Transcript: Keren Wexler | Optimove | Product-Team Processes That Create Big Impact

Who Keren Wexler is and moving from development to product

Eyal David: [00:00] Hey Keren, interesting, how great that you’re here, like it’s been a long time. We were just joking about it, really nice. So Keren is actually Senior Director of Product at Optimove, Keren, introduce yourself.

Keren Wexler: [00:13] Hi everyone, so yes, indeed I’m Senior Director of Product. I started my career many years ago, actually in the army, at 800, and that’s how I discovered that I love programming. I started as a programmer. And I continued like that. I did a master’s degree in computer science and neural networks, and I was a programmer, then a team lead. I really, really loved it, and actually after about 10 years, between 8 and 10 years, depending on whether you count the army. I moved into classic product for all kinds of reasons, some personal too. I was managing a very, very large team, and I had twin daughters, and I said, okay. It’s too big for me now to manage that huge team again. Let’s do something that’s more personal; I thought it would be easier for me. Let’s try it. Everyone said it really suits me.

Eyal David: [01:03] And I made the switch and fell in love, and then I’ve been in product and at Optimove. And come on, you also have an impressive career since then. We can really jump through a few stops, but you came to Optimove only a while ago.

Keren Wexler: [01:17] I’ve been working at Optimove for exactly a year and a half now. And like, you were also at Pendo, we can talk for a second about which companies you hopped between, right? What kinds of industries? Yes, I was mostly in startups. I really like companies where you can make an impact and do everything and not be boxed into a cube. But a few times I was acquired by companies and then I was no longer part of a startup. So really the last time was when I was the only product person at Insert, and I was bought by an American company called Pendo. I was there for five and a half years, learned a lot, and did many roles, and in the end I really had a large product team. I left very happily, it was amazing, and I even took a year off, and then I started at Optimove.

Eyal David: [02:01] Like, you told me earlier that you went into product because you didn’t want to manage such a large team, and how many people are on your team today? Yes, between nine and ten, like I’m just hiring for that now. So okay, maybe we’ll put a link or something, amazing. So maybe first, actually... Before we move on, tell us a bit about the company, what Optimove does.

What Optimove does and what retention marketing is

Keren Wexler: [02:24] So it’s a really interesting field called... CRM marketing. CRM is basically the retention marketing stack. Usually when people think about marketing, they think about how to bring people to buy the product. So basically it’s not acquisition, it’s not how to bring people into the app—for example, I’m SodaStream and I want to bring people to buy... Or Sephora and I want people to buy, to bring people to buy online. So we’re in the field that after the user has already landed on the app, whether on web or mobile, I want to retain that customer. I want them to stay, to buy, to engage, to be loyal, and to maximize the customer lifetime value. How do you do that? Well, there’s no such thing as free gifts, so usually you do it through marketing campaigns that basically give things back to customers, offer them discounts. Newsletters, all kinds of things related to what they need, or simply very, very relevant messages. The belief in this field is that the more relevant and personal the communication is, the better it works.

Eyal David: [03:20] Like now we’re all probably feeling it, given the environment we’re recording this in, the shopping season and everything, right? Exactly, that’s a great example, yes, for sure I...

Keren Wexler: [03:29] When I joined Optimove I said, I hate these campaigns and all this spam. In fact, even I, from the brands I like, wait to receive the emails or see the discount posts in order to buy at the most attractive prices. So that’s really the art of it, and it’s very, very clear around Black Friday, but you can also think about major sports events, the Olympics.

Eyal David: [03:55] Lots and lots of events like back to school, lots of seasonal events around which there’s a lot, a lot of marketing activity. It’s always considered kind of like money on the floor, always, because really there’s no cost to bring the customer—if the customer is already in my mailing list and I know things about them too, right?

Keren Wexler: [04:11] So it’s a different game a little, that’s true, but you have to be very careful not to do spamming. That’s one thing, because then the customer will unsubscribe, will opt out from the push. And that’s it, they’re gone, and I can’t communicate with that customer anymore. So it has to be very relevant; the content has to be very relevant. That’s one thing, and also systems like Optimove cost... Money, service providers, and so on. But in general, yes, this is money that really needs to be used wisely here, because it works.

