Transcript: Focusing on What Really Matters: A VP Product's First Six Months at a Cyber Company

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi, this is Eyal. Welcome to Product Builder, the place for the most interesting product conversations. I'm the owner of UserFlowzz, and among other things the host of this podcast, and my goal here is for us to improve our product skills together. If this is your first time here, I hope you enjoy it. And if you've already listened and gotten value, I'd really love it if you'd share the podcast with a friend. So come on, let's get started! Hey Ariel, what's up? All good, how are you? Great. With us is Ariel, who came from Ionix. Let me tell a bit — so you actually started as a QA person, and then you climbed at a company all the way to product, you actually passed through fintech, and after that you went to LivePerson, cyber, and now you obviously work at Ionix. Right. So tell us a bit, what did I miss, what else can I tell about you?

Ariel Ornstein: [00:56] So indeed, I started as QA, when I was a computer science student, then I moved to development, I was a developer for a few years, and then I got a project as — I was the first developer of a new product, and then I basically just Googled how to start a new product, at the company back then there was no product, it was fully sales-led, and then I started getting to know the product role, and what product does, and slowly I started enjoying it more and more, I enjoyed solving business problems more than technical problems and coding, and slowly I just made the transition to product, the moment there was a development team, I already took a product outside of development, I moved to product, managed it, until we actually launched a product that still exists today, and that's it, I fell in love with product, I wanted to keep doing product; it was hard for the company to digest that there's someone who can write code and doesn't write code,

Eyal David: [01:50] and then, as you said, I moved between a few companies until I got today to Ionix. How was that transition to fintech, and then even back to cyber, how was it?

Ariel Ornstein: [02:02] Challenging. The hardest transition was actually going from being a developer to a product manager and making a shift in your head, but the moment I did it, I understood that the important thing is knowing how to ask questions, and then also when you move between industries, it helps a lot.

Eyal David: [02:18] That's for sure. So basically for the last half year you've been at Ionix? Right. So maybe tell a bit about the company, what's the situation right now?

Ariel Ornstein: [02:25] A bit about the company. Well, let's start for a moment with the product. So here, let's start from the top: there's this big world of security, there are many types of products in security, very high-level — so there are these three main attack vectors: there's external, attack from the outside; there's attack from the inside, because there's some compromised device; and there can also be credential theft, and... identity has become a very hot field today. Ionix plays in external. What does that mean? We basically protect all the internet-facing assets of organizations. What type of organizations do you handle? Enterprise. Enterprise is the main customer. And there are basically three main problems, okay? The first problem is organizations — it's already hard for them to understand, which assets they have, meaning, what's my attack surface? Why is that hard, actually? Because today anyone in the organization can decide they want to sign up for a new service, and put company content and data there, and there your attack surface grows, without you, as a security or IT person, knowing at all. Okay? And this has already become unmanageable for companies, and if you're an enterprise with thousands of employees, that's a lot. The second thing is the growth in threats. Meaning, there are more and more threats every day, and from year to year it's already growing in quantity too, you just can't manage it anymore. If in the past there were, I don't know, on the order of tens of vulnerabilities, today it's thousands, tens of thousands, and even more per organization. And the last thing that happens is attack time. Meaning, if in the past it took attackers many days to attack, today it's dropped to few days, and sometimes even hours.

Eyal David: [04:17] And basically the cause, sorry, of this — is it in technology? Or was there another trend that developed?

Ariel Ornstein: [04:23] The cause of what? Of the rise in all the problems you just defined. So yes, in the end it's all technology, you know, it's more things that I as a company, say, can do. And every time I open a door, that's another door someone else can exploit. So okay, so there are these problems, and basically Ionix answers all of them? Yes, so Ionix — this world started as, come tell me what my attack surface is. And then give me visibility, basically. And then, as I said, the quantity of both threats and assets grew at a dizzying pace. And then it became, I'm drowning in visibility, I don't know what to do. So help me understand what's really most important. Meaning, we understand that you can't fix everything, and you also don't need to fix everything. Even if you found me something that best practice says is critical, but it's just an asset that's dead, I have no data there, it's not interesting. So in the end Ionix doesn't come to fix everything. In the end Ionix comes to help you understand: first, understand your attack surface, and second, help you understand what's really important — not just, not what's a theoretical risk, but what's a risk you can actually exploit. And along the way you also explain how to fix it, from the context. Sure, sure, we help with how to fix, some mitigations, ones we do ourselves proactively too, but yes. So tell a bit about the company, actually — how long has it existed? The company has existed something like seven years. Today we're 70-something employees, in terms of funding post-A, customers — a deal count in the tens of customers, at the high end of tens of customers, Fortune 500 customers too. So now, actually, what have you managed to do in the half year you've been at the company? So a lot — a lot of learning, like a real mole, getting into every corner possible, both in the product and in the company, to map, to understand how things work, what doesn't work, to talk a lot with customers, in order to understand also how they work, and what we can do to improve. Ultimately, I need to understand what's critical for now, what's important but can wait,

