Transcript: Chen Ben Artzi | Cyera | How to build a smart platform that fixes security problems

Intro and meeting Chen

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi friends, this is Eyal. You've reached Product Builder, where you can listen to the most interesting product conversations. My journey started in 2012 when I learned what product is at my own 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 get better as product people. And before we start, if you enjoy listening to Product Builder, please rate us five stars on Spotify. It'll give me great feedback that the podcast is giving you value, and it'll make me very happy. So yalla, let's start. Chen, good morning, how are you? Good morning, great place. Really great. With us is Chen, who comes from Cyera, a product manager. Senior, right? Right.

The path: QA, development and product in fintech, then Cyera

Chen Ben Artzi: [00:52] Tell us a bit about yourself. So I'm originally from Haifa. I grew up and studied in Haifa, I did a degree in computer science combined with humanities. I know that's a bit unusual, but it was important to me to use my bachelor's degree to broaden my horizons and not just focus on the profession. My first job after the degree was at a fintech company, and in fact the first 12 years of my career were in the fintech world. I started in QA, from there I moved to a product owner position, then I pivoted to development and managed development teams. At some point I moved back to the product world, and broadly since then I haven't looked back. I've been a product manager for many years, mostly in fintech, and about a year and a half ago I made another small pivot and moved for the first time into the world of cyber and data security, at Cyera. Maybe tell us a few words about the company. Yes, gladly. So Cyera basically came to solve what you could call the biggest problem large organizations have today, and that's the data problem, data security. Which is also interesting as someone who doesn't come from that world and looks at it from my outsider's point of view. Before I started working at Cyera I didn't really understand much about what all these cyber companies popping up here like mushrooms actually do. From the outside it looked to me like every company had some tiny niche of its own that it handles and protects for its customers. And only when I joined Cyera did I understand why the problem Cyera solves is, A, not niche, and B, a very, very important and big problem, which is the data security problem.

Eyal David: [02:44] So let's dig in here for a second. For those of us who aren't familiar with very, very big customers like Cyera's customers,

The data problem of Fortune 500 enterprises and why context matters

Chen Ben Artzi: [02:52] what is the data problem, what actually happened? So our customers really are Fortune 500, huge enterprise customers. Their data, first of all, they have enormous amounts of data. You're talking with very, very big media companies and food companies. So, A, their information is spread across many kinds of clouds, they don't really know where that data is, and they know even less what's hiding inside that data, especially with an emphasis on whether it's secure. And whether it's secure varies between industries, varies between regulations and laws, and in the end is also very specific to that particular company. I said a food company: for a food company, a recipe may well be sensitive information. For a media company, your secretary's recipe for her son's chocolate cake is not sensitive to the company. So it's very important to understand not only what the data is, but also whether it's sensitive, and whether it's sensitive for that specific customer. Basically, the context.

Eyal David: [03:49] So tell me, when you looked at the different companies and at what's common in the industry, you said there are very point solutions. So maybe explain what solution Cyera gives that CISO, right? That's basically the end customer, no?

The four questions of a Data Security Platform

Chen Ben Artzi: [04:03] Right, our buyer is basically the CISO who's responsible for all security in the organization. Is he also the user? He's often the user, but often the users are more the data analysts, data security analysts, security analysts, privacy people. These are people who often report to the CISO's organization, sometimes to the Chief Data Officer's organization, it really depends on the company. But in the end, for all of them, their data and its security are the most important thing. And what Cyera does is we come in and provide a Data Security Platform that answers four main questions. The first is where is my data, which is the first thing we do: we come in, scan their cloud, and build an inventory of where the data is, at scale of course, because we're talking about enormous amounts here. Then we ask, what is my data, what's actually in there, and here our classification engine comes into the picture, which is homegrown AI, based of course on machine learning, and it's also a very, very smart engine that, as I mentioned earlier, also knows how to learn the customer's environment. It doesn't just scan against generic algorithms and regexes, it actually learns the environment and identifies what's in it and what's sensitive; you said the word context earlier, right. After we say what the data is, we now need to check whether it's at risk. Whether it's at risk can be against a certain regulation, against certain laws, and it can also be against the customer's internal rules. Now we have a policy mechanism, some of it out of the box, some of it the customer builds themselves, and we know how to process that information and understand whether we have problems there; we call them issues. In addition to risk, Identities also come into the picture, which is a very interesting layer in the data sense: it's not only whether the data itself is sensitive, but also who can access it, and that's a module that adds a lot to the question of whether it's at risk. And I said four questions, so the fourth question is how do I reduce that risk and what do I do about it, and here Cyera gives our customers the tools to also solve the problems, not just tell them, hey, you have tons and tons of alerts here, but now we'll also help you prioritize the alerts and resolve them. Which is basically the real thing Cyera provides, right? In the end, dealing with the risk and managing it somehow.

