And it's not about business matter, it's about general attitude of PRM to know "how to win friends" And even though some people will say He is not my friend, he is my colleague) you should still treat them as kind as you would treat your friend.

4. Persistence, can-do/will-do/let's-do

This is another important one to keep on mind, because persistence lead to better results and that attitude can-do/will-do/let's-do helps you to make it happen with your team, because remember, Team is delivering the product, not really you. But as a PRM you should be persistent and inspirational enough to them to let you lead. And the best motivator for that is to start replacing your vocabulary from "I to We" and even from "Can-do to Let's do" (Example: Let's go Giants!)

5. Good speaker and ability to delegate things to people.

This is a big deal, as for PRM is absolutely important how to talk to people, who are above you in corporate chain and peoples are reporting to you. I think you can recall some guys from your childhood, who were dealing fine with everyone, with bullies and with other kids. This ability to negotiate, deal, find a common language and etc. is another quality you can have.
Great news for those, who were not great communicators at childhood, you can still learn it, by taking toastmasters classes, public speaking etc. Because all you need, is to care less about possibility to be wrong and be criticized (all we wrong, all of us done mistakes)

Disclaimer: Your opinion might be slightly different from Mikes, so please take it into account when you read it:)

My Story

StartUp-Man is a super hero from San Francisco.

He was born & raised as a normal kid. Moved to SF, graduated from Stanford. 

But one morning, after the Giants win party, having hangover, he realized, that he has some special power, a power he never had before.

 Abilities such as: comprehensive understanding of big data, ability to do fast prototyping, UX/UI design, User stories and personas.

So, he got his superhero costume, wax his beard and fly on a fixed gear bike to win new horizons of the startups...

But before he left Mike said: " I'm gonna be successful to pay my rent"