Transcript: From Diamonds to Product: Avigayil Lewin on AI, Risk-Taking, and Leading in a Competitive Market | Avigayil Lewin (Duda)

Intro

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi friends, it's Eyal. You've come to Product Builder, and here you can listen to the most interesting product conversations. My journey started in 2012, when I learned what product is in my startup. Since then, I've worked in the industry, and since 2017, my company has been advising a wide range of companies. My drive is to help all of us improve as product people. And before we start, if you're enjoying listening to Product Builder, please rate us 5 stars on Spotify. It will give me great feedback that the podcast gives you value, and it will make me very happy. So let's get started!

Eyal David: [00:35] Hey Avigayil, how are you?

Avigayil Lewin: [00:35] Good, how are you doing?

Eyal David: [00:35] I'm good. So with us is Avigayil, Product Director at Duda. Welcome.

What Duda is: a website platform for agencies and SaaS companies

Avigayil Lewin: [00:41] Thank you.

Eyal David: [00:41] Can you tell us a bit about Duda?

Avigayil Lewin: [00:48] Yeah, so Duda is a website builder platform that is built for digital agencies and SaaS companies to either offer website building services to their customers or also integrate the platform into their SaaS offering in order to expand their product offering overall.

Eyal David: [01:01] Wow, that's a good explanation. And is it only on web, also mobile apps, how it's like?

Avigayil Lewin: [01:06] Just websites, yeah.

Eyal David: [01:06] And how long have you been there?

Avigayil Lewin: [01:14] Four years, four and a half years now.

Eyal David: [01:14] Oh yeah, okay, cool. So you are quite familiar with the company, so please explain to us about the industry, competitors, etc.

The competition: Wix, WordPress and the focus on businesses building many sites

Avigayil Lewin: [01:25] So I'm sure many people are familiar with some of the competitors that we have. Obviously, there's big names out there like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. But of course, while they're website building platforms, our focus is very specific in terms of the type of customer that we are focused on. So we're not focused on the SMB at all. We're not marketing at all to businesses who are building a single website. But instead, we're really marketing towards businesses who are going to be building multiple websites a month, could be even thousands of websites a month.

Eyal David: [02:02] Cool, so I guess that the go-to-market is quite different from the competitors you've mentioned. Can you elaborate more on that?

Avigayil Lewin: [02:09] Yeah, obviously, we're going for digital agencies who are offering many different services to their customers. So the website is, of course, at the core. But then on top of that, they're offering SEO services, digital campaigns, etc. And you need to find them at the right time. Either they're first starting out or they are looking for a new platform for building their business. So we need to offer more capabilities beyond just the website itself, helping them to scale and grow their business overall. Or in the case of the SaaS company, then we are trying to find SaaS companies that have a relevant product, that it makes sense to build websites into the tools that they already have.

Eyal David: [02:53] Got it. And how is this different in terms of when you go ahead to the market and you're offering your goods, right? You cannot start, like, the starting of the company couldn't afford having all these toolbox that you currently can offer. Like, where, from where have you started?

Avigayil Lewin: [03:12] Yeah, so Duda started long before I joined. So there's a long history that I've heard, but wasn't necessarily a part of. They started before responsive websites was a thing that existed at all. So they were offering the ability to make your website relevant for mobile. And from there, over time, they pivoted and shifted. They shifted towards this focus on being a website platform for agencies.

Eyal David: [03:37] So, yeah, the idea was kind of like Microsoft, let's say, like gain the audience and then start selling them all in one stop.

Avigayil Lewin: [03:45] Yeah, yeah.

Eyal David: [03:46] Sweet. So what are you in charge of in terms of products?

The R&D structure and the Scale group

Avigayil Lewin: [03:51] So in Duda, we have three R&D groups. Each one is focused on a different area. So we have the group that's focused on our core website builder called the Websites Group, of course. And then we have e-commerce focused on e-commerce and a few other capabilities in terms of building data-oriented websites. And then we have my group, which is called the Scale Group. So we are made up of three squads. And two of those squads are focused on making our customers more productive and efficient throughout their website building process. So, of course, that can mean a lot of different things. A lot of different features can change from one quarter to the next. And then we have a third team. That's the Payments and App Store team, so focused on our pricing infrastructure and app store offering, et cetera.

Eyal David: [04:40] OK, so when you're talking about efficiency, I guess that's one of the things that your clients care about the most, probably, right? When you manage lots of websites for your customers, what are data-oriented websites?

Avigayil Lewin: [04:54] So we have websites that are built off of what's called a collection. So it's basically a database of information. So they might be a real estate website.

Eyal David: [05:01] Yeah.

Avigayil Lewin: [05:01] That needs to display 500 real estate listings. So they're going to pull off that from their database and display it dynamically on the website.

Eyal David: [05:09] So when looking on those products, do you have specific competitors? I totally understand that you mentioned Wix and probably Elementor, that both of them are Israeli and work with the same audience, probably.

Avigayil Lewin: [05:27] Yeah. Lots of agencies.