Eyal David: [06:31] and no less important, also to understand what we don't know is important. So take me for a moment, just how you actually did the... let's call it onboarding, slash mole-digging, slash discovery —

Ariel Ornstein: [06:40] what did such a process look like? Was there something structured? What did it look like? So there was, you know, a start, some kind of start, the entry points, structured ones, there was no product leader at the company for a while before, I did lean on what there was, but ultimately, you know, pretty quickly it just turns — you expand to every area you see in order to understand, right?

Eyal David: [07:06] Not yet in depth on everything. How was it? Like, I imagine you, sitting in meetings, listening, listening, writing, writing,

Ariel Ornstein: [07:14] sitting with programmers, trying to understand, activity after activity in the code — what did it look like? Yes, so not in the code; you know, in the transition from engineering to product, you part from the code,

Eyal David: [07:24] that's the hard thing, but in the end you do it. So tell me, so I really imagine you, with another product manager — what do you do?

Ariel Ornstein: [07:30] How does this exploration actually look? So yes, there was another product manager, we had these areas of responsibility; one of the things we did, when I joined, it was already there, but we formalized it — to define really what, what each team's areas of responsibility are; we divided it by the flow of the product, each team owner of a certain flow, and then it's also easy to say who does what. There were some who took different ownership, and you changed it — how was it? We needed to clarify a bit; this is something I've done from the moment I actually started leading product, and built the first group — so I always made sure it was clear which flow a certain team is responsible for. And then always, okay, like, you have questions, or a division — a division that many companies do, like, but wait, this is UI, and you actually do UI, I'm the back-end team. So slowly I started to also untie these dependencies, and build teams that can go end-to-end. Some processes that were missing, to give predictability to the field, so they'd know a bit better what's going to come,

Eyal David: [08:38] when, what the value of each thing is. How was it really — how did you communicate, or not communicate, actually, your findings,

Ariel Ornstein: [08:45] to channel them, during this run? Yes, I communicated all the time. In the end, one of the challenges is that you enter a company, and there's this train, and you're inside it. It doesn't stop; you need to be on it, and not stop the business. And you have to communicate. Over-communicating is a must in these cases.

Eyal David: [09:08] Yes, I communicated all the time. Look, but you can't — I'm trying to deliberately dig into this — you can't, after all, leave, as you say, everyone in their own thing expecting you to give them the bottom line of, okay, what's the first thing I'm starting to do, or what's actually the strategy going forward? You now have some kind of heatmap — you called it that in the prep call, right? Right.

Ariel Ornstein: [09:27] So take me there, what did it look like? So yes, so setting expectations, to say really what things you identified, what the critical things are, why they're critical, by the way, and it's worth it — it's advisable not to do it the first time, meaning, that people don't hear it the first time you announce it, right? To do a lot of preparation with people, to rally them, and then you already publish it, so people are already with you. But yes, what's important now? What's critical? Why? What are we going to do? What's important that everyone's shouting about? But I apologize, this will wait.

Eyal David: [10:00] That's it, I imagine you mainly — I'm not even thinking about sales, where probably, and customer support surely, they waited for tons of things — how was it with R&D?

Ariel Ornstein: [10:08] R&D was actually the easy part. Actually easier — you know, there they were very thirsty for product direction, to understand what's important for us to work on, to understand what the business context is, they were very thirsty, and the moment they got it, you know, there's the release. The challenge really was, with the moving train, it's more really the direction of sales, of field, who don't care — our customers don't care that a new VP Product arrived, and now they need to wait and do things.

Eyal David: [10:38] Like, you know, that part. So you can't stop it. So, like, you actually operated in two modes — you had a track to ship things, and meanwhile you do your work.