Eyal David: [06:25] Right. Wow, so you basically moved from fintech, and fintech is also a market full of risks, right? It's basically products in that respect; you don't work with the CISO, but you still need to meet a lot of standards, someone basically needs to sleep well at night, that's what the product comes to deliver in both cases. You mentioned outsider insights, what insights have come up for you now, after a year and a half, two years, since you started working in cyber?

Chen Ben Artzi: [06:53] What came up for you that's different? Yes, so I sort of mentioned it earlier: really from the outside, for someone who didn't grow up in this world, from the outside I see there are lots and lots of fragmented, small solutions answering small, niche questions, and it wasn't always clear to me, looking from the outside, what the problem actually is. Many small problems, or is there one big problem here. At Cyera it really clicked for me how important data is. Our information and companies' information is truly the most important thing to them; there's a very, very big problem here. It's really one of the things that keeps the CISOs of these companies up at night, and we try to help them actually sleep better.

Eyal David: [07:38] Tell me, when you moved to cyber, what did the interview look like? Because you came from a fintech background, how did you prepare for it, for that matter? How did you learn this world?

How to prepare for the interview and learn a new industry

Chen Ben Artzi: [07:47] I read a lot, I talked with friends and acquaintances who are in the field, I really tried to learn not only what cyber is and what data security is, but also what Cyera actually does, and to try to understand it. But like any product job interview, I prepared for a product job interview. In the end, as product managers, and I really believe this, we have a certain set of capabilities we come with. None of us studied a degree to be a product manager, and we come from very, very different backgrounds, which is one of the things I love most about this role, because I get to work with people who come from really diverse backgrounds. Not everyone followed a fixed path. I once worked with a speech therapist who became a product manager, and I work with a lawyer who became a product manager, and that's really nice. It really adds to this role: everyone brings their own angle and what they learned along the way as they rolled into this role. And in a somewhat similar way, my move from one industry to another, in the end a different point of view and a different path also bring some advantage. And if I go back to how I prepared for the interview, I mainly focused on trying to understand the problem space, understand what they do, as much as possible from the outside, and on emphasizing my product management skills and my experience. I think experience, even if it comes from another industry, familiarity with customers of certain sizes, understanding customer processes, understanding customer pains and what they're really looking for, that's in the end a set of skills, and then the content of the product itself you learn along the way, by doing.

Eyal David: [09:34] So those are things you really learned. OK, now that you've been working for two years, are there insights where you look back from the outside and say, wow, this isn't what I thought about cyber?

Chen Ben Artzi: [09:45] Yes, it's also, it's a bit funny, because from the outside it really looks like some kind of closed clique where everyone came from intelligence, 8200, all those numbers. No, you said a lawyer, a speech therapist, I was in shock. Right, and surprisingly, there are a lot of those of course, and the base starts there, but the company is very, very diverse, and people come from very diverse backgrounds, both experience and education, and also diversity between men and women. That was also something that seemed to me from the outside, that cyber is a very male field, but it turns out differently. Our Head of Research, who is basically responsible for the data, which, as I said, is the core of our product, is a woman, and she leads a strong female team.

Eyal David: [10:36] Um... and that, that's nice to discover. I'm curious, going back for a second: if you really look at it, how hard was it to get into cyber? How different was it compared to just doing another fintech company, like you're used to? I don't think it was hard from the perspective, it wasn't hard, uh...

