Transcript: From Utility to Platform: Inside Product Reviews at Lightricks with Alon David

Host: Eyal David · Guest: Alon David · Back to episode

Alon David is VP Product of Facetune, Lightricks' flagship product, after a career that began with design studies in New York, continued with his own digital design and branding studio, and passed through senior product roles at Fiverr. The episode dives into the nuts and bolts of product work: Lightricks' strategic move from Utilities to platforms, which skills are really sought in a PM, and above all the Product Review process as the central muscle that sharpens planning and decision-making. A thread running through the conversation is decision-making with a partial picture — 'looking through a straw' — and the professional humility to set your ego aside and learn from every iteration.

In this episode

  • Lightricks is undergoing a long Zero-to-One move of turning image and video editing tools into a platform — a stage with several types of players and interactions between them, similar to a marketplace like Airbnb or Amazon.
  • The two critical PM skills are the ability to lead without authority over a complex matrix of stakeholders, and the ability to make independent decisions based on partial information without falling into analysis paralysis.
  • The way to sharpen product intuition is actually to work within a structured process that moderates the intuition and leads to data-driven reasoning — and to view mistakes as part of the learning process.
  • Product Review is the green light for execution: the PM does all the legwork (Six-Q, validation, design, effort estimation) and presents to a room where every role has a mandate to raise a red flag.
  • Entering a new product role = 'archaeology work': hands-on use of the product, conversations with company veterans and the CPO, learning users' motivations, and competitive analysis of the competition.
  • Constructive criticism and results that contradict a hypothesis are the default, not the failure — the ability to set your ego aside and treat criticism as learning is a product muscle in itself.

Eyal David: [00:00] Hey friends, Alon, how are you? Great, thanks. Glad you're here. With us today is Alon, who is VP Product at Lightricks.

Alon David: [00:11] Alon, I'd love for you to tell us a bit about your role — what do you do? So I've been at Lightricks for about two and a half years, VP Product of a product called Facetune. Basically Lightricks' flagship product. Lightricks is divided into several verticals, and Facetune is one of those verticals. So in my role I'm responsible for Facetune's product group, working together with a partner who is the VP Engineering, and with a partner from marketing — that's basically how we lead the product and the group. How does it work? How many dev teams are there under Facetune? We split it into domains — right now we have five or six domains, there are domains that are combined together under a PM and an EM, an Engineering Manager, so right now we have five or six dev teams, seven product people,

Eyal David: [01:05] And can you tell us a bit about Lightricks, about the industry, how Lightricks has maybe changed since you got there?

Alon David: [01:12] Yeah, it's interesting — I arrived at a very interesting point at Lightricks. Lightricks started a little over a decade ago, developing technological products for mobile, apps, in image and video processing, a bit of sound but mainly image and video processing, and they were basically state of the art technologically, in the beginning, around 2016 — a little under a decade — but yeah, the breakthrough was a little under a decade ago, and the company was very, very successful, mainly with products like Facetune, Videoleap, Photoleap, and other products too. Was there a rise related to COVID, with more people filming content? How did that work? I arrived after COVID, so I can't say specifically, but I assume so. When I arrived, there really was some kind of turning point in the company, where an understanding or a decision had settled in, that Utilities, as Tools for editing video and images, have some kind of growth cap, in terms of the vertical globally. So there was basically a decision to turn the tools into platforms. To basically broaden the scope. Yes, exactly. Every VP Product of every vertical basically had to come up with what that means. What does it mean to turn a utility into a platform? In Facetune's world — first of all, it's a very long move. You don't immediately know what it means, and even if you have all kinds of assumptions and hypotheses, these are Zero to One projects that take a very long time, and we're still in the process of examining what it means. But broadly, the idea, at least in Facetune's world, the place I'm aiming for, is to turn this Utility into a place where we create some kind of stage, and on that stage there are several players playing. Think of it as a substrate where, if today the Utility or the motivation to come and use Facetune is, say, to look your best — that's a photo — so we want to expand that thing, but not only for those same players, but to expand it for additional players, and also to create interactions within the platform. What does that mean? It means, for example, if you take the example of a marketplace, okay? Or Airbnb or Amazon — so basically Airbnb is a platform, right? It's basically the stage where you have the Hosts, who are one player, you have the Guests, who are a second player, you have businesses, who are a third player. The richer and broader the platform, the more room there is for players to come and enter. It's basically a substrate for the business to grow. And is this really fresh? It's in progress — we've already been working on it for a while, but as I said, it's a very, very big Zero to One project, and a very significant part of working on a Zero to One project is that it's an iterative learning process. You start with some hypotheses, with some product vision, and obviously in the end the product is very different from what you imagined at the start, and the process of arriving at what the product is, is an iterative process. So we're now inside this process, trying to sharpen and understand what the value proposition is that we want to create,