Eyal David: [05:28] Yeah. Do you have a competitor that actually says, OK, I'm working with that, I'm working solely with agencies?

Avigayil Lewin: [05:36] There are maybe some smaller, less known companies, for example, European-based website builders that maybe others are not familiar with that do have an agency focus overall. And of course, there are arms of each company that really double down on the agency group. But I would say many of our customers are, we would say we're competing against WordPress in their case, because they have the flexibility. They have the flexibility to do whatever they want. So WordPress is not necessarily marketing just to agencies, but a lot of the times that's where we're bringing agencies in from.

Eyal David: [06:09] And where do you think that Duda shines?

Avigayil Lewin: [06:13] Because we're so focused on the type of customer that we're offering, every feature and products that we build is based off of the fact that they're not just building a single site. So, of course, we need to have that core offering that allows them to build a very engaging, beautiful, feature-rich site. But it's the layers. There's a layer on top of that that makes us uniquely focused on these businesses who want to go from building one website for one customer to building a hundred websites for a hundred different customers and growing from there.

Eyal David: [06:43] Could you tell us a bit about your challenges, Duda?

Avigayil Lewin: [06:47] Of course, there's competition. You know, we're talking about big, big companies out there that we're competing with that have much bigger teams. So, again, it goes back to that core of making sure we really know who we are and who we're focused on. And the ever-changing, you know, world of websites, whether it's from the design side of things and having great animations to whether it's allowing people to build websites with AI. Of course, we always need to keep up on top of all of those different things that are coming up.

Eyal David: [07:18] So, you're saying it's basically around churn to make sure that every customer remains by offering the right tools as the competitors?

Avigayil Lewin: [07:27] I think on the churn side of things, it's not necessarily one of our big... One of our biggest business challenges right now, of course, there's the acquisition. And in the age of AI, everyone is promising a website in 30 seconds. So, our agencies also have their challenges. They need to have more customers in order for them to bring us more business. So, in the end, we are competing against those build a website in 30 seconds offerings out there, even though we're not offering to actually build a website for the SMB directly.

Eyal David: [07:58] Yeah, I couldn't start with the acquisition. So, thank you for that. And I'm wondering, like, how the sales cycle actually looks like in such a product?

Self-service alongside sales-led

Avigayil Lewin: [08:06] We have two different types. We have the self-service offering, sign up for a free trial, 14 days, pay for a plan, don't need to talk to anyone. If you don't want to, you can, of course. And then we have the sales led. So, we have the bigger accounts who are ultimately purchasing a custom plan. They can be large scale agencies. The SaaS companies, of course, are going with the custom plan because they need API access, etc. So, we have those two different models. Of course, sometimes they meet in the middle. Some are coming directly from the trial into sales and some are just going straight to sales for a conversation.

Eyal David: [08:41] Got it. Can you elaborate more about the initiatives you're doing around AI, for example? You mentioned that, so.

Duda's AI features: content, sections, SEO and accessibility

Avigayil Lewin: [08:48] Yeah. So, we now have various different AI features where we've integrated generative AI models into the platform. Anything from generating a piece of content. In the website or generating a section of the site, which means the layouts, the images, the text, etc. And then we also offer AI in the side of SEO and accessibility. So, allowing users to generate the meta tags, which is what shows up on Google when somebody searches for the website and also alt text for images. So, what the screen reader sees when someone is using a screen reader and navigating through a site.

Eyal David: [09:27] Cool. Probably you can offer more recommendations and stuff. Like that, more insights, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [09:33] We're starting to move more into those areas, but we focus more on the build side and what tools we can offer for our customers to leverage within the platform itself to help them build faster websites. And then as we move forward, we'll turn to other areas.

Eyal David: [09:46] Yeah, because that sounds really interesting. If you have many websites from the same industry and the specific website doesn't have a specific section that everyone else has, at least the benchmark, that could be a great insight, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [09:58] Yeah. But it's way more. It's way more advanced.

Eyal David: [10:01] I agree.

Avigayil Lewin: [10:02] Yeah. I mean, we have today page recommendations, for example. So, we look at what pages you have on a website already, and we'll recommend additional pages to add so that you can build a more content-rich site. Or a lot of our customers work in a model where they're charging by number of pages on a website. So, it will help them to sell to their customer, hey, maybe you want these three additional pages added. It will help with your traffic and also gives them the value that, you know, something that just comes up for them that we're able to suggest. So, yeah.

Eyal David: [10:30] I really love this collaboration between you, Duda, and the agency. What kind of other handshakes do you have with the customer besides offering add-ons to offer for his customer? What else do you guys do around that?

Avigayil Lewin: [10:45] In terms of how we help the agency sell better to…

Eyal David: [10:48] Yeah, and education and everything around it because their success is your success, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [10:52] Yeah. So, Duda is a white-label platform, so we have no interaction with the SMB, who the agency is. But what we can do is offer them different tools, white-label tools that they can use to sell on the different things that we're offering, education side of things, any built-in capabilities that we have in terms of performance, etc. So, helping them with SEO, making sure the website is performing. Ultimately, the agency is not selling just a website. They're selling the conversions that that website is getting, whether it's traffic, contact form, submissions, or sales on an e-commerce store. So, what we need to do is help them actually get to that delivery. Not just a beautiful website, but really what kind of business are they bringing to the SMB. And that's where we try to help them as much as possible.