Channel trends, consent and spam

Eyal David: [04:36] Because retention marketing works. So what trends do you see today in retention marketing that are worth focusing on? I just know email works, but like what other things can you disprove or tell us about?

Keren Wexler: [04:48] So first of all, from the customer side, they’re exposed to many more channels. I mean, today I’m much more on Instagram than on email; my kids, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, so social networks are really significant. So basically, once I’m a customer of some brand, I can see an offer on a social network, chat is a relatively new channel in this space, email, SMS, push, of course. And now there are also providers, including Optimove, who are starting to offer embedded messaging, which is basically right inside the website or the app. If I’ve already arrived, they’ll give me relevant offers there too.

Eyal David: [05:22] So this field is constantly advancing and adding more and more channels. It’s very interesting, and it’s also an event that maybe...

Keren Wexler: [05:28] It’s a very serious issue; we deal with it a lot, especially when we sell to enterprise, but actually it’s pretty easy and simple because there’s also consent, and today consent is required. There are countries like England where it’s completely formal, and you need to give consent for every type of content, for every type of product. Very recently, and in all kinds of different verticals, and they can unsubscribe in one second. I mean, today it’s really easy for them not to receive it if they don’t want to. So from that perspective there’s no problem, and it really depends on the regulation in each country.

Eyal David: [05:58] But that means that behind the scenes, companies like Optimove need to do much more interesting things because of these consents, basically.

Keren Wexler: [06:05] To know when, when the right context is, yes, although usually the one requesting consent is the brand. Inside the brand’s app, in some onboarding flow, in some settings, in some preference center, you can change your settings. It doesn’t depend on us that much, and we just respond. And there are a lot of companies, especially the big ones, that also have all kinds of mechanisms where, at the very last minute before I send a campaign, I send them for approval. They check whether it’s possible to include some kind of promo from the customer, if there’s no problem. If they buy a private video, they send me back an answer.

Eyal David: [06:36] All of a sudden, I’m much smarter about the logic behind it and can infer things. Okay, so you touched on this for a second, that the customer is basically mostly enterprise. You told me before that I know it’s retail companies, right? Let me learn it too. There’s gaming, there’s retail, there’s also streaming, kind of e-commerce, something similar came out of that.

The enterprise market and the competition

Keren Wexler: [06:55] Also finance, so in all these fields you want to retain the customer; there’s basically the same thing, just in a slightly different way. There are tons of competitors; it’s like everything in marketing, there are a million competitors. It’s a tough field. Great—the biggest companies, like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle, are hard to compete with if a company decides it’s simply buying all its products from them. And that’s more or less the kind of companies that go to Oracle, because the downside of going with these companies is usually that they’re less innovative. They have a lot, a lot of sales reps—just the companies, mainly the newer companies that have gained traction in the market. Not that new, but say our main competitors, like Braze, Iterable, Bloomreach—these are companies that are really much more at the technological forefront, and that’s what makes them relevant; that’s all they do. These are really the strong companies, and of course in every specific vertical there are also the strong competitors there.

Eyal David: [07:52] That’s it—how do you move, how do you move in a multi-vertical like this? It’s really something that every second you can see needs to be focused on.

Keren Wexler: [08:00] We chose... there are companies that focus only on retail. Like Bloomreach, mainly retail. There are companies that really try not to focus, like Braze—really every company takes a different angle on it, and that’s very interesting. Ophakim and, traditionally, Mushagaming were very, very successful. Ophakim is something we haven’t gotten into yet, but it’s a very interesting product in a very painful area, with a lot of machine learning, and for many years we tried to educate the market on why it’s important. And while we had to educate most of the market, it turns out gaming companies have very, very smart analytical teams, with people who want innovation, and they really, really wanted this thing. So basically they embraced our product very, very much for many years, and there’s also very tough competition there now.

Eyal David: [08:45] You mean in the world of gaming, yes—but do you mean against your competitors, or within the gaming world? I mean, no, no, it’s just that a lot of competitors also grew there, saw success, and there’s a ton of money flowing there. Basically, there’s also that; there it’s really ingrained in the heart of the industry, like retaining the player—every time you retain the player, it makes him come back again, yes.

