United Kingdom

Product Design

Growth Product Management

Growth Hacking

Business Development

Project Management

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD

Bachelor of Science (BSc)

Mahdi Barkhordari

Founder

Substack

Public Speaking

Product strategy

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Critical-thinking

Team player

Presentation skills

Conflict resolution

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Project management

Negotiation

Content strategy

LinkedIn writing

Sales plan and process

Product roadmap

Trello

Adobe Photoshop

Buffer

ChatGPT

Figma

Google Ads

Intercom

Miro

Notion

Google Analytics

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to identify star candidates, evaluate technical ability, and close hires

Hiring software engineers

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

Methods of prototyping and solution validation. When to use which kind of prototype (eg. Webflow, Notion, etc)

Prototyping methods and tips

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Best practices for documenting projects, epics, and stories

Writing product requirement documents

Learn the career path and progression for product managers.

Product management career path

This is my volunteering work. 

ProductTank is a global network of meet-ups for product people by product people in more than 200 cities. 

ProductTank Birmingham is a strong community of Product People in Birmingham. We meet every month and host speakers to share Product Management learnings and working practices as well as providing networking opportunities. Since March 2024 I have been volunteering as the co-organizer of this event after being introduced with the event and the co-founders on the first event once I arrived to the UK back in November.

Please check our LinkedIn page or Meetup for more information.

● Spearheaded product initiatives for enhancing governance on ticketing and managing over 40% of the daily ticketing volume +150,000 tickets/day in the industry.
● Negotiated and integrated with Central Reservation Systems (CRS), establishing partnerships with three leading domestic airlines and enhancing services for 1M+ passengers annually.
● Defined and executed a rapid go-to-market strategy under resource constraints, aligning with international standards (IATA, ICAO) and delivering a streamlined solution within six months, covering 90% of the industry’s ticket issuance.
● Managed the end-to-end product lifecycle, incorporating stakeholder feedback to reduce development cycle time by 40% and driving a 25% increase in operational efficiency.
● Led discovery phases, including product design, interviews, and field inspections across seven major airports, gathering requirements for the entire product roadmap including our operational needs, customer needs, APIs, android, PWA and dashboards.
● Delivered a robust application with an activation rate of 23% and over 2.8 million check-ins within the first 30 days, providing real-time updates and notifications for passengers.
● Led the design of the user experience and user-friendly interface, enabling passenger timely notification, QR check-in, boarding status and all seamless flight info integration.

Most of my contributions fall under the Fractional CPO role, but I was also involved other scale up initiatives in the business. Classeh (an Edtech startup providing B2B SaaS solutions to schools) had reached an outstanding increase in terms of the number of contracts in more than 212 cities during the Covid 19. Due to the fast pace growth, the company focused mostly on sales and the scale up of divisions specially technical and product faced various challenges:
● Started the process of attaining recognition as a Knowledge-Based Company from the Committee on Innovation and Technology of the Ministry of Science, which involved documentary details with respect to innovative educational technologies of Classeh, its methodologies in curriculum development, and its patented LMS in order to meet the stringent criteria set by the committee. 
● Led efforts to redefine the company's vision, core values, brand entity, and strategic priorities. This realignment provided a clear direction for the entire organization, facilitating better decision-making and focus on product development,
● Built and managed a cohesive technical team with a tight schedule and challenging requirements. By making strategic hiring decisions and implementing decisive planning, I ensured the team was equipped to overcome obstacles and deliver high-quality products,
● Led major process improvements in support, operation sales, and marketing which resulted in major reductions in costs and increase in efficiency,
● Planned the shift of mindset from traditional marketing and sales funnel approach towards a Product-Led Growth model by introducing a freemium model
● Drove and facilitated the introduction and development of a first-time industry innovation, through the gamification of school textbooks.

Leadership & Strategy:
● Spearheaded the company’s pivot to a Revolut-like virtual card solution, providing financial services to +30K unbanked Afghan immigrants in the first 6 months and to +60K in the first year.
● Successfully managed the M&A process with iToll, ensuring a seamless transition of financial, technical, and operational assets.
● Directed strategic planning, aligning business objectives with product development, resulting in a more sustainable revenue model.