Eyal David: [11:42] So, you also ask them about the actual conversion that they are trying to improve around?

Avigayil Lewin: [11:47] We know the context of the business that they're trying to build and what kind of features that they're adding to the site. We don't necessarily ask them that today, but pretty easy to figure out what kind of goal, what industry, etc.

Eyal David: [11:59] So, what… What do you think are the key product skills that a product manager should have?

Product skills: flexibility and calculated risks

Avigayil Lewin: [12:07] I think it's very important for a product manager to, one, being able to try all different things. Being willing, I should say, to try all different things and not just stick within your domain or stick with what you imagine to be a product manager. I think it's important that you're ready for something to change from one hour to the next. And that happens. And take it with grace and move forward. It's a very flexible dynamic and open to doing new and different things. And I think it's also important that product managers are willing and have the skills to take calculated risks overall. That, one, they can define what is a risk, how big of a risk is it, and then that willingness to actually go ahead and jump into something that you're not a hundred percent sure of.

Eyal David: [12:56] So, another thing around that, which might be super relevant, I guess. A skill that I really admire is also the ability to reflect the risk, right? So, let's say, raise the flag at the right time and say, okay, that's going to be a risk in X time from now and here is what we're afraid about. And then, you know, we can do a brainstorm together and understand how to do all the things you just mentioned on how to manage that risk, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [13:21] Yeah, definitely. I think, I mean, I skipped all the… To me, what's obvious in terms of skills for a product manager, you need to have the communication and transparency and collaboration. And, you know… Being able to, as you said, communicate what you see, figure out that, solve that problem together. So, to me, those come, you know, as an obvious requirement for a product manager. And then it's the, on top of that, what's going to make them really grow and be able to push and drive innovation in their role and everything else.

Eyal David: [13:49] Cool. I think it's key to talk about risks with supervisors, your team, whatever. It's key.

Avigayil Lewin: [13:55] Yeah.

From diamonds in Ramat Gan to Hong Kong

Eyal David: [13:56] Okay, let's talk about your bio and how you got into product management.

Avigayil Lewin: [13:59] Yeah. So, I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I was in university. I just went for, I think it was a communications degree. And from there, just started trying out different jobs, different things, marketing, biz dev, etc. So, I started actually in the diamond industry.

Eyal David: [14:19] Diamonds?

Avigayil Lewin: [14:20] Yeah.

Eyal David: [14:21] Okay, where have you done that?

Avigayil Lewin: [14:23] Here, in Ramat Gan.

Eyal David: [14:24] In Ramat Gan, makes sense.

Avigayil Lewin: [14:25] Yeah. Doing biz dev and marketing for a diamond company. And after a year or so that I was with them, I decided I had enough of Israel, actually. And I wanted to move back to the US. So, I quit with no specific plan, no direction. And then I was offered to take a short-term role in Hong Kong. Three months doing a very similar job in another diamond company. And again, I took a risk.

Eyal David: [14:55] How old? Yeah. I'm actually losing that. Yeah. How old? Were you when you done all this?

Avigayil Lewin: [15:01] I think I was 20. Yeah.

Eyal David: [15:03] So, you managed the risk, basically. I'm 20 and I can do...

Avigayil Lewin: [15:06] I'm 20, three months, never been to Asia. Good opportunity to check it out. And worst case, I hate it. And I'll come back after three months. And I was there for four and a half years, I think.

Eyal David: [15:16] Oh, wow.

Avigayil Lewin: [15:16] Yeah. So, six months with diamond company and the rest of the time with the baby furniture company.

Eyal David: [15:23] And this is where you learned some things that actually... What are you doing right now?

Avigayil Lewin: [15:30] Yeah. So, I spent a lot of time doing the global marketing for that furniture company. And originally, they were just selling in stores or through online resellers. And we decided to build our own e-commerce site. So, that was my first touch into online, a little bit of product management in terms of the build of the website and working with the developers and everything else on that. And... And that's where I saw that I had much more passion for that than I had for what I was doing on all the other aspects of my role overall. So, it gave me an idea of what direction that I wanted to go on. And at some point, I quit and I left and I said, where else to go for high tech other than Tel Aviv.

Eyal David: [16:19] But wait, wait, wait. So, you've been working there, you gained some success, you learned lots of stuff probably, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [16:26] Yeah.

Eyal David: [16:27] About how to market and sell high ticket products. I guess.

Avigayil Lewin: [16:30] Yeah.

Eyal David: [16:31] And your way around digital marketing, etc. So, how come you decided, okay, I'm going to leave everything here and just start again?

Avigayil Lewin: [16:41] Yeah. Two aspects of it. One is, have you been to Hong Kong?

Eyal David: [16:46] I did, 12 years ago.

Avigayil Lewin: [16:47] Did it feel very spacious for you?

