Desire to make an educational revolution in Mexico
I started working for Quipper in January 2016, on the same day as when Quipper started to operate in Mexico. My first role was a Customer Service Representative for the Quipper School product. Our team showed teachers how our product could substantially improve the academic level of their students. At the same time, we were all hoping this would make the students’ lives easier.
I first got to know Quipper through a job hunting site. When I made an appointment for my first Skype job interview, my interviewer was in London. I thought ‘this does not sound right… Who interviews for a project that has not even started yet, from across the ocean?’ However, it took 5 minutes of conversation to completely fall in love with Quipper. At my age, I never felt that any of my previous jobs had a real impact on anyone's life. So, to know that I would be working on something that was going to make a real difference in Mexico and the students made me really happy. I believe making the decision to come and work for Quipper has been one of the best decisions of my life!
At the moment my main role is Product Manager for the MX market. I work on taking our products from the hands of the company to the hands of our users in a successful way. Successful in these terms, means that the company gets revenue and at the same time our users are satisfied with our products. To assure that, I coordinate between the Bisuiness Development team and the Product Teams, especially with the Engineers in the Web Dev team.
Previous to this I never had any experience as a Product Manager, so to me this was all a very new challenge, and I think this challenge has made me grow so much professionally and personally. I have learned to see things on a “big picture” kind of way.
I always go by the rule of “Make it happen”. Through our personal and work life we will always encounter roadblocks, that is something that even if we try really hard, we cannot avoid, so we should never feel that something cannot happen or cannot be done.
I actually think that by working together we can achieve more, and teamwork is fundamental in every aspect of my work-life. I do believe that understanding different points of view is really important so we can all come up with solutions that are sustainable from every angle. These are the two things I value when I have challenges in my work.
Personally, I want to grow into a much more knowledgeable and confident Product Manager. I would like to be the go-to person along with the Development Team when it comes to really understand in depth the products that we offer in Mexico and how we can all as a team improve them. In time, I would like to get much more involved in other markets so we call all learn and transfer knowledge on how we can all make this Education Revolution a reality for a countless number of students that otherwise would have never had access to good and high-quality education.
The joy when a kid tells me ‘I understood!!’
Looking in retrospective, there have been a lot of times where I felt very happy during my career in Quipper.
There was one time when we went to aschool to show students and teachers how to use Quipper School. To the students in particular we will have a full Maths lesson along with the teacher. There were all sorts of students, chatty, distracted, shy, but we did our best to keep them engaged.
At the end of a lesson, when all of the students were exiting the classroom while I was packing my stuff to head back to the office, one of the extremely shy students approached me and said very quietly: “I understood the lesson”, he paused for a second or two trying to hide a smile, and then he continued: “This is the third time that the teacher explains this to us, but I always feel so embarrassed to ask questions and I don’t want them to think that I am not smart”.
There I was, all tired from a hard day at work, and I immediately reflected myself in him when I was his age. I knew the struggle that it was for me when it came to asking questions in class to the cost of others potentially making fun of me for not understanding “soon enough”. With the help of Quipper he understood the lesson, and that made me feel so incredibly happy for him.
I think learning is a very important way to make one’s life easier and more productive. Learning also helps us understand others better. Daily learning experiences at school will build the foundation of ability to study of students. I cannot be happier if we can support their daily learning experiences at school and help them be able to make a successful life of their own, whatever success means to them.
2018/6/1
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