Ariel Ornstein: [10:47] Yes, so there's the day-to-day where you really — you want to deliver, there are things you just let keep happening, while you start to shape your opinion, understand what's important, and what the things are that you want to focus on, not just for the next week or sprint,

Eyal David: [11:05] but for the coming months. And what was that thing? What was the focus for that thing you pushed? I think you pushed. Did you take one big thing as you came in?

Ariel Ornstein: [11:12] Yes, so when I arrived there was something specific that was just a business bottleneck. That we — we aim to grow, and grow by a lot, this process is a process that weighs on us, and we won't be able to grow. Even if 100 customers came now, and all knocked on the door, just take us — we simply couldn't. So this was an area that was just strategic, and it was important that we get into it, take a leap like this, and just push it. Yes. So in terms of — it was something very strategic, but tactically I got into it fast, and pushed, so that, you know, we'd get out of this situation.

Eyal David: [11:48] So was it a project or a feature, that was around the core of the system? Yes. Or was it more actually here? Yes. So you also had to very quickly understand the knowledge domain, and get inside. Right. So who did you actually work closely with? Usually in situations like this you stick to someone who's already there, right?

Ariel Ornstein: [12:06] Right. So indeed, I just teamed up with the people who handle... it's some operational stage in the product. I just sat with them. I saw what they do, how they do it, I learned myself. And then here you have a balance. You don't want to become a professional of that team, but yes, to understand enough to know how to translate what they do into something more efficient and more automatic.

Eyal David: [12:31] To actually understand. Yes. And then you actually communicated the... was it easy to communicate the business message here, in this situation? How was it in this case? Go on? Everyone waited for it — how was it? Yes, so it's a need that...

Ariel Ornstein: [12:43] you know, when you build the heatmap and everyone's shouting somewhere, and then you have that screaming red, so this was a place everyone understood must improve. The challenge was that it's not magic. Meaning, it's something that did take a bit of time, and it's always hard for people to swallow that... this is very important to me, but it takes time.

Eyal David: [13:02] How was the rollout of this thing? In general — discovering it, building the feature, was it something easy in practice to get into, to bring to fruition,

Ariel Ornstein: [13:08] did you do it hands-on? So I did it hands-on, I said — I sat with people who do it in their day-to-day, I saw the processes, a lot of observation, in the end to understand what these actions are that they do manually, repeating them each time, and how you can do it in a more efficient way, ultimately, to make a product out of it.

Eyal David: [13:31] Meaning, to turn manual processes into a process where the product helps you be more efficient. And how, actually... so okay, in parallel to all this, you're also building the team, you're building strategy going forward — so how did you take on all these things in parallel, how was it?

Ariel Ornstein: [13:45] It's still — we're still inside it. How's it going? I divide the time; there's a part where I'm more hands-on, and in the details, and there are times where I need to go up a bit higher, to interview — a lot of interviewing,

Eyal David: [14:00] and to try to bring good people who joined us. So tell me a bit about the industry, tell me actually about your Unique Value Proposition,

Ariel Ornstein: [14:08] what does it look like? Okay. So in the industry game, Exposure Management is crowded. By the way, I learned to understand this over time, right? I even started interviewing people for Ionix, and then they'd say, oh, I also do Exposure Management, and then you talk, and you do a completely different product, but they call themselves Exposure Management, and neither of us defined the other as competition. So it's interesting, interesting to understand this.

Eyal David: [14:34] When you sell the product, or when you go into sales calls, or actually — what's the uniqueness of Ionix?

Ariel Ornstein: [14:41] So what we — the way we position Ionix ultimately, is to be able to start casting the widest net possible, in order to find as many things as possible, and to go to the deepest depth possible. But ultimately, to help you find that insight, to understand what I need to do now. So — the widest net over a lot of noise, to give you the most actionable insight, that you need to do now, or would have been better to do yesterday, and you don't want to wait.

Eyal David: [15:15] How do you communicate this ROI, actually, along the way? What does it look like?

Ariel Ornstein: [15:21] We try to communicate it — there are metrics, there are all kinds of industry standards, right? Like MTTR, for example, Mean Time to Resolution. That's one example. We try to give you dashboards, and... to let you also understand your progress. That's within the product. And it's ultimately a product that sells to enterprise; obviously there's quite a bit of high-touch there, right? So there's customer success in the picture, who do their regular calls with customers, or if it's QBRs,

Eyal David: [15:52] where there too they go over the value they're getting. Cool. Tell me, and from the fact that you got to touch a few industries, what's the significant difference — let's take, say, Payoneer where you worked, and take... Snyk, for that matter. What's the significant difference between fintech and cyber as you see it?