Eyal David: [16:49] It did.

Avigayil Lewin: [16:50] It did? Okay. So, if you live there for four years, it's not spacious at all. It's very intense. And...

Eyal David: [16:58] Yeah. I don't think it comes too much.

Avigayil Lewin: [17:00] Living there was an amazing place. I made my best friends that I still have today there, but it's just, you end up living from vacation to vacation because you just want to breathe and not live on top of each other and pollution even, you literally feel it. So, I wanted to leave Hong Kong in general. And also, I wanted something new in terms of my career.

Eyal David: [17:25] Yeah. Now, I'm actually remembering the size of the apartment.

Avigayil Lewin: [17:27] Yeah. That's so true.

Eyal David: [17:29] But the food, I guess, it's overpowering everything.

Avigayil Lewin: [17:30] Yeah. It distracts it.

Eyal David: [17:32] Yeah. Yeah. And from there, so you went back to Tel Aviv and you wanted to get into high-tech, but where have you started there?

Back to Tel Aviv and a year of freelancing

Avigayil Lewin: [17:42] I started freelancing. I knew I had no experience in high-tech, the likelihood that somebody was going to take me for a role that I was interested in was probably pretty low, but I said, let's take a risk, take a chance.

Eyal David: [17:53] Well, that's a big risk, I guess, because many Israeli companies back then actually, it was a big risk.

Avigayil Lewin: [17:54] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Eyal David: [17:57] And I was actually looking for native English speakers and you can probably get into that, but you decided to go ahead and freelance. So...

Avigayil Lewin: [18:05] Yeah. I think every role that came up to me, somebody recommended me for was more on the sales side of things, which is definitely not my passion at all. So I didn't want to do that. But on the flip side, I knew I don't have experience in high-tech, what's the chance someone's going to take me for a role that I am more interested in? And I'm still not 100% sure.

Eyal David: [18:26] Yeah.

Avigayil Lewin: [18:27] I'm still not 100% sure what I want to do. So I'll just try out different things. And so I spent a year freelancing all different types of companies, types of projects, anything from very large organizations of thousands of people to small startups with a couple of people.

Eyal David: [18:46] That's great. You rolled the dice and you actually succeeded in terms of working with different industries, different, I guess, clients, et cetera. And you helped them in what? Digital marketing?

Avigayil Lewin: [18:56] Yeah. Marketing, content writing, project management. Everything you just mentioned.

Segmanta: becoming a product manager without planning to

Eyal David: [19:02] And what happened then?

Avigayil Lewin: [19:03] And then one of the companies that I was working for offered me a full-time position. They were called Segmanta, a SaaS platform for market research. So basically democratizing market research, especially in large organizations like Procter and Gamble that have a market research team, but it's a very expensive asset. So they developed a tool to allow other teams like their marketing team to perform market research that's approved by the research team, but not actually performed by the research team.

Eyal David: [19:36] A white-label solution again?

Avigayil Lewin: [19:37] Yeah. So I was offered a full-time position there. It was a customer success position. But I saw an opportunity to join a company at a relevant stage where there's a lot of room to grow. If the company grows, of course, then there's a lot of room for me to change.

Eyal David: [19:54] Yeah.

Avigayil Lewin: [19:55] So that's the role I'm working on, to get exposed to many different aspects of working in a startup and see where it goes from there. So I went for it. And they didn't have a product person in any sort of role in the company at the time. It was kind of the CEO and the CTO just figuring things out from one day to the next. And that's where I figured out that they needed a product manager and I needed to figure out how to be a product manager. And I basically taught myself and became ultimately there. The VP of product strategy.

Eyal David: [20:26] Wait, okay. Wow. So let's understand this. When you started working there, you didn't know or did you know that you want to be a product manager?

Avigayil Lewin: [20:35] I think I had a little bit of an idea, but I didn't go with a certain mindset of I'm coming here and going to create a product manager position or there's any opportunity for it. I had kind of gotten exposed to this role through the freelancing and through the e-commerce project and reading and everything else, but I still didn't really know what a product manager was.

Eyal David: [20:55] So we're talking here about two different risk-taking, right? The first one was to quit your freelancing gig and then get, I don't know how big was your business, and get into this company. And then again, to move into product and be the VP of product, probably not from day one, but to learn a new profession, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [21:14] Yeah. Which I guess that felt like less of a risk to me. It's just something that happened naturally. And I think I just started doing the role of a product person. Maybe not even realizing that that's what I was doing, and in time it became more obvious and I started talking to more people and learning more about product management. And then it was, okay, finally, I found the career and the role for me, and now I'm serious about it. And now I want to see where I can take this.

Eyal David: [21:41] Yeah. It seems like it because you've been in Duda for four years and probably some time there in this company. But I'm starting to understand something about you, I guess.

Avigayil Lewin: [21:53] Yeah.

Eyal David: [21:54] So the idea of taking risks is actually not being afraid of change. That's key, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [22:01] Yeah.

Eyal David: [22:02] And then you need to just believe in yourself, believe in the idea that you took, the facts that you know, and then just run with it, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [22:09] Yeah.