Eyal David: [04:09] and for whom, what the use cases are, and so on. Cool, interesting. And can you tell us a bit — so let's talk about the industry,

Alon David: [04:18] who your competitors are, is it the Creator Economy, what is the industry even called? So it's the Creator Economy, but with a twist, meaning, as I said, there are different verticals at Lightricks. Facetune, the veteran one, also addresses the Creator Economy, because at the end of the day, Creators who produce content, of course want to look their best, the most 'wow', in every piece of content they put out, and Facetune is basically the tool that lets them do that, in a very convenient way, with very high control, on mobile, so it's also on the go, and very, very accessible and quick to work with. But it also addresses just regular people who want to improve their photos, and to edit their photos and videos, so that's why I say it's the Creator Economy with a twist,

Eyal David: [05:06] at the end of the day it also connects with the Beauty Industry, which is probably, as you say, the consumer it's most tailored for right now, no?

Alon David: [05:14] Right. In the end, the basic motivation today of someone who comes to use Facetune is 'I want to look the best in a photo', and that's basically what the tool enables today. And do you have notable competitors in this space? Yes, there are. Yes, there are notable competitors. First of all, this vertical in the stores, in the App Store and Google Store, is a very, very broad, very crowded vertical, with a lot of competition. Also the technological changes in recent years, and certainly in the AI world, are greatly changing this Landscape, and creating more opportunities for competing companies or products. So what we're basically trying to do, also going back to what we talked about regarding the platform, we're basically trying to create a value proposition, that I don't want to say is independent, but certainly lowers or reduces the friction that exists with the competition. Where do these processes happen today? In Facetune they don't happen. That's exactly why I'm asking. Yeah, so today in the Photo Editing world there isn't really this thing I'm talking about, but there are, you know, adjacent industries, right? If you take Photoshop as an example, so with Photoshop too — if it once was just an image-editing tool, today it's a platform, and also the whole Adobe world, and the Adobe Suite — you have fonts, you have images, you have collaborations, meaning it's already a platform, and not just a work tool.

Eyal David: [06:37] Exactly. Okay, so here we love the practical stuff — we dove straight into the practical, and we'll stay in the practical for another moment, okay? Alon, can you describe what kind of skills you look for in a PM, at Lightricks for instance?

Alon David: [06:51] Yeah, definitely. So there's quite a range of... no, let's focus on the most... So the really most important things — I think the ability, first of all, to lead, meaning leadership, I'll call it the ability to lead, a PM needs to lead not only the projects he manages and the products he wants to develop, but he leads a process and people without authority, over a very complex matrix of stakeholders and partners the PM works with, and he basically needs to lead them, help them implement and reach the goals he's pursuing — that's one thing. And the second is the ability to make decisions, or to be independent — that is, it's two things, it's basically two things, two sides of a coin: the ability to make decisions with a partial picture, okay? If data is missing — at the end of the day, when we validate a hypothesis, we really do it with... I always liken it to this: you have a picture and you can't see the whole picture, you're looking through a straw and you see blue, and you need to figure out whether it's sky or sea. The more points you poke in the picture, the more you understand whether you're seeing sky or sea, or something else, and then you need to make a decision based on that — so the ability to move independently, to make decisions based on partial information, and to lead this move independently — those are things that are very hard. How do you test for that? We have interview processes — you know, you try to draw out signals. Also, look, research is very, very important for the ability to lead, and also to be independent and make decisions — it's also the person's personality: you need to be a people person, you need to be someone who knows how to talk to people, knows how to motivate, you try to surface this in interviews through questions about what they've done, and also some exercise we do right in the interview itself, trying to understand who the person in front of us is and what skills they have that could fit us.