Keren Wexler: [09:05] Another game, basically in the end. And what do you think, just—I’m thinking out loud—what do you think about the connection between the physical, you talked about retail, between the physical and the virtual, how do you handle digital? It’s very interesting, more at the level of success and everything, but companies lay out for us their whole strategy: how retail, how the physical connects with the digital, and whether they need to compete with each other or complement each other, and every company takes a very different take. But in general, we have the advantage that not all competitors really have all the data, both physical and digital, so once someone takes it physically, they take it in a way that we know them, which is very significant.

Which skills are critical for product managers

Eyal David: [09:41] In a sharp transition, Wef is looking for employees, so maybe I’ll just ask you a question that comes up a lot here: in your opinion, what product skills are the most important?

Keren Wexler: [09:51] Product—first of all, that’s a hard question because you always want to just pile on a lot of abilities. First of all, for me you need brain power; meaning, really, you need someone sharp. Analytical, someone who speaks with a sharp analytical mindset, knows how to make connections between different needs and different things, and that’s really something I don’t see—not throughout my career, this is really the most critical thing for me, because it’s hard, it’s a hard role and you have to do so many things. And you need to dive deeply into the problem space and also into the solution space, so there are a lot of abilities, and in the end it comes down to brain power. The second thing I really see people failing on is the issue of major and minor. It’s very easy to say “major and minor,” but in the end we always write that funny sentence in the résumé. “Disper sanity tools for prioritizing”—what does that basically mean? It means you constantly have to decide for yourself; you see all the needs, and you constantly have to decide what I’m dealing with. What am I solving, what am I not solving—the ability to separate the major from the minor. In the end, a lot of it is your knowledge of the market, the customers, instincts you’ve developed, and also the ability to finally make a decision.

Eyal David: [10:57] I have to tell you something about major and minor, about the problem space. I started working now on some product, and I started taking feedback from colleagues; I felt at some point. That the obsession with the problem space sometimes takes you a little out of focus. There was a point where I got to a really good offer that generates meetings for me, generates the conversion I wanted.

Keren Wexler: [11:23] But I’m still getting feedback about whether it’s worth emphasizing this here, worth emphasizing the problem space there or not—so I agree with you, but it’s also major and minor. I mean, how can this be reflected in an interview? In the end, it’s very hard to understand these things in an interview. So you try to understand whether the person can define the MVP well and why, and then you change the rules of the game a bit and try to define the MVP again. Because in the end, major and minor is exactly knowing the 80 and where to stop, where to stop in discovery—there’s a limit to how much you should dig.

Eyal David: [11:54] You need to get this thing out there and see what happens for real, so I totally agree with you. Great, let’s continue.

Keren Wexler: [12:02] I’ll just say that in every role—it’s not related to product at all, I didn’t even mention this—but of course there’s the lunch test. If you don’t know the person, it’s like, if you don’t feel like going out to lunch with them, then no. Basically, at that level, I don’t really have a way to encompass all human traits; in the end, you need to connect with people, interest people, connect with development.

Eyal David: [12:27] Connecting with your team, and that already gets to the end, kind of generally.

Keren Wexler: [12:30] Yes, yes, it’s like, it’s really also about the ability to learn, the desire to learn. Because I can now assess whether people understand, like whether they, say, understand Agile and know how to start small and continue—someone with analytical ability and a desire to learn can be taught in a second. So I’m really trying to distinguish between something that is knowledge you can acquire if I have those traits, versus not.

Eyal David: [12:56] So what are you actually looking to see in an interview like that? What’s the most, most significant thing you want to see on the other side?

Keren Wexler: [13:03] So that was one thing I didn’t mention that maybe also completes the picture, which is some kind of passion for the area. Meaning, in the end, if I’m looking for someone who’s going to work more on the platform, then I need passion for the platform. I need it to make the person’s eyes light up. And if someone works a lot on UI/UX, then I want them to love it. I mean, there’s no. This learning mindset and this passion are something you just pick up in an interview. And I think that once people have that and they have the brainpower, they just run with it. I mean, either you teach them or they learn on their own.

Internal mobility as a way to grow PMs

Eyal David: [13:32] How do you check that? That’s the million-dollar question, and it’s really hard. Before that you gave me, you said that at your place internal mobility is something that worked really well.