Eyal David: [22:10] This is exactly what you've done.

Avigayil Lewin: [22:11] Yeah.

Moving to Duda, a month before lockdown

Eyal David: [22:12] So from that company, how did you move to Duda?

Avigayil Lewin: [22:16] So I was with the company, probably in a product position for three years or so. And in time, I realized that I loved being in a startup. I was a startup of that size, but unless they were going to grow exponentially in a short term, I was never going to get access to enough data to be able to say I'm a very data-oriented product manager, or I worked with millions of users or anything like that. So I knew I needed to take a leap, go somewhere else to allow me to learn, and then I found Duda.

Eyal David: [22:50] Cool. So I'm not sure about the timeline, but now I understand that if we're talking about four years from now, it was like basically around 2020, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [22:58] Yeah. I'm going to do that. Yeah.

Eyal David: [23:01] So you've done that while there was a pandemic, et cetera, took the chances, lots of risks here all around.

Avigayil Lewin: [23:08] I think I joined Duda one month before we went into lockdown.

Eyal David: [23:12] Okay. So we're aiming here for February 2020?

Avigayil Lewin: [23:14] Yeah.

Eyal David: [23:15] Wow. The timeline is amazing. So what happened there? Like you started there as a director or you climbed your way up? How was it?

Avigayil Lewin: [23:23] I started there as a product manager of a squad. At the time, it was called the collaboration squad. And also at the time, the R&D makeup was only squads. We didn't have groups at that time. And then from there, things changed within the company, within my role.

Eyal David: [23:41] Can you elaborate more about the collaboration there?

Avigayil Lewin: [23:44] Yeah. So pretty standard in terms of what you might think on a SaaS platform. We allow our customers to collaborate either with their clients. So their clients can get a set of very granular permissions to access a website, whether it's just to look at it or to actually go in and make edits, working with their team members and also kind of all of the tools that are not collaboration on paper, but we define them as such, which is all of the dashboard area of the platform. So being able to define the custom branding for the white label capabilities, the place that you view all of your websites.

Eyal David: [24:23] Sounds interesting. You actually been to the intersection between the clients and their clients.

Avigayil Lewin: [24:29] Yeah. Yeah.

Eyal David: [24:31] If we're talking about risk taking, then you actually understand from these while you're doing discovery, it's actually way easier to understand what your clients actually need, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [24:45] Yeah. Again, we can't actually talk to them, which is one of the challenges that we have if we only know what we hear from our direct customers. The agencies themselves, but it gives an opportunity to really get deep and understand exactly how they work with their clients to allow us to understand more of what they need beyond just the stock standard collaboration tools.

Eyal David: [25:07] So from there, you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, you talked about the collaboration and the team change his name, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [25:16] Yeah. So I want to say two years ago now, maybe a bit less than that. We shifted the R&D reorg to have three groups. And at that time, we were trying to figure out how we're going to focus these groups, what their goals are going to be, and also where our opportunities are. And it had become clear that collaboration is important, but it's a bit table stakes in terms of SaaS these days. You need to have them. You need to have great capabilities, but we want to do more than that for our customers to help them scale their business. So scale group was born. And from there, also the focus of the squad itself changed from collaboration to more the productivity side, which is where we are set apart from other website builders.

Eyal David: [26:08] Collaborate on a larger scale.

Avigayil Lewin: [26:10] Yeah. Yeah.

Eyal David: [26:12] Okay. So was it a success so far?

Avigayil Lewin: [26:14] Definitely. Yeah.

Eyal David: [26:16] Can you tell us more about it?

The Scale group: discovery without a predefined feature set

Avigayil Lewin: [26:19] So one of the... I'll first start with the challenge. One of the biggest challenges of switching was we no longer owned a predefined feature set. Of course, we kept all the features that we already had. But from there, in terms of where to go next, wasn't about a specific feature area. It was where are the challenges for our customers? Most often challenges that they don't even realize or opportunities that they don't realize. What is slowing them down and what's going to help them be able to build more websites faster?

Eyal David: [26:49] Yeah.

Avigayil Lewin: [26:50] Yeah. So we had to expand the number of services, change their team makeup to allow them to really grow their business over there. So from there, it became a lot more discovery, a lot more risk taking in terms of making sure that we hear the customer problems, but also hear what they're not telling us to find those opportunities that they didn't even think of themselves in order to make them more efficient, automated, etc.

Eyal David: [27:19] So it's interesting. I guess. For these agencies, their KPI is the top revenue, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [27:26] Yeah.

Eyal David: [27:27] What is the KPI that you are aiming for as Duda? No, I mean, in terms of helping them to be more efficient, let's say.

Avigayil Lewin: [27:34] Yeah. Of course, we want to see them growing the number of sites that each individual account is building. So of course, we want to convert more accounts. But what happens over time is if they're only building one website, they're only of X value to us. We want to help them free up their time. We want to free up their resources to allow them to sell better to their customers and then from there build more websites.