Chen Ben Artzi: [10:55] Because it's hard. I mean, maybe I needed to go through some process with myself of "you can do this," because it's not like Cyera would say "oh, you didn't come from cyber so we won't take you."

Eyal David: [11:05] Yes, yes, but I wonder how complicated the onboarding was here. I mean, I now need to take in a whole industry, start building insights, basically learn. How complicated was it compared to what you imagined?

Chen Ben Artzi: [11:16] It wasn't very easy, but I don't think it was something impossible. I really, really enjoyed the process, which in the end is also something that we as product managers probably have no choice about: we have to be people who love to learn. And I really enjoyed the learning and that kind of refresh after many, many years in what you could even call a comfort zone. And in the end, I think knowing how to be curious is one of the traits and things we as product managers constantly need to do, even if we stay in the same industry. The fintech industry I started working in in 2010 is not the same fintech industry of 2025, so even while you're inside an industry you're constantly learning and constantly need to keep up and constantly need to think about what's new. In general, the whole industry, we're constantly changing. Like, who would have believed three years ago that AI would get to where it is today, generative AI and GPT, and that it would become a tool that even my seven-and-a-half-year-old knows how to use. That's something I wouldn't have imagined. Right, we're all curious, you especially, with all the broadened studies, you already came curious from home,

Eyal David: [12:31] but it's something that's really necessary in this profession. So tell us a bit about your role in the product, where are you, where does the platform actually come into play?

Chen's role: platform, remediation and integrations

Chen Ben Artzi: [12:40] So the platform is there from the beginning. I mean, the platform, if we talked about those four questions, it integrates the whole thing in the end into something the user can see and touch, whether it's the dashboards and the inventory itself and those problems we found for them, which we call issues. Everything is there. So everything the user touches is the platform. But at an even more specific level, the area I get into, I'm basically more responsible for, let's call it the fourth question: what do I do with this risk now, how do I fix it. The platform basically gives our users and customers the ability to also fix those problems. Many times the fixes are internal in our platform, but even more often that fix requires us to integrate with other systems. I'm basically responsible for the platform and remediation area, mainly the integrations side, because Cyera basically sits inside an ecosystem at the customer. That ecosystem is made up of many different systems: that customer, and we said our buyer is the CISO, now has some ten different systems under him, each doing a different part of protecting his environment, whether it's a data catalog or a SIEM and all the workflow automations, and Cyera needs to enter that ecosystem and deliver its value, and also deliver that value outward, to those systems. So we enrich other systems with the data we find, and we also get enrichment back, which helps us with those insights.

Eyal David: [14:13] Beyond insights, as you say, there are also actions, right? Yes. I'm now a CISO in a huge organization, right? I need to close the loop, get someone to do this thing, make sure it gets prioritized, right? Right, that's basically one of the CISOs' biggest pains,

Alert fatigue and closing the loop through integrations

Chen Ben Artzi: [14:26] that multitude of systems often makes things hard for them and creates something people like to call alert fatigue. I now have tons and tons of alerts, but now I need to resolve those alerts, that's what really matters to me. And Cyera helps a lot with that, because it knows how to give him alerts that are accurate for his environment, accurate for his data. We help him prioritize those alerts, but we also help him resolve them, which is very, very important. And here integrations come into the picture very strongly, because many times fixing that problem needs to step outside the platform for a moment. Whether it's opening a Jira ticket, and the person responsible for that data or that bucket needs to close the port and tell me, I closed it, he closes the Jira ticket, and I close the alert in Cyera, and there, I've taken something off your to-do list. Or whether it's actually going and performing the fix itself, where our integrations also help, because I can integrate with another system,

Eyal David: [15:21] and with the click of a button in the platform, I don't know, remove the share setting of that document that's exposed to the world and shouldn't be. Tell me, what other challenges does he have? You mentioned one challenge, that he really needs to move through this whole organization and make his things happen. What other challenges have you found CISOs live with, your customers?

