Meet Jasmine Melikyan of OutRival’

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jasmine Melikyan.

Hi Jasmine, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
As a freshman studying marketing years ago, I had this idealistic vision in my mind of how my career would look like and how I’d always work in this exciting, dynamic, creative space that I thought marketing agencies were at the time.
Fast forward a few years, I opened my own marketing agency and was faced with the boring, un-sexy work that takes place behind the scenes. Unfortunately that life wasn’t meant for me. Call it fate, right place-right time, but I quickly found myself working at Career Karma (now OutRival) and rediscovered my teenage dream there. The passion, the excitement, the dynamic startup environment, the growth opportunities – I was given it all. That’s when my journey really started and I’ve been here for the past 3.5 years.
From growth marketing to now product development, I’ve had the craziest, most exciting, most fulfilling journey any ambitious, career-focused woman can ask for. But here’s what made it special – for the past 2 years I found myself heading towards a more tech role in product management, where I became one of the first people to really dive deep into generative AI and figure out how to turn it into actual products that make money.
I was able to quickly learn and adopt the new generative AI wave and help solve one of the biggest challenges businesses face today – the tech is great, but how do you actually use it? How do you make it boost your revenue? How do you make it improve your operational efficiency? These are all questions that took us months of trial and error and close collaboration to figure out, but we cracked the code and developed approaches that other companies are now learning from.
That being said, the journey is just beginning and I’m beyond excited to see what the future holds, how technology will continue to grow and transform all industries, and I’m grateful to be a part of leading that transformation.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Certainly not! The road to success and self-discovery is never smooth or linear. I firmly believe that you grow the most during the toughest times, and personally I embrace being uncomfortable – that’s the only way I know I have room to do more, to be more.
As with most startups you have long days, impossible deadlines, lack of resources and incredible urgency to move fast, to do better, to win. But what made it even more challenging was that we were pioneers – there was no playbook for what we were trying to do with AI. We were literally writing the rules as we went.
We’ve had a lot of unsuccessful product development, misguided assumptions, painful disappointments, market shifts – you name it. I remember spending months building AI features that we thought would be game-changers, only to realize they weren’t solving the right problems for businesses. There were times when I questioned if we were on the right track at all.
But here’s what I’m proud of – despite it all, the team kept pushing, kept learning and growing, and we’ve found a niche where we can deliver real impact and make a real difference. Now we’re helping companies save hundreds of hours and significantly increase their efficiency using AI solutions that actually work in the real world. All those tough moments led us to where we are today, and I wouldn’t change any of it.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
What I do: I am the Group Product Manager at OutRival and I work closely with our founders, engineering and client-facing teams to build our AI product offering. But really, what I do is translate cutting-edge AI technology into solutions that businesses can actually implement and see results from.

What I specialize in: I specialize in 2 areas that don’t usually go together. My original background is in marketing, primarily growth and organic marketing. My current specialization is generative AI and the application of genAI in businesses – I’ve become one of the go-to experts for companies trying to figure out how to actually make AI work for them beyond just the hype.

What I’m known for: I’m definitely known for doing whatever it takes to get the job done. Being a startup with a newly developed AI product, we have to be very creative about how we approach demos, how we showcase our offering to clients, how we launch this new technology in real-world use cases and most importantly how we drive results. As we’ve been developing and trying to find our product direction, I’ve played a key role in ensuring both prospective and existing clients not only see results but understand the transformative potential of what we’re building.

What I’m most proud of: I am most definitely proud of the AI products we created and the journey that took us there. We’ve been building for over 2 years now and we’ve had many iterations of our genAI offering, but through this process we refined our vision, listened to the needs of our clients and came up with something that’s already helping businesses save significant time and money. The solutions we’ve built are now being used by companies across different industries to streamline processes that used to take extensive human capital and turn them into repeatable, agentic work.

What sets me apart from others: My persistence, commitment and customer obsession, but also my unique ability to bridge the gap between complex AI technology and practical business results. Most people in this space are either very technical or very business-focused, but I can speak both languages fluently, which lets me solve problems that others have a hard time tackling.

We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
I fondly remember the kindergarten play where I was the Autumn. My grandmother made a costume for me and used real autumn leaves we collected from the park. I remember walking through the golden leaves and trying to find the most perfect-looking ones, I definitely miss fall in Miami ))

Contact Info:

• Website: https://outrival.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasmine-melikyan-686742180/