Product Development & Innovation:
● Led the product team to develop and launch nine value-added services within a year, significantly expanding the product portfolio.
● Championed user-centric design and development, resulting in a 32% increase in customer conversion and higher user engagement.
● Facilitated the development of a QR-based taxi fare payment solution, increasing DAU/MAU by 2% and boosting service engagement by 12% in 3 months.

Operational & Financial Management:
● Negotiated contracts and managed complex tax disputes, securing an 85% reduction in unfair tax liabilities after multiple rounds of structured and organised follow up with our tax/legal team.
● Optimized operational workflows, improving service delivery and enhancing customer experience across the platform.
● Scaled the business to serve plus 500K users, ensuring technical and operational scalability during periods of rapid growth.

Partnerships & Market Expansion:
● Built strategic partnerships with key stakeholders, including a collaboration with one of Iran’s top FMCG chains.
● Expanded service offerings through collaborations, integrating with existing systems to enhance product functionality and market reach.

During my time at Carpino, a top ride-hailing service in Iran, I played a pivotal role in the team transition and development of fast-to-market products. With the company undergoing a team replacement due to complications, I was tasked with creating a parallel team to the core technical team. Our goal was to launch products quickly with minimal reliance on the core team. In this position I managed to balance short term needs of the business with some quick wins such as the website revamp, not loosing sight of long term return of investment for the business. Key accomplishments include:

● Redesigned and launched Carpino's website in just two months, delivering a modern, user-friendly interface to enhance the overall customer experience.
● Collaborated closely with the core tech and product team to revamp the official application's user interface and experience, aligning it with evolving customer needs.
● Led the development and launch of highly effective products, enabling the Marketing and BI teams to increase rides sixfold within six months. Notably, we introduced a groundbreaking product similar to Lyft and Uber Pass, leveraging historical data and customer clusters. This industry-first innovation led to a monthly 35% increase in rides during peak hours.
● Pioneered the design and launch of an industry-first product similar to Uber for Business. This solution was subsequently adopted by competitors Tap30 and Snapp, significantly impacting the daily ride count within three months. Through negotiation as the part of the team, I developed a white-label solution with the municipality of Tehran called Sahand, enabling them to deploy and manage the product based on their needs. 
● Developed and launched a product automating driver registration and online verification, resulting in a 168% increase in driver registrations and a remarkable 83% reduction in processing time for the operations team.

● Being approached through a referral by a travel agency owner, who later became my Co-founder, I transitioned from a promising role as a programmer to co-founding an online tourism startup. Seizing the untapped potential in the Iranian market, I proposed a bold solution to the owners; I would develop his idea in exchange for a 50% equity of the company in case it showed traction in 3 months. 
● I started coding the front end and convinced a university friend to code the back end. 
I started the front-end development myself and onboarded a university friend Reza Karimi to help with the back end. In March 2016, we registered “Tose-e Monasebat Danesh Gostar” company and our journey with "Vistavel" started.
● Vistavel was a bootstrapped startup that grew to serve over 470,000 users, and focused on Schengen travel insurance for Iranian passengers, CIP, VIP lounge, and airport transfers.
● Tose-e Monasebat Danesh Gostar provided it's tourism services under the license of "Niloufaraneh Parvaz Roayee Travel agency".

Moments that I loved regarded our collaboration with Niloufaraneh to Curate, organize, distribute and sales of special sport tours. Vistavel was responsible for the online presence of Niloufaraneh as well, and based on that the marketing, acquiring, selling and operation of several major tours. 
● Pioneering in the use of cruise ships for accommodation, a first in Iran sport tour history for more than 380 passengers for the 2019 AFC Asian Cup.
● By 2019, the economy in Iran was taking a major downturn. Our marketing costs had increased significantly, Google Ads being our primary channel of acquisition. Realizing this, I managed to strike a deal with Iran’s largest Super Application with over 40 million users and an MAU of 18 million. 
● Led the launch “SafarBus”, a dedicated service for online bus tickets, which rapidly gained traction with +2 million users through this collaboration and reached an annual turnover of £250K (Oanda FX) in the last year.

I worked in the IT department of the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports Sciences at University of Tehran. It resulted in the launch of an e-commerce website for sports pathology and corrective excercises equipment.

Mahdi Barkhordari🇬🇧

About Mahdi Barkhordari

Expertise

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