Ariel Ornstein: [16:10] Specifically fintech and cyber — so I'd say fintech, regulation, you know, though time has passed, but I remember that every action I wanted to do, like, it's regulation and compliance, and let's check, and let's this, so very heavy processes. By the way, it also became a secret sauce for companies, right? I'm already compliant, and I have an advantage over others. And so I can run within a company. Snyk, for that matter, but there there's less compliance on the company itself, it's not processes where you need to go through regulation — you could do things, it's much faster.

Eyal David: [16:41] In terms of the content world, to get into — what's simpler? You know, if you do it without any background,

Ariel Ornstein: [16:47] then I'd say fintech — you can Google how it works, how a bank works, or how it works with credit cards, and you can check. Snyk is a world of application security, for that matter. To learn that just by Googling, that's less trivial. Meaning, I had the advantage as a developer, which was also what brought me into the world of security. For that matter, an anecdote — when I got to Snyk, the interviewer asked me, what don't you want to do? Now, without trashing any industry, I said, I don't want gaming, I don't want adtech, and I don't want security. Why? Because I just find it hard to put myself in the users' shoes, and create the empathy that's important as a product person. A week after that, or a month after that, I joined Snyk. Which is security. And what really drew me is application security. That's the developers' side. It could be, it was very easy for me, because three years before that I was still a developer, it was very easy for me, and very compelling — the developer experience.

Eyal David: [17:47] Exactly. And tell me, and actually how do you recommend today, for someone to get into the world of cyber? For someone, some person?

Ariel Ornstein: [17:53] So there are all kinds of ways, you know — first, to learn, always learn. Where do you recommend learning? There's a ton. Like, it's, you know, also today you already have ChatGPT, and you don't need, it's no longer — you don't need to guess, you don't need to Google anymore, where, how, or how to learn something. ChatGPT — you're a teacher, you're a cyber instructor, for such-and-such a field, and I'm a student who wants to learn, and you start, you start getting a lot, a lot of knowledge, and sometimes there are also all kinds of adjacent things. I can give you an example — fintech and cyber, there's, say, specifically also with us, for one of the hirings we did, so there are all kinds of processes, discovery processes, and working with data, that are very similar, and then although you don't have the background, in cyber specifically, but yes, you have the background of discovery work, so there you go, that's how you can jump to cyber, without, you know — also in cyber, you need all kinds of skills, there are those who do the deep cyber, and they have the security background, and there are those who bring other things to the table.

Eyal David: [19:07] Interesting, so okay, so you started to touch on this, so tell me — what are the things that are most important in product management?

Ariel Ornstein: [19:14] So I'd say, first thing, to understand problems, and to know how to ask questions, and to lead a conversation with problems. Meaning, you want to do something, you explain to them why — it's much easier for people to connect this way; it's harder to lead a conversation this way, it's much easier to say, let's do such-and-such a feature, and then it sounds cool cool cool, and then you actually ask yourself why, and you start to fumble — so to understand the why. Data, data-oriented — it's okay to say, I think, and to go by the people, and there are situations where you really need to, because there's no data, but ultimately you need to be able to also lead with data, and to roll up your sleeves — meaning, to know how to roll up your sleeves, to be hands-on, whether it's with your product, so to know the product, every screw in the product, work close to engineering, to help with execution. I've seen situations where product managers are eager to accelerate execution, and those who are eager to crush execution, and that's very important,

Eyal David: [20:27] very much in startups too. Come on, let's talk about the crushing — like, I have a few thoughts in my head, also, you know, from the period when I was a young product person — what's the most significant thing you've seen that really stops development, or stops the launch of something? Inflated scope.