Chen Ben Artzi: [15:41] So there's really this challenge of the multitude of systems, and of understanding, a really good understanding of what's actually happening in my environment, and where my blind spots really are, and where the things are that are most important for me to handle. There's focus, as you said. So yes, this matter of focus and prioritization is very, very important. And many times it also has to catch up with what's happening in the industry and in the world. AI is taking over every good patch, and many times we also see a lot of systems that add AI after the fact. At Cyera, AI is already at the core. Our mechanism, the classification engine, is already homegrown AI,

Eyal David: [16:30] machine learning, LLM-based, it can do wonders. Say it, say the words in English for a second. Yes, sorry. Yes, so I basically have classification of issues, right? I'm taking issues, I fall into it too. I have all kinds of things I want to alert on, and the classification basically helps me group them together, right?

Chen Ben Artzi: [16:46] The classification basically finds the issues, because we look at the data and we say, what do you have here? We connect it to context. I mean, it's not just that I have a recipe document here, it's also in the context of an environment of a company that's a food company; or I have a document with a first name and last name, but it's also in a context where this is a European citizen, and then it's sensitive information. And now the organizations, on top of that,

Eyal David: [17:13] there's AI everywhere, there's a ton of content being created, a ton. Like, that's exactly the problem that keeps swelling and swelling,

Security for AI inside the organization

Chen Ben Artzi: [17:21] he has an even more significant challenge, right? Right, he also has the challenge of doing security for AI itself. I mean, in the end he's probably deployed some generative AI inside his own organization, they went with it, it happens in many organizations, and he needs to make sure that his thousand employees, when they ask that AI bot inside the organization, the answers they get are answers they're allowed to get. That someone in HR can't now get information from some other division in the organization, and that not every developer can get answers about his manager's salary.

Eyal David: [17:54] And that's when they use the organization's tools. What about all the organizations where there's that uncle who buys his own GPT license for 20 dollars, right, and takes everything outside. And then it's very, very important to understand what we're exposing outward, and what we're exposing to external tools, and also internally, what we're exposing into those tools. And tell me, in the platform itself, how much is he the only user,

The different users of the product

Chen Ben Artzi: [18:14] of users, you mentioned, right? Right. There are quite a few types of users, they're usually in some constellation within the customer's security organization, whether they're actual data security analysts, often privacy people, usually under the CISO and security organization, sometimes under the Chief Data Officer's organization. And nearly all of them, their problem is to protect the organization's data, but each of them has the angle that matters more to them. So for the privacy people, what matters more is protecting sensitive information in areas like GDPR, which everyone knows, and sensitive European data. And for data security people, what interests them more, and I'll throw in another English term, is data sprawl: understanding where the data goes and making sure it goes to the right places. And there are people who really care about the sensitivity of who can access my data, not only whether it's sensitive and it's here, but also who can access it, whether they're allowed to access it. And tell me, how do you prioritize?

Eyal David: [19:19] So if you have all these entities, that's a common problem in the SaaS world. How do you prioritize? I have the customer, and I have all these satellites you mentioned. How do you prioritize between them, between requests from them, requests from here?

Prioritizing between customers, POVs and internal needs

Chen Ben Artzi: [19:33] Yes, as always as product managers, the most important thing is knowing how to prioritize, and we have a lot of forces pulling at us. So we have the customers, and within the customers we sometimes have different organizations pulling, and we have customers who are still in some proof-of-value stage, who aren't paying yet, but it's very, very important to us that they sign and pay. We have internal needs, especially for a company in that kind of hyper-growth, we're growing at scale, and it's very important not to forget the technology in all that. And in the end you're at that intersection and need to know how to prioritize. I rely a lot on dialogue, whether it's dialogue with the customer, but also a lot of internal dialogue, and I rely on others. We often look at, in the end it's very, very important that we also look at the data, and really understand if I now have, I don't know, ten customers who need something versus one customer, and know how to make those prioritizations. And maybe also pay attention to how much they're worth. And some segmentation of the customers, yes, you can lean on that as much as possible. And in the end one of the important things is really that skill of understanding the customer and understanding your user, and being empathetic to their needs and pains, and putting yourself in their shoes and understanding what really matters, what will really solve their problem now, and out of what they asked for, doing some internal prioritization of what really needs handling now and what can

Eyal David: [21:05] be pushed for a moment and added later, and decide for ourselves. Right. If we attach this for a second to the customer journey here, OK? So there's the moment he basically does some pilot with you, you start, right? And then when does the platform actually come into use? Right after?