Building a risk-taking culture on the team

Eyal David: [27:57] So let's talk about risk taking. You mentioned it before and let's dig into it. So you encourage your employees to do or everyone in Duda to do the same?

Avigayil Lewin: [28:06] Yeah. I think for me as a manager of product managers and product designers, the thing that's become more obvious to me over time is making sure that they have the confidence and the trust, to know that you're going to have their back in order to allow them to take more risks, move quickly when possible. And I think I'm only able to do that because I also had those experiences myself of taking risks, whether they were small or large. And it's definitely something that I try to pass on as much as possible and give them the confidence and tell them to just go for it. Go for it with the right confidence, the right information, but to go for it.

Eyal David: [28:48] Okay. So first of all, you encourage them to reflect the risk to you, right? This is probably not a default setting that the user has, that the human has, right? And then after you encourage them to do so, you actually talk with them about the risk. And is it usually that they come with the risk baked enough that you can discuss it or do you need to help them to actually get to the point to like how this actually looks like?

Avigayil Lewin: [29:15] I think most people are naturally risk averse. So it most often comes as a risk. It's the opposite of we can't do that because we don't know X, Y, Z, or we can only do that in three months because first we need to do this discovery, or we only have this amount of information, et cetera. And so it's trying to push them to be more open to it so that they can ultimately come to me with the version that you're saying, where they're coming to me with the risk. And then we're talking about how can we just make the decision based off of that?

Eyal David: [29:45] When will it bite me? Right? That's the question usually.

Avigayil Lewin: [29:48] Yeah. That's the trouble.

Eyal David: [29:50] Right. That's right. What actually helps a product manager or product designer, of course, to reflect and to manage risks better?

Avigayil Lewin: [30:02] One is making sure they really understand that it's not going to be you did something wrong or your mistake. It's us, we're a team, I have your back. Of course, we need the transparency. We need that discussion of what kind of risk are we trying to take and to make the decision, together, when relevant, but to understand that it's not about, is my job on the line decision? It's, are we going to potentially make the product better for the amount of risk that we're taking? Is it worth it? And also, just examples of certain things that have worked, certain risks that have been taken. And I think once you get that first experience of taking something that you thought was a risk at the beginning and it worked out, you can already see the eyes light up. And the gears start turning in terms of what can I do now that I learned that it's not that bad.

Story: ripping off the band-aid on the site list

Eyal David: [30:57] Can you share a few examples around that? Let's start with something simple, if you have any idea.

Avigayil Lewin: [31:03] So something very small is when I was the product manager for the squad, we rewrote our site list. Just the list that somebody views all of their projects or sites on.

Eyal David: [31:17] Kind of like a drop down our menu of the client, of the details.

Avigayil Lewin: [31:18] Yeah.

Eyal David: [31:19] Is that the content of the different websites that he manages?

Avigayil Lewin: [31:21] Yeah. So it can be a long list. They can have thousands and thousands of websites.

Eyal David: [31:25] Good for you.

Avigayil Lewin: [31:26] Yeah. And we had a lot of data points there was, you know, very legacy code, old design. And over time, just things have been added there. And we wanted to clean it up. We wanted to improve the user experience, focus the users on exactly what they need to know at that given point in time. And there was a lot of discussion of, well, they're going to... You know, we're going to get so many support tickets and they're going to be yelling at us because we're going to take the direct link to some internal tool that they can access in a hundred other more logical ways. If we take it away from them, what's going to happen? And in the end, you know, made the decision to put the bare minimum. 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.

Eyal David: [32:14] So let me understand this. So... One of the risks was to remove the Band-Aid in one hit. But there were two risks here, I guess, that I'm hearing. First of all was the UX risk or the business risk that what if someone won't be able to find what he or she used to find, right? And I don't know how you manage it. I mean, it sounds like you just filtered the list and just kept the relevant things. But there's also the code, the technical part of things. You wanted to remove that, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [32:45] Yeah. Well. Definitely. Definitely the goal, the main goal there was to clean up tech debt, remove legacy code and also simplify as much as possible on both sides of things technically and also from the user experience side.

Eyal David: [33:01] So let's assess this risk together for a sec, okay? So it sounds like if we keep this, it will keep continuing creating problems or CS tickets for us to handle, I guess, and maintenance.

Avigayil Lewin: [33:15] Yeah.

Eyal David: [33:16] And the other thing, and that's one, I don't know how many tickets were created till then. Probably it was big enough of a number for you to act upon. But also there was the problem of the UX of things, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [33:32] Yeah. The first one was more on the developer side of things. They pushed it. Yeah. So on a mission to just remove legacy code, taking one area at a time, so you can say, you know, the risk there is we're doing something that's much more focused on tech debt than it is on adding new features to our customers. But now let's wrap it in a better user experience, a better first time impression of the dashboard area, you know, a cleaner way to access things, et cetera.

Eyal David: [34:03] So there was a risk to not do it as well, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [34:06] Yeah.

Eyal David: [34:07] I mean, also in terms of technical business and also your relationships with the dev team probably.

Avigayil Lewin: [34:13] Yeah. Yeah.

