Bugra Kaya was drowning in to-dos. As a Product Manager, he was passionate about growth but couldn't find his starting point. Despite his dedication, his initiatives kept failing. The path forward seemed increasingly unclear.
"I've been passionate about becoming a better product manager and improving my skills, but I did not know where and how to start," Bugra recalls. "Everything was scattered around for me and with the workload, I had a lot going on. I was concerned about a lot and that is when I decided to seek external guidance to put myself on a clear path."
This realization led him to MentorCruise, where structured mentorship with Yoav Farbey would fundamentally reshape his career trajectory. Within months, Bugra became a shareowner at Insider, received a substantial raise, and led the complete redesign of the company's churn process. The journey started with acknowledging a simple truth: he needed help.
Scrolling through MentorCruise profiles, Bugra knew what he needed: B2B SaaS experience. Someone who understood enterprise software, product discovery, and the realities of fast-paced tech environments. Yoav Farbey's profile stood out immediately.
"Yoav's profile was interesting for me because he had the call to actions that I actually was looking for: gaining clarity and thriving at my role while growing," Bugra explains. The methodology mattered as much as experience. Yoav offered a structured, hands-on approach backed by years of hiring and promoting talent.
Like many professionals, Bugra had hesitations about whether external guidance could make a difference. "At first, I thought that mentorship is a tool to help me push myself, regardless of the mentor I had," he admits. This assumption would prove dramatically wrong.
From their first bi-weekly session, Yoav and Bugra established a clear rhythm. Each session tackled specific topics. They deconstructed challenges, identified root causes, and developed action plans. It was systematic, deliberate, and refreshingly practical.
The most impactful revelation came early: Bugra was focusing on the wrong things.
"As a product manager, I always focused on creating value, but I lacked the focus or I was focusing on the wrong things," Bugra reflects. "It might sound simple, but is actually one of the key learnings for me during our mentorship, that I needed to focus on what the company was focusing on because only then I could generate the best results as everyone is trying to improve those metrics."
Before mentorship, Bugra poured energy into metrics and projects he personally believed were important. He was the only one pushing in certain directions while the organization moved elsewhere. Even his best efforts couldn't gain traction.
Yoav helped him see this wasn't a failure of vision but a failure of strategy. Great product managers create value that compounds because it aligns with organizational priorities.
Every mentorship has its pivotal moment. For Bugra, it came during a conversation about his failing projects. Yoav's words were direct: "I did not have control over everything going on at the company, I would help people notice and realize about those, but only when it's crucial."
Yoav taught him to focus effort where he had actual control and where it mattered most.
"Once I grasped what he was trying to say to me, I started building my confidence and focused on the churn process itself," Bugra explains.
Churn was a critical company metric. Everyone wanted to decrease it, but fundamental problems with the existing process prevented meaningful insights. Instead of trying to fix everything alone, Bugra applied his new framework. He aligned stakeholders around the shared goal and articulated the problem through a detailed Issue Proposal.
"Then everything started to unfold in rapid succession," he recalls. The initiative became a model for driving critical changes within the organization. By focusing on what mattered to everyone and building alignment first, Bugra had cracked the code.
Some of the most valuable mentorship moments came from unexpected areas. Bugra struggled with self-promotion. He could position a product perfectly but couldn't apply the same skills to himself.
"I never knew where to start or how to talk about my experiences let alone matching them with a company," he admits. "I know how to do it for a product, but I always struggled to do it for myself, on my resume or cover letters."
Yoav's approach was characteristically hands-on. They reviewed Bugra's resume and cover letters line by line. As someone who had hired and promoted talent, Yoav knew exactly what hiring managers sought.
"I kept taking notes and realized that they were actually to-the-point comments that helped me enable and tell myself through those tools," Bugra says. But the technical improvements were secondary. "One of the best things that he did was that he infused me with confidence during these sessions, which is one of the crucial things to introduce yourself to other companies."
This confidence transformed how Bugra showed up in his current role. He stopped second-guessing his contributions and started articulating his value with clarity and conviction.
The results came faster than expected. "After the first month, it started to bear fruit exponentially," Bugra notes. Within months of starting mentorship:
Each achievement built on the last, creating a virtuous cycle. The shareowner status was the company betting on Bugra's future impact. The raise recognized his evolved ability to drive results. The churn process redesign proved he could lead transformational initiatives.
"In our first two sessions, we focused on trying to detect what I lacked in skills or which skills I could improve," Bugra explains. "This helped us pave the way for all of those achievements."
Today, when colleagues ask Bugra about mentorship, his message is clear: take the chance.
"Mentorship helps improve yourself in lots of ways, whether you seek an external guide to push you or guide you," he says. "There are some people out there that felt like how you feel right now or had faced similar situations, take a chance."
His initial hesitations now seem distant, replaced by gratitude for taking that first step. The investment didn't just pay for itself through raises and promotions. It fundamentally changed his trajectory within Insider.
The scattered feeling that once defined his work has been replaced by focused execution. Initiatives that once failed now succeed because they align with organizational priorities. The confidence that once wavered now provides a foundation for increasingly ambitious challenges.
For Bugra, mentorship with Yoav Farbey through MentorCruise wasn't just about becoming a better product manager. It was about discovering his true capabilities when given the right guidance, structure, and support. The tangible results are impressive, but they're external markers of a deeper transformation: a professional who went from feeling scattered and concerned to someone with the confidence and agency to take on anything.
That transformation started with a simple realization and a single decision. Sometimes, acknowledging that you need help is the first step toward discovering just how far you can go.
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