Chen Ben Artzi: [21:21] Relatively quickly. In general, customers really start with us, the vast majority of customers start with some proof of value, where they come and do a sample of their data, when we scan and show them what we find. And that's something where within hours they already see value. Within a few hours they can already see the inventory we built for them, and also the insights of what we found there, what we found and what problems we found, and they see all of it in the platform. So the platform is there from very early stages. The remediation part is often already present during the proof-of-value period too, so as to deliver value there as well.

Eyal David: [22:04] But basically you're sitting on the scale lever. Basically, from the moment they come in, the incentive now is to embed you, or to get into integrations as much as possible, so that if I'm sitting in this cockpit, right? In this command center, you add it, then as much data as possible will flow to me, and I'll be able to do as many things as possible. So you mainly do, I'll ask at the day-to-day level, you mainly do discovery with a lot of customers, you listen to them, try, what do you do day-to-day, what does it look like, what mainly bothers you? Yes, discovery with customers happens a lot.

Discovery with customers, design partners and partners

Chen Ben Artzi: [22:35] Actually in all areas of the product, but also in mine. And you can really say our customers very, very much like working with us collaboratively. We have a lot of design partners and a lot of customers with whom we're really on a fixed cadence of calls to help us improve the product. A lot of discovery also with partners, I mean, we're inside an ecosystem, so we have partner companies that do the integrations with us, so we're in a lot of conversations with them and in the end we build the integrations together with them, and a lot of work with development of course, because in the end you also need to bring it to implementation.

Eyal David: [23:13] Yes. There's another thing here that's really interesting, that your product is basically AI, pure AI. Do you want to expand on that a bit? Yes, right, so I mentioned earlier the AI revolution, which I think

Chen Ben Artzi: [23:25] means you can't have a conversation today, not even a hallway conversation, without talking about AI. So yes, at Cyera, unlike companies or all kinds of products that remembered to add AI afterwards, we started there. Our product is a homegrown machine learning engine, it was built that way, built on machine learning algorithms, LLMs, all the buzzwords, except that for us they're not just more buzzwords, it really is the core of the product. So help me understand, the significant AI part is basically around understanding the context, understanding the risk, basically that assessment. Yes, and as I mentioned earlier, one of the things this engine can do is also identify the customer's environment, what we call learned: it knows how to learn the customer's environment, and in addition to identifying what the data is and giving it its context, we can also say what the context is for that particular customer. I can give the recipe example again; it's simply an example of the general understanding that for a certain food company, its recipe is sensitive and needs to be protected, compared to another company.

Eyal David: [24:42] And what challenges do you have, as Chen? As Chen. As Chen in the platform and integrations role?

Chen Ben Artzi: [24:49] So we talked a bit about the challenges of really entering this world of data security from the outside, which is something that stays with you all the time. Yes, today, after a year and a half, do you still feel it? Not because I came from the outside, but yes, maybe it's more thanks to, I'll say, Cyera constantly growing and expanding, and this whole world of data and AI and these things where we constantly need to catch up and learn. I do feel I'm still learning. How do you keep up today with the industry, with trends? I try to listen to a lot of podcasts, I try to read a lot, but it's also a lot by doing, because in the end we bring it into our roadmap and features and our daily work; we're constantly trying to move forward together with the world in that direction. And you also hear it a lot from customers; in the end the customer is also very, very connected and knows what's happening in the world

Eyal David: [25:50] and wants to see it in our product too. It sounds like you have to juggle, for example, between features you hear about from customers, right?