Eyal David: [08:51] How do you recommend sharpening — let's focus, I think, on decision-making, really on making decisions based on intuition, as we called it in our pre-conversation — how do you recommend sharpening a skill like that?

Alon David: [09:06] So I think the best way to become proficient at it and improve at it is to work within some very structured product process, specifically the intuitive aspect, which is definitely important and an inseparable component of leading product work — precisely that is something we put into the process to moderate, exactly to minimize it, so that it isn't what drives the decision in the process itself. If you do the process — I can, if you want, go deeper into what the process is, of course. If you work according to the process in an orderly way, at the end of the day you arrive at healthier, more data-driven, and more informed reasoning about what you want to do, now in the end, look, we build a product — these are hypotheses, there were many assumptions, as I said the picture is partial, and you also make a lot of mistakes, but I don't call them mistakes because it's the learning process, you're always learning. Exactly. So I think that if you understand that through the process, and through the fact that even if you didn't succeed in the test, in the end you learn from it and it basically helps you understand what the next step is — then you're also less afraid to make decisions, you don't fall into analysis paralysis trying to construct the full picture.

Eyal David: [10:19] So that sounds — it sounds to me very much like a continuation of another episode we did with Yael Shamir from Fiverr, which by the way is just because I haven't properly introduced you yet, and I will as mentioned. But let's pin this and really come back to it later. Let me introduce you a bit — so Alon, you really have a career that's unusual, from what I felt when I looked, and from our conversations. So Alon, you actually started design studies in New York. Right. You became a business owner — you had your own agency that basically provided mainly design services, right?

Alon David: [10:55] Yeah, it was a design and branding studio, and we focused mainly on digital worlds. This was 2007–2008, right at the beginning of the smartphone boom in terms of apps and so on, and we understood we needed to focus on these worlds. What interested us was basically working with a wide variety of clients. Simple websites, which were actually less interesting — that was more about the branding there — but up to web-based platforms for insurance or finance and the like, and games.

Eyal David: [11:29] Listen, this fascinates me, because — let's go back to 2007, the iPhone came out — how did you decide to make such a shift from branding, from branding?

Alon David: [11:41] I think it was a fairly natural decision. In the end, clients come to you. They have — in these digital worlds, they're trying to create their footprint in the digital world, and you kind of get pulled into this world out of necessity.

Eyal David: [11:58] So it came from a need. Just — because in 2007 the iPhone had really just come out, I don't know, Nokia probably — amazing that a need arose at such a stage and you already identified it and already made this shift. That really points to decision-making, when you're looking at something through a straw and have to decide.

Alon David: [12:14] Yeah, that's true, it was also the mobile worlds. But also the internet worlds, and as I say, it's like — you know, clients come and pull you in, but we did know it was also a world that fascinates and interests us, meaning we weren't just anywhere — we also sought out this kind of client and this kind of field of work, and that's also what we highlighted in our portfolio and on our site.

Eyal David: [12:38] Well, of course everything that supports it. Yeah, cool. So I'll tell it: from here you got to sell your agency too, right, and you got —

Alon David: [12:48] to one of your clients, right, you sold it to one of your clients, right? So my partner and I — it's important to note the studio was mine and a partner's — one of the clients who worked with us in earlier incarnations came back to us with an offer that he wanted us to become exclusive, in-house with him. It suited us in many respects at that same point, and we basically went with this move and became — you joined the company, we joined the company, me as head of product and my partner as creative director.