Keren Wexler: [13:41] That’s something I salute Optimove for, because I wasn’t that familiar with it. If you think about it, then also at Pando I had two internal mobility moves that were amazing for the team. At Optimove, they really believe in it. I mean, a person sometimes comes straight from university. Shows capabilities in a second, earlier, earlier, earlier, and one of the places where you really need to be very good to advance into is product, and there’s a huge, huge willingness from people in the company. And then you basically passed the brainpower test, and many times also the basic aptitude test, and of course the lunch test. And basically the only thing you need to teach this person is product, that craft of product, which is amazing. Because you’ve basically reduced the level of uncertainty drastically; you just need to be able to hold that you need to teach the person Maips.

Eyal David: [14:28] Yes, it reminds me that once there was the whole world of. I wanted to swell, so I would go basically do an internship in length, which they didn’t really call that; basically to be like standing next to the person, he would tolerate me for a day inflating beside him, seeing whether I fit him and whether I suited him. That whole world of taking someone from inside the company, and you know how they are, you know what their brainpower is, like I said, why you want to take them to lunch, and then if he or she sits next to you, sits next to you, and you clicked, and if it connects. So I feel like it’s really a bet worth taking, less risky. I hope the analogies made sense. How long did we say you were at Optimove? A year and a half.

Joining an existing team from outside and building trust

Keren Wexler: [15:08] And basically you entered the role when there was already a pretty big team, right? Yes, so basically the SVP Product, Shay Frank, he had already been there for many years. He managed the product there and moved to the United States about a year before I arrived. And half of the product team sits in London and half sits in Israel. There was some kind of vacuum that lasted for quite a while until I arrived. One of the reasons they brought me in was to redefine the product team in Israel, meaning one without a manager. And from my perspective it was an interesting challenge because at Pando, for example, I recruited my team, whether through internal mobility or external hiring. And it’s just a different story, a different opera, when you recruit someone. They come in your image; they come because they want to work with you. It’s clear that you shape the path, and when they bring you in from the outside, then you actually have to work against resistance sometimes. And basically come and move the cheese for a lot of people. When you’re given credit, when you’re given credit, you arrived, you understand the least of everyone, you don’t know the market all that well. It’s really an interesting position to be in, and for me it was the challenge; it really interested me, so I went for it. The company also interested me, but also that specific challenge.

Eyal David: [16:23] That’s it, I came in with low trust, and basically we said there are a few interesting lessons here, or a few interesting insights we can learn that are worth taking a second to sharpen. I think there’s one more thing that happened to Optimove during that time, that it grew a lot.

When a company grows: why you need more structure

Keren Wexler: [16:37] So today we’re 500-something employees, like with every good startup, especially Israeli and certainly Israeli, what happened basically was that you had to create a little more structure. And even though we already talked about it a few minutes ago, it’s not that process and I are best friends. It’s not really my passion, but at Optimove specifically I really saw how when part of the process is missing, that’s really not good. Or the opposite—how the process can support people’s ability to grow. The team’s ability to grow, and that’s how things had to be done, things that had to change to bring us to where we are today. So what foundations did you start with? What did it look like at the beginning, for example? On one hand, amazing foundations—there’s an approach at Optimove that I really love: a product manager, even if he or she is almost on the first day in the role, doesn’t do only inbound. They’re not only taught to work with development and write user stories; from the start they need to get to know the market, get to know the customers, get to know the competitors, talk to customers. Do discovery, do user testing—that’s the approach. Everyone basically also owns an area in the product that they need to be recognized for. So basically that was great; that was something I said, wow, amazing. But on the other hand, not everyone had the tools to do it, and like I said, maybe not the frameworks to do it either, and basically a group of talented people. Who really want to know very well what they need and are supposed to do, and have really internalized all these needs: working with metrics, talking to customers, doing discovery. But how can you actually bring that into the busy, hectic day-to-day lives of product managers? Which is always the million-dollar question, and therefore I think what I’m perhaps describing is relevant not only for, say, a team lead, but for people in a similar role. Because in the end, each of us is looking for a way to become a better product manager, to find the time to look at metrics, to find the time to work. To somehow manage to consolidate all the customer conversations, the things he did, and create from that some kind of strategy, some kind of statement.

Eyal David: [18:34] So okay, so let’s move forward step by step, Hila, so I started defining some kind of vision, or how you’d want these things to be laid out.