Chen Ben Artzi: [25:58] Because there are different industries there? No, that sounds right to me. That's true. I do think that for almost every product manager this is an ever-present challenge, the juggling, the multitasking we're so good at. So it's also about knowing how to juggle between your tasks, but it's also about always knowing how to prioritize and to distinguish between the essential and the trivial, between things that come up from the market, from the industry, from customers, from internal needs that always exist, especially in a company in hyper-growth where you're constantly growing but you also constantly need to take care of technical debt and make sure we keep growing at scale and don't leave it behind. So this whole matter of constant prioritization is one of the challenges

Eyal David: [26:44] that accompany me and every product manager. So you talked about focus, and I'm curious what product skills you think are most important in product people?

The key skills: curiosity and separating the essential from the trivial

Chen Ben Artzi: [26:56] Curious, you said. I said curious, right. I think curiosity is a very, very important thing, because in the end we constantly need to advance and learn. And I touched on it just now: that distinction between the essential and the trivial, really knowing, within all this noise and all these forces pulling us in every direction. They always say we're a central junction in every organization. We get pulled from the customer side, we get pulled from the field side, we get pulled from the development side, and it's always important to know how to take in all the feedback, collect it all, and then come out with a prioritized list of what we do when.

Eyal David: [27:36] So that distinction between the essential and the trivial is a very important thing. Do you have something you do around it? Do you have a habit or... something you can share, something you can point to, yes, this really helps me separate the essential from the trivial?

Chen Ben Artzi: [27:51] I think there's a lot here about understanding the customer and the user, which is another skill hiding here, empathy, a word I maybe like less. But in the end, empathy for the user, not empathy in the sense that we only care about their welfare, but the empathy of really understanding their journey. And what they're looking for in my product, I mean, where their problem really is and how I solve it for them. And once you understand that, it's much easier to prioritize and to distinguish between what really matters to them now and what will really help them now to move forward and solve the problem, and what can be added later to complete it.

Eyal David: [28:35] Which also connects us to curiosity, right, and to active listening. So you get on a lot of phone calls, customer calls, and how do you manage to maintain the... you called it empathy, but it's not only empathy, it's basically the know-how, and understanding the industry and understanding the customer, right?

Chen Ben Artzi: [28:53] How do I manage to maintain it? We talk a lot with our customers, I already said that, in those cadence calls with customers that we join, but we also have customer advisory boards that we hold every so often, where they come and talk with us. And many times I also, you know, if I now have some specific topic or feature that I want to understand, even before the requirements, just to test the waters, whether it even interests anyone, then many times I get on a Zoom with the field team and tell them, bring me five customers. Does this help you sleep peacefully at night? If so, does it add five minutes of sleep for you, take away five minutes of sleep? Yes.

Eyal David: [29:44] OK, so those are basically also the things you look for in the job interviews you do. You're interviewing a lot now, right? Right, Cyera is growing very, very fast. How many employees are you today? We're already, we'll get back to job interviews, how many employees are you today? We've already passed 600 employees globally, about half of that in Israel. And how many are you in product, to give a sense?

Hyper-growth and what a product interview at Cyera looks like

Chen Ben Artzi: [30:06] Something like 20-25. Just to give a sense, when I arrived a year and something ago we were six. Wow, OK. That's what you call hyper-growth. Yes, we're constantly growing and we're looking for good people for a range of roles, not only product; we mostly hire development, but yes, we're hiring product and I help with the interview process. So those are the things you look for in an interview? Yes, I look for them. In the end there's the dry matter of experience and what they've done, but as I said, it doesn't have to come from a specific industry. But we do look for curious people, we look for people who are thirsty for doing and learning and who really know how to make that distinction between the essential and the trivial. We test it a bit in the interview, often through some more thought-based exercise that we do together with the candidate. It can be on the product they tell us they're working on today or worked on in the past, to give that comfort of talking about something familiar, and sometimes we actually give an example of some feature at Cyera that we're working on now or worked on recently and have them think about it together with us.

Eyal David: [31:25] And then you're basically looking to see that curiosity when you push back from the other side?