Eyal David: [13:18] So wait, I'll do one more second — so this is really an unusual story, because you basically became product with the help of the universe, you didn't plan it, right? Had you thought about it beforehand, that you want to be product? Is it something that interested you? Did you know what it was?

Alon David: [13:33] So, when we worked on our clients, on their products, at the studio, at Blogo — actually they didn't even call it product back then, there were all kinds of names. I was already a project manager. Yeah, it was a project. UX, all kinds of, you know — really at Rumble it started to become more institutionalized, although there too it was B2B, and you know, it's a slightly different kind of product work. The real product work, like — as opposed to my university — the product work was at Fiverr.

Eyal David: [14:05] What an ad we're doing here for Fiverr. So let's just place ourselves on the timeline for a second, and really jump to Fiverr — so Blogo was sold in what year?

Alon David: [14:14] Two thousand and... we opened Blogo in... not in 2000. In 2008, 2009, on the timeline, and in 2015 — sorry, 2014.

Eyal David: [14:25] I see. So those, you know, there were already some products in the world by then. Okay, yeah yeah yeah, so okay. And then from there you really got to Fiverr, right, and there — I remember you came in as product and very quickly already became a Group Manager, correct me if I'm wrong, right, and in the end you got to Senior Director, right? Right. Do you want to tell us a bit about your time at Fiverr? Maybe. Tell us also how it felt, or what the differences were between the product work you did at Rumble versus Fiverr, for instance.

Alon David: [14:57] Yeah, so first of all, really, at Fiverr my entry into the product world at the professional level really was at Fiverr, for several reasons. First of all, it was already a product with a lot of users and data, and B2C, so you kind of enter very process-driven and proper product work, let's call it. where you make decisions based on data. And you also get fairly quick feedback on the work you do. It was very, very different from anything I'd known before. But it's also a product company, again in contrast to what I'd known before. And a very strong emphasis on — Product is king. Yeah, product is king, and the whole matter of the skill set of product people and the training of product people. All the product work was very, very much at the core of the company. That of course translated into investment in us as product people. In training, in workshops, really to improve us and refine us and turn us into better product people.

Eyal David: [15:54] What do you think is the thing, the ability, you sharpened the most during that period? So one of the things —

Alon David: [16:00] I talked about the process earlier — it's the process that I basically learned at Fiverr, and that I also continue with at Lightricks, which is also a product company, and there too the emphasis on the product is very, very strong, so for me it's some kind of continuous line. It's the process that basically leads a product manager from someone — from ideation, an idea or an opportunity he wants to implement, all the way to the product review, which is basically a kind of — call it the green light to continue with the product work. This process goes through the Six-Q that Yael mentioned in her podcast, and goes through working with the various stakeholders — whether it's the data people in the validation process of the problem hypothesis, and the product designer and working on the solution hypothesis, and the tech partners in dev to understand what's feasible and what's not and what the effort estimation is — and all of this ultimately brings you to the product review. The product review is a meeting — a meeting the product manager runs — and present at this meeting are all the stakeholders of the project he now wants to bring to execution, whether from tech, from data, from design, marketing, and so on. And the PM's managers sit in, whether it's the Group Manager, in our case the VPs, and basically the product manager and his partners present the process.