Keren Wexler: [18:45] I started really in complete silence, learning the field, the team, and the existing process, and I started forming my opinions. I think it was about a month or two, really like that. I’m a bit impatient, I don’t have much patience many times, but I really held myself back like that to try to understand what was going on, and also because the thing is that in every company things run differently, and every thing has its advantages and disadvantages. You have to be very careful about saying, very, very much, “it worked like this here, it worked like that there,” because it doesn’t always fit the company’s home. So okay, I did a diagnosis, I did a diagnosis, there was a list of things I thought should be changed, I worked in collaboration with my peer, Rob, in England, and with my manager in the United States, who actually— we started making changes in all kinds of areas, some of them, I have to say, I think our work of improving doesn’t end as product managers, especially when technologies are constantly changing and we constantly need to adjust. But yes, basically it’s some kind of process we went through all the time, okay, fine, very practical, let’s go. I maybe should maybe explain a little what the situation was then. Let’s say we did customer conversations, we did user testing. People worked with metrics, people knew how to pull metrics with SQL; every time a decision had to be made, they went and pulled the metrics. What was actually missing in this context, for example. That the metrics—I managed them, I ran them for myself—and there was no discussion about them, I didn’t present them anywhere, they were very, very ad hoc. For example, many times when we did planning, we would just present what we were going to do in that quarter. But there was less discussion about trade-offs, about what we actually are not doing, so it wasn’t that it wasn’t in people’s heads, but it wasn’t out there in the air, in presentations, in conversations.

What was missing: metrics, discussion and trade-offs

Eyal David: [20:40] Like, if we talked about bringing power, you can do bringing power x multiple x.

Keren Wexler: [20:45] Yes, and really when you know there are people with a ton of knowledge in your domain, and each one is an expert in their field, but you can’t turn that into a strategy, can’t generate enough output. Ideas that come up from below, then you have to do something else. So actually the goal here was to take this team and turn everyone into smarter, more productive people and even better, more strategic, more connected product managers. To the business. How do you do that? So there are some very trivial things, like there are team weeks, so okay, what do you do in team weeks? First of all, I ask people to come and present things they’ve done. So I’m a big believer in FOMO. Just now a product manager came and presented an amazing deck about the feature she made and how she defined things and everything, and people look and learn. And I think we’re very ambitious as product managers, so immediately I say to myself, wait, why am I not doing this? Wow, what an amazing presentation. Wow, what did she do here? And people come and share all kinds of nuggets from customer conversations and all kinds of metrics, and sometimes when it doesn’t work, I share too, like I can build a dashboard and share it. So part of the things I felt wasn’t enough, and in a second I’ll explain what process I felt needed to be added to this. In addition, there are places where I feel you need to bring in outside help. I mean, two things I was very happy we did this year: we brought two workshops to the team. One of them was in the field of storytelling. It was led by Rotem Reis Dotan. It was amazing, highly recommend it. It stuck—it really stuck. To the point that first of all, we repeated some things a few times in meetings, trying to remind each other what was actually there. And when we now do, for example, product-to-sales presentations, we really try to follow scripts like that, how to do storytelling, start with the context—like, I won’t steal from Rotem, but there is really a very clear methodology there. In so many, many aspects of product, it was very engaging and really spoke to people. We also brought in Shira Weinberg Harel, who talked with us about how to use AI, but really, I have to say, what I feel most advances the team, all of us, is that people come and present.

How to create team learning: presentations, workshops and FOMO

Eyal David: [22:49] It’s very communication-oriented.

Keren Wexler: [22:51] To say that people are a little shy—you need to say, “You can go through and tell us how it went for you, you tried two AI tools, what worked better for you.” You worked with, I don’t know what, Figma, make, and Lovable—what were the differences, how did you work, how did you bring in context, how did you manage to create something that looks similar to our product, what did you do so people will come and tell. And I still sometimes need to ask people; in the end, people arrive very passively to team meetings a lot of the time, and I say, come on, come present, come tell us what you did. A person changed the process they work with, with Mark, with PM, suddenly something there works, they tell a story together, they think bigger—what did you do, what did you do differently?

Eyal David: [23:32] How do you measure progress? There’s a feeling that it’s great, there’s a quiet moment, maybe in meetings they need to manage less. But there is some kind of translation here, actually in the end to faster releases, more features, like, it looks like.

