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

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.

Key moments

1. 0:00 · Intro
2. 0:41 · What Duda is: a website platform for agencies and SaaS companies
3. 1:25 · The competition: Wix, WordPress and the focus on businesses building many sites
4. 3:51 · The R&D structure and the Scale group
5. 8:06 · Self-service alongside sales-led
6. 8:48 · Duda's AI features: content, sections, SEO and accessibility
7. 12:07 · Product skills: flexibility and calculated risks
8. 13:56 · From diamonds in Ramat Gan to Hong Kong
9. 17:42 · Back to Tel Aviv and a year of freelancing
10. 19:02 · Segmanta: becoming a product manager without planning to
11. 22:12 · Moving to Duda, a month before lockdown
12. 26:19 · The Scale group: discovery without a predefined feature set
13. 27:57 · Building a risk-taking culture on the team
14. 30:57 · Story: ripping off the band-aid on the site list
15. 35:39 · The GenAI risk: control and quality instead of a 30-second website
16. 44:36 · Hiring, and where she hopes to be in 10 years
17. 45:24 · Advice for getting into product