Eyal David: [17:25] It interests me a lot, and we'll talk about the product review — that's also one, that's the topic we pinned as mentioned and will return to. I just want to basically complete the picture here, to understand your whole experience — I call it the first job at Fiverr, but just because we branded it that way, because that's how you described it — that it was the meaningful place where you learned product. How was your entry into Fiverr? Basically now you're entering — as you said, you came from a B2B company, and you suddenly enter a consumer company, there's product market fit — I don't know if Rumble had it too — suddenly there are tons of users, there's a very branching product you need to learn. What did

Alon David: [18:02] your first six months there look like? First of all, I really enjoyed it — for me it was an eye-opener to come into a world so rich in data. The people around me were — it was also the first time I worked with a product group, product colleagues, product managers. At Rumble were you solo? What was it like? It was fairly solo, yeah, there were a few more functions adjacent to the product world, it wasn't a structure, it wasn't a product organization, and very talented people, so you know, you're rubbing against talented people, and that's just — another thing that helped me a lot in entering was that Fiverr's content world, which is the world of freelancers, is a world I came from — I studied design, I was actually a freelancer since I was a student, my wife does this too, she's still a freelancer today, so I was very, very familiar with the content world, and that also helped me a lot. And another thing is that I immediately started using the product too, which is one of the things that really helped me so I opened a gig of just Photoshop — the goal wasn't even to sell at all, because I did simple Photoshop jobs like that at night for five dollars, but it was to experience the experience and get communication from the buyer, to understand what the buyer experiences from his side, and from the seller, from his side — I was also responsible, I was PM on the sellers' side, so this was the side I was basically supposed to represent in the product, so this whole thing was definitely —

Eyal David: [19:38] Thanks. An eye-opener. That sounds to me like a great tip for going forward, by the way, on how you enter and dig deep into something. Yeah, that sounds great to me. And basically at Lightricks you made a similar move, entering the company — how was that? Yeah, so at Lightricks, first of all, I came already in the role of VP Product, so basically your starting position is different, and also the details you dig into with others.

Alon David: [20:00] In the first six months I kind of — I came in around summer, and I said okay, by the end of the year I set myself three goals: organizing the group, organizing the domain, and learning the app, the profession, the users, and so on. I think that's, you know, an inseparable part of product work — to get to know the subject matter, the subject matter. Yeah. How do you measure that, Alon, if you set it for yourself as a six-month goal? How do you measure a thing like that? So first of all, really, the product learning doesn't end after six months, it's kind of ongoing, all the time you keep discovering new things. And a product is also something that changes and evolves, so what was true two and a half years ago isn't true today, but it's certainly different and has — it's painted in slightly different colors as time goes on. With the other things, the other goals I had, it was easier to measure — whether to build the group, to understand what the vision is. I remind you that I came in exactly at the pivotal point where the company was moving from tool to platform, so also the understanding, or the desire to understand, what it means to be a platform — that's not a simple, easy question to answer, I had a lot of these threads to handle, it was more like — I'm trying for a second — it was actually that I set aside time each week to really become proficient, to learn more, and less to set it as a quantitative target. It was ongoing, it was also setting myself blocks of time and becoming proficient, it was also looking at users' ideas and working with UX Research. To do, you know, digging back in time when you weren't there, yeah — talking a lot with the product people who were already there, you know, the CPO who really built the product, so lots of conversations with him, and getting to know — archaeology work.

Eyal David: [21:51] Really nice, we made it practical, I'm pleased. Okay, so now — let's, if you can, the thing we pinned, let's talk about it: what does a product review process look like at you, at Lightricks?