Keren Wexler: [23:50] First of all, great question, so like this: I don’t have a metric. I can start measuring how many people on the team work fully from metrics and how many customer conversations each team member does. We haven’t reached that level either; it’s also a bit less my style. I mean, I really believe in positive reinforcement, and like, if someone did amazing work, first of all I ask them to come and tell the team, and I tell them it was excellent. After that we share in more forums, later we’ll talk about them; I mean, I think in the end it’s some kind of wave, some kind of flywheel like that that needs to be created, and for people to get into the groove. So no, I don’t really have metrics right now. I can tell you about the whole team. We look a bit at AI usage metrics, meaning it’s just a statement that the whole team has to use an AI prototyping tool, no question about it. Meaning we always have some kind of mockup that we didn’t really do ourselves—maybe we did it with the designers, but we did it on our own. Yes, at the team level, we did it. All the rest of this is kind of, for us, a must. I mean, you have to work with metrics, but we don’t have some specific measure right now.

Eyal David: [24:52] It could even be something else, maybe even at the level of how you feel before and how you feel after, like. I think otherwise it’s really hard to maintain something like that, right? So maybe I’ll talk about something else we did. So basically, also.

Product reviews as a mechanism for strategic discussion

Keren Wexler: [25:07] In order to create some kind of discussion about strategy and something beyond the day-to-day, which is incredibly, incredibly draining in the product world, you just have to create those forums. Where a person has to come and talk about their feature, come talk about what they think should be done, or about metrics, or about things they learned. So basically we did product reviews for each area in the product, where we meet the VP Product, me, the directors, and other stakeholders, every month. The PMs are the ones who have to prepare them, and I also have some kind of structure for them, so okay, in the structure it needs to show analytics and certain things need to be shown. This also helped me throughout my career. I mean, in the end you get to the week before this thing and you want to, you need to present something. Okay, so maybe now go back for a second to your favorite analytics tool, dig a little, dig into the summaries of the customer calls you did, and think about what you have to share. Then a discussion can develop at a higher level. It’s kind of storytelling, but really the point is taking the things you did—maybe you thought they were very dry, very, very specific, just to make a decision now. But to spark discussion about them that is strategic, because once you start talking about all kinds of things that came up in customer calls. And all kinds of weird metrics—people don’t use this, and yes they do use it, or they complained about it all the time—and it becomes a discussion at a different level. Obviously, it’s a great opportunity to talk about some hypothesis that was mentioned earlier, so yes, now every time you also need to start talking about what will be in the next quarter, what will be in the next quarters, what I think, what needs to be done. So, like, I’m saying this is some kind of process that ultimately supports all of us. It supports all of us, so that.

Eyal David: [26:46] Like you said, to preserve it, okay, that’s it. I mean, I know this from another company I consulted for, but you guys did it—they encouraged the. Number of decisions that weren’t made before and after a period of time, and that was the wow. I didn’t mean, like, how many things stayed open and for how long. Nice, I said storytelling—you have to talk with the context and all that, so definitely you’re more prepared and you wrapped, you wrapped, or you wrapped your story and it was easier to digest and understand it. I said raw and bland, so a decision needs to be made or the context needs to be understood better. So definitely there’s this flywheel, and in the end it converges there, I think.

Keren Wexler: [27:28] Really, really, and it also grows the PMs in the end, like each one has to come and tell the story of what they’re doing, or what’s happening with what they’re doing, or why it didn’t—I don’t know. It didn’t run the way they thought, and in the end that’s analytical thinking. You want people to kind of take a second, zoom out from now, from here and now, and say okay, why is this, what does this mean, what do I need to do with this information. Maybe still nothing, but one more thing we did, which is also kind of trivial, but there were these product reviews that weren’t really organized—you went in. A PM wrote a crazy good spec, took it to the team, and they started working. Let’s say it was already a feature we decided we were doing, so we did some kind of. Process—again, a word I’m going to go back on, but it helps us a lot now, because everyone adopted it in a second, that we have serious feature tiers. You need to do a director review, a VP review. Of course, the equivalent in the development world. Suddenly all the thinking and talking about features went up a level. You have to present it to the VP, and then you talk about the motivations and the why, and what your trade-offs will be, and what competitors have. Because that’s also part of, of course, the PowerPoint template you get to do this and everything, and you just. Become a better product manager, and that’s amazing because it’s just, like, a process.

