From Diamonds to Product: Avigayil Lewin on AI, Risk-Taking, and Leading in a Competitive Market | Avigayil Lewin (Duda)
Host: Eyal David · Guest: Avigayil Lewin · About the host
Avigayil Lewin, Director of Product at Duda, got into product management with no high-tech background: from the diamond industry in Ramat Gan, through four and a half years in Hong Kong and a year of freelancing, to a startup where she noticed there was no product person and taught herself the job. Her advice for getting into product: be willing to try things and to do what you didn't sign up for. And to succeed in it, take calculated risks: define them, communicate them to the team and developers upfront, and start with small risks that work.
In this episode
- There's no clean, obvious way into product: you have to be willing to try things and do what you didn't exactly sign up for. Avigayil became a product manager when she noticed nobody at her startup was doing the role, and taught herself.
- A product manager needs to take calculated risks: define what the risk is and how big it is, and then be willing to jump into something you're not 100% sure of.
- For a team to take risks, it needs to know it has backing: it's not "your mistake" but "it's us, we're a team". Once the first risk works out, you can see the eyes light up.
- Communicate the risk to developers too: the bottom of the spec on Avigayil's team has a "things to know" section, so everyone is prepared to come back two weeks later and make a change. The goal is to minimize the impact of being wrong.
- You can always give people more, but taking things away is harder. So when cleaning up a legacy interface, go all the way and keep the bare minimum.
- In GenAI, Duda chose control and quality over speed: generating a page in steps rather than a website in 30 seconds, because it's much harder to bring a user back after a bad first experience.
Listen to this episode
Episode Description
Eyal David hosts Avigayil Lewin, Director of Product at Duda, in a conversation held in English. Duda is a white-label website-building platform for digital agencies and SaaS companies that build dozens, hundreds and even thousands of websites a month, not for the small business building a single site. Avigayil, four and a half years at Duda, leads the Scale group, whose goal is to make agencies more efficient. They cover the competition with Wix and WordPress, self-service alongside sales-led, Duda's AI features, and the fact that an agency is really selling its client conversions, not just a website. The common thread is risk-taking: she quit a job with no plan, went to Hong Kong for three months and stayed four and a half years, freelanced for a year, and became VP of Product Strategy at Segmanta because nobody else was filling the role. At Duda, which she joined a month before the 2020 lockdown, she teaches her team to take calculated risks, and shares the story of cleaning up the dashboard's site list and the decision to build GenAI features that give agencies control over the result instead of a website in 30 seconds.
Chapters
- 0:00 · Intro
- 0:41 · What Duda is: a website platform for agencies and SaaS companies
- 1:25 · The competition: Wix, WordPress and the focus on businesses building many sites
- 3:51 · The R&D structure and the Scale group
- 8:06 · Self-service alongside sales-led
- 8:48 · Duda's AI features: content, sections, SEO and accessibility
- 12:07 · Product skills: flexibility and calculated risks
- 13:56 · From diamonds in Ramat Gan to Hong Kong
- 17:42 · Back to Tel Aviv and a year of freelancing
- 19:02 · Segmanta: becoming a product manager without planning to
- 22:12 · Moving to Duda, a month before lockdown
- 26:19 · The Scale group: discovery without a predefined feature set
- 27:57 · Building a risk-taking culture on the team
- 30:57 · Story: ripping off the band-aid on the site list
- 35:39 · The GenAI risk: control and quality instead of a 30-second website
- 44:36 · Hiring, and where she hopes to be in 10 years
- 45:24 · Advice for getting into product
Full transcript with speakers and timestamps
Selected quotes
“Anyone who's asked how to get into product obviously has heard that there's no clean, obvious way to do it. So you just have to try and be willing to do something that maybe wasn't exactly what you signed up for.”
“You can always give people more, but taking things away from people is harder. So if you're going to do it, you better go for it.”
“It's much harder to bring somebody back after a bad experience than it is to, you know, give them a good experience in the first time or get them to try it out the first time.”
Questions & answers
What is Duda?
Duda is a white-label website-building platform for digital agencies and SaaS companies, which either offer website building to their clients or integrate the platform into their own product. It doesn't market to businesses building a single site, but to businesses building several and up to thousands of websites a month for their clients, and offers both self-service with a 14-day free trial and custom plans through sales.
Who is Avigayil Lewin?
Avigayil Lewin is Director of Product at Duda, where she leads the Scale group. Before that she worked in marketing and business development in the diamond industry in Ramat Gan and Hong Kong and in global marketing for a baby furniture company, freelanced for a year, and became VP of Product Strategy at the startup Segmanta. She joined Duda in February 2020, about four and a half years before the recording, as product manager of the collaboration squad.
How do you get into product management without high-tech experience?
According to Avigayil, be willing to try things and to do what you didn't exactly sign up for. She got in through marketing freelancing and a customer success role at a small startup, noticed there was no product person, and taught herself to do the job.
How should product managers manage risk?
Define what the risk is and how big it is, list scenarios, communicate them upfront to the team and developers, hold regular check-ins after launch, and prioritize: not every risk is worth the whole process. Above all, give the team backing so they aren't afraid to raise risks.
Why didn't Duda build a 30-second AI website feature?
Because a website in 30 seconds is probably not a high-quality website, and won't deliver on the promise agencies make to their clients. Duda built GenAI features that give agencies control, for example generating a page in steps (layout, then images and content), because it's very hard to win back a user after a bad first experience.
People & resources mentioned
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