Alon David: [22:03] So when a product manager wants to bring a feature or hypothesis to execution, he needs to do a product review. A product review basically touches several stages in the process, or several points of the product work. Not every product review looks the same, and not every product requires the full spectrum of a product review, so you kind of manage it according to the intensity of the product. But you basically start by talking about the problem — why do you want to do — a problem or an opportunity. What's the problem hypothesis, because you know, the fact that I have a drop here doesn't mean I know why the drop is happening, so you need to bring the hypotheses there — what's the solution hypothesis, meaning what's the proposal to solve it, what are the KPIs and how will you measure success, which is also very, very important to talk about and to pin down exactly what you want to measure at the local level or the global level. Risks — a lot of people tend to ignore the risks of an experiment, and you're basically shipping an experiment. A product review — one of the principles of a product review is that everyone sitting in the room has a mandate. Sitting in the room — you mentioned that earlier. So the PM basically also brings the partners from his dev team — the engineering manager, the developers who are actually going to work on the product are in the room and already know at this stage — the product designer, the data analyst, marketing partner, sometimes also, you know, if it's something that has some legal risk, then someone from legal, and so on. Of course the VP Product, VP Engineering, yeah, and that's it. And basically the PM and his partners present the product, the move they want to make, where of course everyone in the room has a mandate to say, wait, there's a red flag here. And the goal in the end is to get a green light to set off, which is why for the product manager it kind of obligates him to do the legwork before he gets to the product review, and to basically pass through the whole process up to the product review — the Six-Q, which is kind of the initial ideation and the initial reasoning for why you're doing it, all the way to working with the tech partners and understanding the effort estimation and what's possible and what's not, working with design and working with data and doing validation on the whole process. So in the end you arrive at the product review, and this goes back to your question of what makes us proficient or sharpens and hones these abilities for us — in the end, the more product reviews you do and the more you get the questions in the room that put you in a kind of, not a test, but you need to give an answer, then you advance more and more.

Eyal David: [24:36] So you really sharpen the planning stage, right — it's important to say that it basically focuses on this area. And describe for us, basically, okay — what does it look like in practice? Meaning, I finished it, the session's over, it probably takes something like an hour, I came out with a list of insights or questions, some of which I knew how to answer and some I didn't. After that is there another iteration like this, or do I just internalize them?

Alon David: [24:59] Sometimes yes, sometimes it's another iteration in the same forum, sometimes it's another iteration in a smaller forum, sometimes it's just an update of things versus, say, versus me, the VP Product or the VP Engineering, and sometimes it's really like, okay, we're not on the right track, we need to go do more work.

Eyal David: [25:17] That's a bummer. It's a bummer, but not a bummer, because at the end of the day it really helps you arrive at a better product. But I didn't just say 'what a bummer' for nothing, because it takes me right back to our conversation downstairs, over coffee. Basically the product manager and everyone who worked on this storytelling that happens in this meeting needs to put their ego aside, not to think in the direction of 'what a bummer', and to take and answer as cleanly as possible on the things, in order to really create the best product. Right. That's also a muscle you probably strengthen or sharpen in this process. Totally. This whole matter of constructive criticism,

Alon David: [25:54] understanding that basically any criticism, whether it's in the product review process, or whether you shipped the experiment and got results that don't match what you thought or what your hypothesis was — it's all okay. First of all, it happens in most cases, there's nothing to be done. We, as I said, make decisions based on a picture we saw through a hole in a straw. And that's okay, it's part of the learning process — if you really know how to put your ego aside, and look at this thing as something that teaches you. By the way, I too, as VP Product, don't know more than the PM, right? I too don't have more visibility. In the end the PM brings me the picture, so there are two of us, we look through the holes in the straw, and try to understand what we're looking at, and to build the hypothesis.

Eyal David: [26:37] So throw us a few more things, really practical nuggets — so just, what does a thing like this look like? Are there fixed slides in a presentation like this?

Alon David: [26:43] Yes, there's a fixed structure, that starts with the Why, or what's the opportunity, what's the problem hypothesis. Six-Q, basically, for instance. A kind of Six-Q, what's the validation of the problem hypothesis, which can come from all kinds of sources of data, both data, raw data from the product, and it can also be from the competition, from what's happening out there, from Qualitative Data, from interviews and UX Research. What's the solution you're proposing, where sometimes the PM, or the PM and the Product Designer, propose, say, two or three solutions, and that's part of the discussion at the end of the meeting. There's always a chunk of time at the end reserved for discussion. How much? It depends, but if, say, a product review is around 45 minutes, then a quarter of an hour is what we want to leave for discussion. I also encourage — it's not always possible — I encourage the product manager to run through the discussion, and for people to write down their questions and not — because otherwise the discussion starts at a very, very early stage, and you don't actually get to see the whole picture. So, as mentioned, the validation of the hypothesis, and then the solutions, what's the Rollout Plan — I'm going to test both variants, blah blah, for which users, how will I measure success, what really are the Local KPIs, Business KPIs, Global KPIs, and risks. Risks and Dependencies. If I'm, say, dependent on another team, or dependent on... that's also a risk on the face of it.