Eyal David: [34:15] So have you listed a few scenarios that could happen? That's what you mentioned, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [34:22] Yeah. So also, like you mentioned, communicating the risk is important between me and the product managers on my team, but very important to communicate the areas of risk to the dev team themselves and say, these are the points that we know are risky. So just know that we might come back two weeks later and tell you the risk was too great. We need to go back and make a change. So a lot of the times we have in the bottom of the spec is things to know. Just so you know, this might happen. We need to be prepared. We need to understand what would be the effort to make that change based off of feedback that we might get. So it's a lot of playing on different scenarios and preparing all of the different parties involved for understanding that there can be a cost. We could be wrong in the end, but we want to minimize the impact of being wrong.

Eyal David: [35:13] I love it. So today with GenAI tools, it's kind of easy to actually come up with these ideas or risks, but also, I guess, to assess them, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [35:24] Yeah.

Eyal David: [35:25] The probability that it would actually happen.

Avigayil Lewin: [35:27] Yeah.

Eyal David: [35:28] Wow. So it was a success, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [35:30] Yeah. Yeah. And then we have a much cleaner dashboard and very few complaints and very happy that we went with that.

Eyal David: [35:36] Yeah. Are there any more examples that you can share?

The GenAI risk: control and quality instead of a 30-second website

Avigayil Lewin: [35:39] Well, you touched on GenAI. So I think that's it. The entire world has risk right now because it's constantly changing. Even if you choose one model today, you might be taking a risk that tomorrow there's going to be a better model or a better company that you want to integrate with, et cetera. But for us, the biggest risk there was the decision to build our GenAI features differently than the rest of the market.

Eyal David: [36:05] Please tell us more.

Avigayil Lewin: [36:08] So I think we touched on it earlier about websites in 30 seconds, and we also touched on the fact that in the end, … And the reality is that a website in 30 seconds is probably not a high quality website. In the end, it's not going to deliver on that promise that our agencies are giving their customers. So we wanted to look at our AI features from a different angle. One, how can we build GenAI features that are going to give the most value to agencies looking to scale? Because that's the promise that we're making to our customers. Second is, if we're going to go in the direction of helping them build websites, how can we make sure that we're not exchanging speed for quality, but still giving them speed? And this has been a process, a lot of risk-taking, a lot of learning, a lot of guessing. But in the end, what became very clear to us is that our agencies need control. They need control over the result, and they want to make sure that they're a part of that result. And we need to build the features to support that need that they have.

Eyal David: [37:15] It's interesting. I mean, when you're talking about results, how did you manage this risk? What kind of results? What happened if X will happen? How was that?

Avigayil Lewin: [37:30] Let's take, for example, the ability to generate a page of a website. So again, it's going to be all the content, the layout, the images, etc. The risk there is multifactorial. One is they don't like the layout. Maybe they like the content, but they don't like the layout. They don't like the images, but they like everything else. And so, so many different elements, they're getting one shot in their face, and then they either like it or they don't. And I think anyone who's worked in product or just as a consumer themselves, usually you try something once, you don't like it. The chance you're coming back is very low. 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. So what we didn't want to do is come with something that, you know, wasn't going to be anywhere near their expectations. They weren't going to be happy with it because we knew that it would be so hard to get them to try again. No matter how many optimizations we would do, we would spend so much work trying to bring them back.

Eyal David: [38:29] For sure. And how did you manage this risk?

Avigayil Lewin: [38:32] So a lot of trial and error. I think, you know, the UX designer on the team, the product manager was an exception. We had a lot of experience for them and, you know, they're amazing in terms of all the different variations that we played around with internally. Not things that we released, but different things that we tried of how can we balance this control in terms of the results that they are getting with the speed side of things. So breaking things into phases, making sure that we have some validation, some feedback from the user before moving to the next step. Giving them the opportunity to do everything in one shot. If they are that kind of user versus another user who wants to do something in three steps because they want to make sure, I like the layout, now let's move forward. So, you know, if you compare that to a website in 30 seconds, it's not as fast if you're going to go in multi-step. But it doesn't matter if in the end you get, you know, 20% are happy with the result versus 80% are happy with the result. But you saved them a bit less time.

Eyal David: [39:35] That's interesting. I mean, also another thing that you've probably done is to actually share your experience with your clients. Show that to users before it's ready and get their point of view of the actual process. And this is how you came probably with that personalization that for like multi-step versus seeing the entire thing, et cetera. How about like, have you thought about maybe, you know, sharing three layouts at once and then starting to get the idea around that? Like, have you tried other approaches before launching this idea?

Avigayil Lewin: [40:09] Yeah, we thought about it. We've tried different approaches like that. But, you know, there's always the cognitive overload. And again, already the user is making the decision of whether they like and then three different aspects of a page, content, images and layout. And now you're going to give them times three in terms of decisions to make overall. Or you need to decide what elements are you going to change in each variation in order to get them.

Eyal David: [40:34] No, I meant like before, like Wix done it before, I guess.

Avigayil Lewin: [40:37] Yeah.