Feature reviews that raise the level with Engineering

Eyal David: [28:42] But in the end it just reminds us of the things we really need to do. I’m thinking about it also in terms of the storytelling you’re describing to them. In the end, their incentive is also in the context and all that, so they also have context, something that interests them, and actually the incentive to do now what someone describes. Beyond Optimove and the product department, these are tools that will stay with them for their whole career, and they improve them by an order of magnitude—I mean, exactly, there’s a hundred-percent overlap that I keep telling everyone all the time, I’m something percent between what you.

Keren Wexler: [29:12] What Optimove needs from them and what they need in order to grow their career, to be better, to succeed in the next role, because what’s more important than the product, the most important thing is you. I mean, really, but to gain more tools and do more things, and here the mutual fertilization is really significant. In the end, I think that with your perspective—and I say this about myself with my perspective—then someone else comes along with a different perspective because I opened up this topic to kind of a dilemma I have in a team meeting, and other people responded, and it opens my mind. And one of the other things we did was really a bit about how we make big decisions. In the end there’s the title planning. And that’s hard, hand on heart, in my opinion it’s the hardest thing. And being a product manager, in my opinion, is those big decisions. I mean, of course it happens in small as well, in every feature—you have to make decisions—but the big decisions are what to do and what not to do. It’s hard, and in the end, we’re facing bots. And how can the sabbat be handled in the most intelligent, smart way? So there, we really did a process as well. Again, the company is very organized, so okay, so product initiative many, basically we derived from okay, so the problem was that there were too many initiatives, there were about 20–30 initiatives, all of them very legitimate. And then basically every initiative that a product manager wanted to advance or suggest advancing fit into some initiative in a way that didn’t allow us to prioritize. There’s a lot of room for error here, because the real question is: how much customization do I leave, how many degrees of freedom do I leave, and how much control do I give this system so that it can work on its own?

How to narrow dozens of initiatives to 2–3 focuses

AI as a trend changing retention marketing

Eyal David: [35:58] Yes, that’s the question of questions. So, well, this is a very interesting turn. We don’t have to talk about it for now. Maybe I’ll bring you back to this. I want you to tell me, out of all the things you listed that worked well in the process you went through—

The thing that worked best in the process

Keren Wexler: [36:11] what worked best between you? I don’t know if there’s just one thing, but I think that— what was truly critical, and by the way, to me it’s the most trivial thing. I mean, it was the first thing on my list. It’s this feature-feature release—feature review, sorry, definitely not release. I mean, this place where we start working on some feature, at the level of a single feature, we look at it, work on some feature, and there’s some forum— that requires the product manager to be very professional in somehow presenting the things, somehow talking about the things in the goals they set, as part of the script they need to say, “I expect this to raise my KPI by...” or raise my usage by so-and-so. In other words, it makes this thing more business-oriented, more connected to reality. We often forget to do this. I mean, this is really something very good. It also really defined the line between engineering and product, because we do this with development, and then— they can also express their opinion, and more than once, not just once or twice, they completely changed our plans because they brought such significant arguments that maybe before that wouldn’t have happened, because— often it’s also someone senior in engineering; they have this idea in R&D, and not necessarily the team lead.

Eyal David: [37:23] It improves the team, like, not your team—right, yes.

Keren Wexler: [37:27] Yes, because then you actually give space to the stakeholders who are truly our best partners. Again, then the whole thing levels up; the architect is there. I keep saying, “Isn’t this almost trivial?” Because it should happen, and on the other hand— it’s hard, because instead of just putting the feature into the team now, I first need to wait and schedule access with people abroad at inconvenient hours, and maybe push it by two weeks because I couldn’t find a slot. And prepare the deck, and I already know what I want to do. It seems obvious to me that this is what needs to be done. Maybe bring two competing designs, because suddenly I’m in a different position, and not just the design I was thinking of.

Eyal David: [38:02] Two concepts always feels awful, but on the other hand it saves a week of development for nothing, or something that’s a shame you didn’t do a little differently. So both of these give me a lot of alignment, like these people make connections—like with a feature we talked about last week, maybe we can do this and that.