Chen Ben Artzi: [31:33] Yes, the pushback. In the end, our process is a pleasant one. It's not there to make the candidate fail, quite the opposite: we really want to understand the fit together with them. I join the process at the very first stage, which is the candidate's first conversation, a conversation with me and another product manager. We get to know them and hear a bit about their experience, we tell them about Cyera, and then we dive a bit more into questions that are more aimed at a product manager's skill set. Can you share such a question? Yes, there's a question I really like to ask. It usually comes after they've talked about their experience and their product, and we've already asked the questions a bit like what you're interviewing me about here: who's the customer, what's the value, how do you work with them. And I ask them to describe a feature they worked on recently that they're proud of, and to really walk me through their thought process, starting from discovery through the specification and the implementation, whether it was delivered, and if it was delivered successfully, how they know it succeeded. Do you want to tell more about how you got into product? Yes, so I really started in QA. And I did a sort of QA, development, product path, broadly. I think the move to product was, on one hand, very natural, and many people make that move from the technical side to the product side. I think for me it was very significant. I think as QA, and later also on the development side, you really, really understand how the product works and you know how to test it very, very well. And then the move to product, and really bringing that layer of understanding, and then going to customers and the market and bringing in the requirements and bringing that other side better, really gives some picture; it helped me a lot that I had both of those sides. And to this day my development background helps me a lot in my work, having that technical understanding. I can usually talk to developers in a language they understand, and I also understand what they tell me, and sometimes you can go into deeper details when you need to understand the feasibility of features and how long they'll take to develop and things like that.

Eyal David: [33:59] And that perspective, as someone who comes from that direction, adds a lot for me. Yes, if we talked about pushback, now maybe in the sense of pushback it maybe has no value. That was probably also one of the job requirements, no? No, not necessarily. Really? I was, you see, here something just shattered for me. I was sure that in cyber the minimum I need is to come from a technical background. It helps. We really have

Chen Ben Artzi: [34:26] a range of roles where for some it's more important, and in the job description we'll specify that it's more important to come from a technical background. Sometimes there's also a position where we'll really want someone who did something similar at another company. But no, not necessarily, and certainly in our platform team, as I said, she really is a lawyer.

Eyal David: [34:46] So exactly, if I see such roles open, for example, I can really conclude that I have a chance even if I don't have a technical background.

Moving from development to product, and three maternity leaves

Chen Ben Artzi: [34:54] That's interesting. So how did you actually get into product? So I really made that move from a role that, let's call it, was more technical, from QA to development to product. Why did you even want it? Sorry for... It felt very natural to me in a way. Always, in the roles I had in QA and development, I was always very, very interested in the why, in why things happen and why we do them, and in really understanding the requirements from the customer and market side and what we're actually here to solve. And when the opportunity came up at the company I worked at then to make that move, I was also already on very good terms with the product people. And yes, there was... They also saw something in you. Probably. Probably, right. It's always like that, someone pulls someone, something happens. Yes, there's someone who pulls, yes, but it also had to come from me, I had to say that I want it and ask for it.

Eyal David: [35:56] And how long did that process take until you found yourself in product?

Chen Ben Artzi: [36:01] I need a second to remember the timelines, and I'm also pretty sure my official move from development to product was after maternity leave. Which is maybe the time to tell people, and mothers, that maternity leave is a very, very good opportunity to stop for a moment and look at your career and what you want to do next. I had three of those, and in all three I came back in a different role than the one I went on maternity leave from. Really? What? So from QA to what? How was it? From development to product was the first maternity leave. That was also the first child, right? And then the second maternity leave was a move within product, but it was small, and I moved to managing products. The third maternity leave was the move from fintech to cyber, which was a significant milestone.

Eyal David: [36:58] Yes, I think we're in a period, as you said, of lots and lots of changes, so it's OK to reinvent yourself. Yes. And I think also really stepping out like that for a moment, I'm not a woman, but stepping out of the thing for a moment and looking at it from the side is a really good time to do it. And so, OK, you became product there. And now what, are you totally junior? What did it look like at the beginning?

Chen Ben Artzi: [37:24] A bit junior, but since it was in the same company, and as QA and on the development side I knew the product very, very well from the inside, I actually had an advantage there. I mean, yes, I came from a place of experience from the inside. Because you know how much things will cost, how complex they are. Yes, and I do know the customers, and I do know the market at a basic level. So yes, I had a very significant knowledge advantage from experience, but someone had to teach me what it is to do product. And that was, who did that?

