PMProject-M8

I build the boring machinery that makes projects finish.

I am Tigran Zakarian, a senior project manager and product owner with 13 years of end-to-end delivery across complex, multi-stakeholder programmes. Most of my work starts on initiatives that are already moving and already in trouble — unclear sponsorship, scope that grows quietly, reporting that reassures until the week it does not.

Tigran Zakarian, senior project manager and product owner

Tigran Zakarian

Senior Project Manager / Product Owner — Stockholm

I walk into running initiatives, establish delivery structure, and create clarity across parallel teams and competing priorities — translating between business expectations and engineering reality without losing either side. Recent work spans H&M Group, TV4 Play, SEB, Clear Channel, Mynewsdesk, Avida Finance and Mentimeter, across payments, fraud and risk, CRM and AI platforms. PMBOK-style governance above, Kanban and flow-based delivery below.

  • 13 years owning end-to-end delivery
  • Certified Agile Scrum Product Owner (Scrum Alliance)
  • PMP-style project management, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban
  • Generative AI for Project Managers (PMI)
  • BSc + MSc Business Administration, Örebro University
  • Swedish (native), English (professional), Spanish (conversational)
LinkedIntigran.zak@gmail.com

What clients say

“Tigran successfully led multiple complex implementation projects, combining technical insight with structure, clear communication, and a grounded leadership style. His work played a key role in delivering value to our clients.”
Mårten Tilosius, CEO, Miltton Insights
“Tigran demonstrated outstanding leadership during a high-risk initiative, delivering results that exceeded expectations. His ability to manage sensitive challenges with subtlety and precision ensured minimal impact on our users.”
Henri Caddeo, CIO, SJ

How I work

Hybrid is not a compromise between two methods; it is a deliberate split. Governance, funding and accountability follow PMBOK's structural logic — a charter, a named sponsor, decision rights, a change gate, a formal close. Delivery, prioritisation and learning follow Agile's empirical logic — short iterations, visible work, forecasts instead of percentages, retrospectives that produce one owned change at a time.

Trouble appears when the two are mixed at the same level: iteration ceremonies with no governance above them, or governance gates with no empirical evidence beneath them. A practical test — if your steering report requires work the team does not otherwise do, the two layers are not connected properly.

Case snapshots

H&M Group — AI fraud prevention platform across 8 markets

Situation
A multi-market, AI-driven fraud prevention programme spanning five business areas, C-suite governance forums and delivery teams across Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Approach
Owned end-to-end delivery: objectives, timelines, risk analysis, go-live and migration planning. Established a delivery framework that made expected deliveries and dates legible to a project team of 8 and a wider group of 27, and translated continuously between business expectations and engineering reality.
Outcome
Seven figures in upsell and savings, with a smooth, predictable execution across all eight markets.

TV4 Play (Telia) — payment platform migration, 400,000+ users

Situation
A complex payment platform migration with parallel teams in Sweden and Finland and dependencies running across CRM, PSP and marketing automation workstreams.
Approach
Coordinated the parallel workstreams, managed dependencies and blockers, and led steering committees and governance reporting so every business unit stayed aligned through the cutover.
Outcome
Zero critical disruptions for more than 400,000 active users during the migration.

Clear Channel International — 5,000+ hour modernisation across 6 countries

Situation
A technology modernisation programme with parallel delivery teams in Sweden and Spain, 20+ cross-functional members, and reporting obligations across 12 markets.
Approach
Owned budget, timeline, quality and reporting, and acted as the central governance authority — presenting to initiative approval boards and maintaining compliance, security and regulatory documentation throughout.
Outcome
The programme delivered against its approval-board commitments while meeting the full security and regulatory bar.

Happy to talk through any of these in detail on a call — including the parts that did not go to plan.

This site is the work sample

The Buddy encodes the diagnostic questions I ask in the first hour of an engagement, and the templates are the ones I actually use. If the reasoning here matches how you want your projects run, we will probably work well together.

Work with me

Sometimes the fix needs a person, not a template.

I am Tigran Zakarian, a senior project manager with 13 years of end-to-end delivery for clients such as H&M Group, TV4, SEB and Clear Channel. I work on exactly the situations described across this site: rescuing drifting deliveries, setting up governance that people actually use, and facilitating the workshops that unblock decisions.

Projects & programmes

  • Interim / rescue project management
  • Programme & multi-team delivery ownership
  • PMO, governance and steering setup
  • Product ownership & backlog clarity

Workshops

  • Risk analysis workshops
  • Planning and prioritisation sessions
  • Decision and stakeholder alignment
  • Retrospectives that change something

Talks & training

  • Educational talks and keynotes
  • Hybrid PMBOK + Agile training
  • Kanban / flow ways of working
  • Team coaching for new PMs
Book a free consultation tigran.zak@gmail.com LinkedIn