Eyal David: [40:37] That you can first select the...

Avigayil Lewin: [40:40] The layout style.

Eyal David: [40:41] Yeah. And then you can start moving around and see, you know, the entire layout.

Avigayil Lewin: [40:47] Yeah.

Eyal David: [40:47] Fetched out for you.

Avigayil Lewin: [40:48] Yeah. So what we did do in the end, and it was after a lot of different variations and talking to users, et cetera, was we allow them to go and either choose the layout manually and build the page themselves, just the layout. And then they can go and apply images and content. Or they can go and do just the layout. And then... And apply afterwards. So it's kind of... It's flexible. In the end, you work the way that you want to. You can go as fast as you want to go. And then, of course, we're getting feedback along the way and optimizing all the time.

Eyal David: [41:22] Yeah. So that's another thing that you've added, like any AI feature, I guess, that you get feedback and you optimize accordingly. Are there any risks there that you managed as well? Like what happened if this won't work and we need to roll back? Like, how can we do something like that?

Avigayil Lewin: [41:38] We just announced it. Like... We didn't go as far on the risk of releasing something that we thought we would have to roll back. We knew we would have to and want to make optimizations over time. So I think with a project of that scope, you want to manage the risk as much as you can to not go to a place where it's going to go as far as rolling back. Again, the issue of it's harder to bring people a second time than it is to bring them the first time. So that was, I think, one of our biggest fears. Our biggest concerns was not being good enough the first time. And then you're just dealing with the aftermath of that, no matter how hard you work on it. And it can be so frustrating in the end. So we definitely tried to avoid any scenario that would look like that.

Eyal David: [42:22] So another approach to managing risk is to always remember your vision and act upon it, right?

Avigayil Lewin: [42:28] Yeah. That sounds good.

Eyal David: [42:30] Any other examples you might want to share? That was a really good and it was a success, right? This way I'm moving forward.

Avigayil Lewin: [42:35] Yeah. We're continuing to make optimizations.

Eyal David: [42:39] Yeah.

Avigayil Lewin: [42:39] We're continuing to expand the capabilities to more areas based off of what we learned from it.

Eyal David: [42:45] When launch happens or when like every period of time actually passes, do you actually communicate the risks again to your team to actually says, wow, we nailed this and now like, how does this look like?

Avigayil Lewin: [43:00] Yeah, we're always assessing and regular check-ins, whether it be on the group level of what happens, what happened with the risk that we took, or where do we stand in terms of getting towards the place that we want to be and optimizing. And then, you know, once you take that bigger risk, you can still take smaller risks along the way in terms of changing what you did. Optimizing can even be a prompt, you know, in terms of the risk on the quality of the results. It can be something, you know, completely behind the scenes that will impact the experience of the user. And so it's things we're playing with all the time.

Eyal David: [43:38] Yeah. It's also worth mentioning. I was mentioning that you should also prioritize your risk, like not any risk worth all this process because it might won't be affecting the business in high level. But yeah, wow, Avigayil, it was so interesting and educational. And I was so happy to hear my thoughts reflected from you because I'm managing risk all the time. And it was quite interesting and very interesting, actually. So how can people actually, you know, actually contact you and learn more about risk taking or maybe positions at Duda or just to, you know, get your advice about something?

Avigayil Lewin: [44:17] LinkedIn, checking messages there. So, yeah.

Eyal David: [44:19] Cool. By the way, are you looking for product managers, product designers right now?

Avigayil Lewin: [44:24] Yeah. At the moment, we are hiring a product manager and we have regularly new positions, opening product, dev, etc. So if you want to take risks.

Eyal David: [44:33] Yeah.

Avigayil Lewin: [44:35] With a good team.

Hiring, and where she hopes to be in 10 years

Eyal David: [44:36] And what do you actually... That's going to be interesting. What are you wishing for you in 10 years from now? So many risks.

Avigayil Lewin: [44:44] Yeah. Always a hard question to answer. I think when we talk about risks, the biggest risk would always be starting something myself. So as much as I'm a risk taker in work, I think now that I have a child, I'm maybe a little less of a risk taker on my personal life side of things. Because I always think about the potential impact on her. But I would hope that in 10 years, I would have had the confidence to do something like that and really take a big risk that would affect my personal life side of things, but would be kind of where I've always dreamed of.

Advice for getting into product

Eyal David: [45:24] Well, I wish you exactly that. Do you have any piece of advice from the route that you took for junior product managers or product wannabes on how to get into product?

Avigayil Lewin: [45:36] Just being willing to try things. 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. Otherwise, it's very unlikely you're going to get to where you want to be.

Eyal David: [45:56] So work hard and take risks.

Avigayil Lewin: [45:59] Yeah.

Eyal David: [46:00] Avigayil, it was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Avigayil Lewin: [46:03] Thank you. Bye-bye.

Eyal David: [46:05] Hey, friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast worthwhile, you can sign up, 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, we would be happy for you to write to us. We look forward to five stars on each platform, and to you following us so that more listeners can discover 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, yalla, be efficient, and bye-bye.