Ariel Ornstein: [20:46] In the end, it's in the small details, okay? And I've seen all kinds of situations, you know, they come to a team, and just inflate the scope, to a level that it's already possible, but then it delays everything for you, and you don't really need it. So first, in many situations I've seen, because you released so much, and you gave so many features — a feature isn't like you released the feature and it's done; there are questions about it afterwards, they want you to improve it afterwards, and the more you inflate, the harder it is for you in the end to get out of it. And the team too — in the end you want, you want to deliver, you don't want to wait a long time until you deliver, it's also harder to break it into small parts. So yes. This comes up a lot for me. The ability to say no — in the end especially, all kinds of proposals come, mainly at the end — that's how I always remember it, usually proposals come at the end, unless it's something that really moves the needle, it probably won't show up at the last minute, but proposals come, and you need to know how to say no to them. This is something I've always seen, that they really get lost in it, and things aren't fully defined, and it always screws things up in the end, so actually this is also the criterion

Eyal David: [22:10] for what you're looking for now, in the hirings you're doing? You can expand on it if you want.

Ariel Ornstein: [22:16] Yes, so broadly, product is product, okay? And no matter which industry you're in, I'm less familiar, but in health, say, I assume the processes are different, so maybe it's a bit different, but in the end, yes, so that's the basis, and in addition to that, so there's, one of the roles we're looking for is more on the side with the Security Expertise, meaning, if I divide our product into, like, three parts, then we have the stage where we find all the assets of a certain organization; the next stage is to do all the Security Assessments, and understand where, where there are things that need to be handled, and the last stage is to do to it what we call Operationalization — to fix, to help companies do Remediation processes. So I'm looking for the second stage, for that matter, where you need Security understanding, you need to be able to work with Security Researchers,

Eyal David: [23:16] and what about the second stage, the third — more empathy and UX, and maybe a development background?

Ariel Ornstein: [23:22] So a development background not necessarily, but this is the stage of coming and knowing, okay, and now we had tons of insights, how do we get you, or you all, as a Security team, to translate this into a Remediation process, whether it's within our product, or you interface to products that you're already working with today, and enable you to do it efficiently. Tell me, it probably really requires understanding the company's situation,

Eyal David: [23:46] what the maturity is there, on the other side and so on. So okay, so I understand you're actually a lot in interviews — you hinted at this earlier too — so tell a bit about, first, maybe questions that you ask, maybe things you can share, that people get stuck on — what do you expect?

Ariel Ornstein: [24:04] So today there's this stage, there's the stage to advance, and then after that I always do an hour-long conversation, which is more like going over things that product people do in day-to-day, how to start understanding how people do and think product. So I go between all kinds of, you know, working with data, working with R&D, all kinds of stages like this.

Eyal David: [24:26] What are you mainly looking to see? What, in this month, are you looking for? I'll say where people fall.

Ariel Ornstein: [24:32] Go ahead. So, what does falling mean? You know. Not passing you. Yes. There, when I give feedback — do you give feedback on the spot? After every conversation, whoever got to this stage, so I call and give the feedback. Whether yes or whether no. And then the places where people succeed less — so first, trivially, like, preparation. I always ask this, before I explain about Ionix: what did you manage to understand? And as we said, there's GenAI there — what would you expect, that people would come and... at minimum, go into the website. Try to understand — even if you didn't understand, show that you did something. And not rarely I get to this, that people say, I didn't have time, I'm flooded with processes, so I don't know anything, start from... I'd be happy for you to start from 0. So okay, I'll explain, but we're product. So also when you do hiring processes, do prioritization for who you want to go to and who not. Be focused. Come a bit more prepared. At the very least, understand the business. Yes, and as we said, ChatGPT is one prompt away. You get all the information you could want. So that's one area. Another area is data and KPIs. I get to hear quite a few product managers who say, listen, at our place I have no infrastructure for data and I can't get the... I don't get the numbers. Or at our place they don't measure, or at my place they measure support tickets, and that's how they measure quality. Ultimately, what I'm trying to understand is beyond the fact that you do work. You do — but do you know how to say what value your product gives, and do you know how to measure it. So that's it, maybe I'll dwell on this. Really, if you do the preliminary research, and you understand what the company does, and what its model is, even if you take a certain area, even high-level, the most high-level, like KPIs, or some goal, at the very least,

Eyal David: [26:38] and derive KPIs from it. How do you recommend really preparing for this thing? Because usually, just, when people who are interviewing turn to me, and that's when. Either they're told, hey, come on, take something you did in the past, and tell it in this way, or take an existing product, and tell it. And I always refer them — I hear them out, and I help them tell their story, but I always refer, listen, here, there's a product here that's much easier, that you can also get data on, and tell its story. What would you prefer to hear, and if you heard about a product case study, how would you take it?