Eyal David: [28:10] Right. What's also amazing about this method — I'd say it also, since we already talked about sharpening abilities, it also sharpens the abilities of everyone in the room. Even if I'm not product, right. And then everyone speaks the same language throughout, and it also naturally makes the final result probably better. It's simply a different step from regular product grooming, I think, which deals more with questions, with smaller details. I've gotten to see quite a few places, and precisely when you talk about Risks, and you bring in the E of Legal, and you pin this thing down — just, a much healthier process, no doubt. So I'm sure the listeners who want to learn more about this can reach out to you, or, um, maybe we'll also talk about where. And we're already moving toward wrapping up the episode. Alon, do you have some recommendation? I think you gave an excellent recommendation, so maybe really wrap it up — a recommendation for young PMs?

Alon David: [29:03] Yeah, I think that a PM who's starting out in this profession — first of all I think that, starting at a small startup, where you touch a lot of things, is a plus. Even though it will usually be less process-driven, and less structured, but precisely that — this requirement to be an all-arounder — really strengthens the product muscle, and the intuitions. And I think, as I said, to enter and get to know the product itself, and the users. Here I always tend to make the distinction — it's not to know the users, like who the user is — always, thanks, you have your user, but no. It's to know the motivations, it's to understand what causes the user to come to your product, to do certain actions, or not do certain actions, and that's through the practice of also getting to know the product itself, or also talking with people, also working with — if there's, say, a UX Research group in the organization, then of course working a lot with them, and trying through them to understand these motivations,

Eyal David: [30:05] that's super important. And you — sorry that I'm jumping in, but you kind of brought this to me maybe, to land it — I think what you're basically saying is that when you now enter a company, you really try to soak up all the information you can, whether it's through your hands, really hands-on experimentation, or whether it's basically, as they call it, an archaeologist — basically digging and drawing everything to you, you listen to podcasts around the topic, you watch videos in order to keep yourself — how do you actually consume all this information efficiently?

Alon David: [30:36] Basically I'm not so much — I mean, I think it's more of a focus on the company or the product itself, You won't listen to a podcast about the product, about the industry? Yeah, of course, so like — to read about the industry, to understand in some way, a kind of competitive analysis of the competition, and how the competition presents their value proposition, and to understand the motivations also through the competition, to understand the historical context — meaning, talking with people who were at the company years before you, and to understand what was done, and why, and why — not everything that was done, and was considered — but that means you can't do it again, maybe with a different approach, but yes, to understand the context of

Eyal David: [31:18] how things got to where they got. Cool, and is that also what you recommend to every new employee who joins your product team?

Alon David: [31:25] Or is there a process and you already... There's of course an onboarding process, and an orderly onboarding document, we like to work in an orderly way, but yes, it's a lot of, you know, personal responsibility, a lot of like — the time you invest, the more you get in and understand more about what you're working on, and why you're doing what you're doing, then that's how you'll be able to arrive at those same two things we're — closing the loop — which is to be a leader, and to be a domain expert, meaning to be the one who knows how to make decisions and run independently in your domain. Yeah, you need deep knowledge to support these two, no doubt about these two. Cool, so how does one get in touch with you? So on LinkedIn, that's the best way. I'm not super active, but whoever reaches out to me, I get back to them if not the same day,

Eyal David: [32:15] so don't make promises here, but I get back to people. Great, wonderful, Alon, so we had a lot of fun, me too, thanks, and it seems to me we also have topics for another episode, so we'll remember that. Thanks. Alright, bye for now.