Keren Wexler: [38:18] Meaning, you’re also connecting all kinds of things before they even started, and maybe seeing that there are dependencies.

Eyal David: [38:23] Maybe in general you need support from these people, and if they weren’t aligned, good luck informing Brigade, right? Like they’re surfacing some crazy thing no one was aware of.

Keren Wexler: [38:33] So usually I really believe it shortens things for us in the end, and it just kind of forces you to get feedback from a wider circle. It’s hard, but it’s really, really important, and it grows everyone. We agreed on one more thing, if you remember, that you’d give some golden tip.

Golden tip: ask for feedback without arriving unprepared

Eyal David: [38:48] I remember, yes.

Keren Wexler: [38:49] So, I was thinking: what tip would I have given five years ago, and what tip—just a bit of perspective—I could have given five years ago? I would have said, really, and I also used to go around to various companies, gave talks on how to work with data and how to be data-informed. I could have said, “Don’t forget to work with data and be data-informed,” but today I think the tip I’ll give is— our role is tricky; we need to be very, very decisive. We build some kind of case—it means this is my opinion, and I built it, and I know this area best—and my biggest recommendation to product managers is truly— to seek feedback, to cultivate the possibility that maybe you don’t know everything, and in every possible place you can get feedback on what you’re doing, whether it’s in a team meeting, which is hard, like not to volunteer—why would I show what I’m working on right now? The design dilemma I have—one of the things I really try to do myself and push everyone to do—is: if I have an idea, and I’m talking to a customer tomorrow, I also try to throw the idea at the customer. Or show them the beginning of the mockup. In other words, get feedback at every level and from all the stakeholders, and that takes some humility, because a lot of times it also means I’m not on the right track. And I really, really believe that the person who is open to feedback and comes looking for those opportunities is the person with confidence. Because they’re capable of handling it; they’re not shaken by it, since of course they’re also getting criticism. So really, I’m kind of inviting everyone here to look for the opportunities— even if you’re a little embarrassed or afraid they’ll change things and move things around for you—to look for opportunities to get that feedback from as many— sources as possible, because in the end it just gives perspective and improves everything, including you, because otherwise we just won’t learn only from our own mistakes.

Eyal David: [40:34] I could go a bit overboard here. I can tell you, if you’re very early in your career, then in my opinion, wow—like, take feedback, take feedback, and embrace it. Think about it afterward and measure it too. Maybe someone told you something, so it’s worth listening. Very two people—meaning, to really lock it in overall, maybe it’s worthwhile. At a more advanced stage, I think it’s great to come get feedback, but you also need to come in a certain way with yourself. Okay, I’m not going to waste your time.

Keren Wexler: [41:04] Thanks for saying that. Really, getting feedback doesn’t mean arriving with something that’s completely unprocessed, even in your own mind, and dumping it on another person. It’s respecting other people’s time. It doesn’t mean you don’t prepare it and think about it. And not most of the time—you need to come in general, I believe this especially with product—you always need to come with an opinion. Meaning, you have two alternatives, three alternatives; you have to say what you think should be done. You can’t just throw that dilemma at someone else.

Eyal David: [41:30] Maybe you know this, but it’s great: I started running a prompt summer. I read about it somewhere. You take the generator, basically a panel of three expert people and roles, and one is like super critical, the second goes along with you more, and the third. And then you get, you say, give me the cutting insight from these three opinions on what I just presented to you, and then you get such a great insight for doing this further draft before you present it to someone and run the prompts.

Keren Wexler: [42:02] It will help us, it’s really great, and that’s it. I’m really in favor of this sharpening because it doesn’t mean telling him to come prepared, it doesn’t mean coming with some opinion. Like with a proposal, it has to, that’s our job; it just means that after all this. I’ll feel comfortable presenting this thing and hearing more opinions and hearing them without necessarily agreeing, yes.

Eyal David: [42:24] So here too you need to come very sharp about why, what this is actually going to move, because even with the solution I’m presenting now, graben, it’s not good. Still, we need that line, what are we even trying to achieve, and maybe this mutual fertilization, like. will produce some much better thing, basically, that we can talk about; maybe you can bring it into a conversation where I can’t even get feedback if I don’t explain properly what I’m actually trying to solve.