Ariel Ornstein: [27:14] So that's interesting. I can do both things, and sometimes I do. Meaning, sometimes you talk mainly in cyber, sometimes ex-military people come to you, and they can't tell you about the product they're building. They can't dive in. So at this stage, say, I do an exercise. Come, let's take an app we both use. You start to do some drill-down there. Meaning, tell me what this app is. What problem does it solve? What, in your opinion, are the goals, the business goals? If you were a product manager, what would you improve? And then you kind of see a person's way of thinking. It's just something worth practicing regardless. Whether you're interviewing, and whether not, in my opinion. It's a must. Really, I also wasn't in any process, also when I interviewed, where this didn't come up. Meaning, even sometimes I joined companies that in the process talked to me endlessly about KPIs, I got to work and that's it, it was thrown out the window, no one talked to me about it. But I didn't have a process that was interesting. They didn't ask me about KPIs. Interesting. Okay, so are there more things

Eyal David: [28:20] that you kind of try to watch for? I'll just give one more thing here. How many times have I already gotten

Ariel Ornstein: [28:26] the answer, listen, my organization doesn't measure anything, but I, as product, decided that I'm putting out some feature and these are the KPIs I set, because that's how I want to measure the value.

Eyal David: [28:38] And I love this answer. Like, it shows also, you know, shows... not the initiative, but the big-picture thinking — you understand that you're doing, you don't do a feature for its own sake. You want to measure through it, and you also understand how you do it. That's for sure, no one's a philanthropist. And tell me, and actually, so what answer do you hear when you keep digging after you get such an answer? So that people don't just come and throw this answer everywhere. What's the question you continue with, and what do you hear? So you need to understand,

Ariel Ornstein: [29:08] like, what's an example of a data-driven decision you made, or give me some central KPI that you track. Why is it important? It's very important to understand also, okay, you didn't hit the KPI — what do you do? You know, those who... how you set the KPI to measure and don't reach it and just continue, and you want to understand, okay,

Eyal David: [29:32] you didn't hit the KPI, what do you do to improve? So you're also looking to hear the practical side. Right. So tell me, and I don't know if you're looking for this, but you touched on it earlier too — the whole scoping topic, again, maybe again, when you understand what your business goal is, and you know what you want to achieve and what you measure, it's very easy for you also actually,

Ariel Ornstein: [29:50] I don't know if easy, but easier, to start to decide actually what I leave in and what not. Right. So this is the next thing you check, actually? Yes, so great, cool — for the third thing I'm looking for, work with engineering. For me this is very important. I've already seen situations of product managers who don't work well with development teams, and it crushes the team. Where do people fall, from what you see? Many times it's in the relationships and communication. Meaning, I've seen situations of, you know, teams that don't listen, don't want to listen to product, and they know best. I've also seen the opposite — product comes and says, okay, this is what we do, don't give me your feedback, this is what we do, and this is the plan. It doesn't work well, so the relationships are very important. For me, from my side, when I build this — meaning, I see us, me and engineering, we're parallel; the product team and the product manager, for me, are one. For me, it's

Eyal David: [30:50] a product development team. How do you build? Build or product? Or product —

Ariel Ornstein: [30:56] build is also product. Indeed. So these relationships are very important to me, and it's important for me to see people who create collaboration, not people who each time — I'm not looking for the stars who come and always give the solution; usually those are also the same people who don't think about the problem before coming with a problem to the team: this is the problem we need to solve,

Eyal David: [31:20] here's also why, and let's find a solution. Interesting — so in an interview you expect,

Ariel Ornstein: [31:26] actually, this ping-pong, you want to see it? Yes, yes yes, I want to see it, I also, you know, I ask them questions; we have this in day-to-day, we always see it — you want to put out some feature and they come and tell you, listen, the team, this can't be done, it'll be ugly code, and this —

Eyal David: [31:44] let's do something else. How do you deal with this thing? You, from your side as product, there's an experience you want to give — how do you defend this position? How do you take care of the user? And really, how do you make a decision and stand on the risks, and maybe communicate them, ask? Right, you have tech debt — this is also a corner that many people kind of don't really know how to deal with. He says, okay, a team lead comes to you now, I need — it'll take three weeks to do a refactor of some service — how do you solve this? So there are product managers who say, okay, he said it's important enough,

Ariel Ornstein: [32:20] well no, I won't get into details, but you want to understand? Okay, also here from my side, since I also arrive at an organization and they tell me tech debt — what's tech debt? Meaning, I don't know tech debt that doesn't in the end have value for the user. That's it, let's break it down: it's either for the user or for the business, it seems to me, or you become more efficient and you save development hours and then amazing, or alternatively there's some blah-blah process

Eyal David: [32:44] that just, as you say, hurts the user and we'll want to... Right, so if it hurts the user

Ariel Ornstein: [32:50] that's clear, that's easy. There's also a matter of risk — I mean, it could be there's some bomb that right now, just, someone today turns manually so it keeps working, but I don't know, in another six weeks this thing will explode in everyone's face, so this can also be a driver to push tech debt. By the way, it happened to me — it happened that they came to me in one of the quarterly plannings we did, and, like, you know they come, it was one of the roles where I was a director — like, with a bowed head, listen, we must now, for the quarter, lay down the whole team and handle some service now. You hear such a thing, you want to pull out all your hair. Transfer me another team, transfer the team, the specialists, and then you start to dig, like, okay, let's talk about it, let's try to understand why, and then slowly you understand, okay, this is a single point of failure of the product; if this service falls, your product goes up and down, for many minutes, if not more, especially when you want to reach 99.99 uptime, you can't afford it, especially when you understand you're within reach — so this became an easy decision.

Eyal David: [34:02] Exactly, here it became an easy decision. Now, maybe you can understand, maybe there's a minimum you can start with, maybe you can plan it differently,

Ariel Ornstein: [34:08] but you can manage this thing, actually. Right, now also when they tell you, if we do this thing then it saves the team hours — you didn't just save the team hours, you created for the team hours that they can work on a new feature for customers in the end. No matter what tech debt you throw at me, go translate it into value for the customer, and if not, then you don't need to do it. So I chirped.

Eyal David: [34:32] Come on, your challenges — you listed a few and also answered them like that, but what are the challenges today at Ionix? On a personal level.

Ariel Ornstein: [34:38] The challenges are, again, it's the height differences, starting from being in the details on specific features and working with engineering at ten in the morning, and at eleven in the morning going up to the height where you need to talk strategically with some prospect or important customer, and then again going down to details, and then going up again to prepare a presentation for investors or things like that, so this is, say, a challenge that, you know, these height changes happen quite a bit. Do you have something you do — meditation,

Eyal David: [35:14] you swim, is there something that helps you find this headspace? Unfortunately not.

Ariel Ornstein: [35:20] I don't have this skill. I'm just task-oriented, and then, you know, I kind of set myself tasks each time, and I know I need to achieve them; at the end of the day I clear my head.

Eyal David: [35:32] Here's another thing you found that you're looking for — a skill you're looking for in a product manager? Yes, so that's one thing,

Ariel Ornstein: [35:38] and, you know, not to stop the business, it's very important not to stop the business. I'll give an example — that I arrived, and like one of the first questions is, okay, what data do we have? I said data is one of the things I look for, and then you understand there isn't much. Now I think about all kinds of cases in the past, before I was a product leader, so I'd say, okay, a situation like this, stop everything, we have data and then we'll continue — you can't stop everything; again, the train needs to continue, and you need to know how to take the calculated risks, say, about what not to stop, and what — I kind of discover as you build this, you understand that you can also trickle things,

Eyal David: [36:20] because there's no choice. Wow, how interesting and instructive. So Ariel, I'm for a moment wrapping up the episode — what do you wish for yourself in another ten years, in which industries will you be?

Ariel Ornstein: [36:34] As you understood, I don't necessarily stay in industries; I think the last two roles I did, it's the first time I stayed in an industry. What I wish is that I'll continue to enjoy and solve products and make a good impact on people,

Eyal David: [36:52] solve people's problems. Gorgeous. And how can one get in touch with you, if they want a resume or want to consult? LinkedIn mainly. So yes, are you active? Yes. Excellent, so we'll leave a link in the show notes, and it was fun for me too, thank you very much, come on, bye for now. Bye bye. Hey friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe, follow us of course for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other app. Of course, if you didn't find us on some app, I'd be happy for you to write to us. We'd be very happy for five stars on any platform, and for you to follow us so that more listeners can be exposed to us and find the podcast. You can also find the previous episodes on any app or on the YouTube channel — we have links in the description. So until next time, come on, be efficient, and bye bye.