Eyal David: [38:00] My manager. How did he do it, how did he mentor you? He just managed you and there were meetings every so often going over things, like that.

Chen Ben Artzi: [38:09] Yes, yes, something like that. Today do you also mentor product managers? Yes, sure, yes. It's part of the role that I really, really love; I did it in previous roles and I also do it at Cyera, because we have both juniors and seniors, really at every level.

Eyal David: [38:28] Really, you have junior product managers? Yes. Tell us a bit about that. What background do they come with? Are they people who grew from within the organization, that you recruited like that? We have growth from within the organization, and we have

Mentoring juniors and product processes

Chen Ben Artzi: [38:38] people who are just finishing the army and come in directly. And yes, when it's growth from within the organization, you have the organizational knowledge and you need to understand what it is to do product management, the product management skills and all the processes, and learn that. When you come from the army, you have the background knowledge of this world; usually they really come from something similar they did in the army, and here it's maybe a leap of understanding what it is to work in a civilian company, plus what product management is and the processes of truly professional product management. So what do you work on with them the most?

Eyal David: [39:15] With them? I don't know if you mentor more women or men. A lot of learning from... we talked about curiosity,

Chen Ben Artzi: [39:22] asking questions, being very, very open to consultation. In general I do that too, it's something I do all the time, consulting with my peers and my managers, and here too I give a lot of advice. And also something where at Cyera in general I feel I had some advantage from my product management experience: I came in and they gave me room to bring from my background all kinds of product management processes, how we measure ourselves, metrics, and all kinds of things to formalize a bit more, within the startup, how product management processes are done, which I brought from my experience. And I took on all kinds of areas of responsibility outside my specific part of the product, more cross-cutting ones, and those are areas I really enjoy helping with too. Really? Like what? Basically like what, what processes did you take on and enjoy helping others with? Mainly processes of prioritizing things, and what we do when we build a feature now from start to finish. I helped implement Mixpanel in our organization, for example, so that we really have analytics and... Very important, how many cyber companies go barefoot in that respect, right? Yes, and all kinds of other complementary products, Pendo and things like that, that help us make our product robust and well-founded, and be more data-driven in the decisions we make. It feels a bit strange to call myself a mentor, but... Yes? But that's what you do. Yes, but it's like, it's an inseparable part of what I do as a product manager. It's something you do naturally, especially when you work in a team, and in a team that has both seniors and juniors, naturally there's that dynamic of guidance. But on the other side, I also learn a lot from the younger folks.

Eyal David: [41:28] Yes, what new thing have you learned recently that you want... First of all there's slang I can't keep up with. New things. Look, really the people who come from the army,

Chen Ben Artzi: [41:42] they bring a lot, a lot of hands-on knowledge and real understanding of things similar to Cyera from within the army. They come with tons and tons of curiosity and a lot of hunger, and they really work at a different pace.

Eyal David: [42:00] So it teaches me anew to work at those paces. They don't have kids, obviously. Fine. I'm joking. No, so basically, that's mainly what they bring? The know-how from the army and basically the drive to work hard? That's what you mean by pace?

Chen Ben Artzi: [42:17] Yes, yes, in that sense, yes. In general, at Cyera we work at a very, very fast pace. We're still a startup, I said 600 people, but we still work at startup pace, constantly charging toward the shared goal. And another thing I feel works really nicely, and it's very much thanks to the human capital that's gathered there, is that everyone is really very committed to the goal, working very much together, there's amazing collaboration. We talked a bit about juggling between things, and being a central junction between many forces that pull. Something I really enjoy seeing and working with at Cyera is that the collaboration is truly amazing between different development groups, between development and product, between product and the field,

Eyal David: [43:09] it's pretty amazing. Really. Tell me, and for people who want to get into product management now, OK? If you'd want to refer this episode in three months to someone who wants to get into product management, and tell her, yes, this is the most significant thing worth hearing in this episode, what would it be? I think we really touched on it earlier.

Advice for anyone who wants to get into product management

Chen Ben Artzi: [43:31] The fact that all of us as product managers each have a different background. There's no fixed path where you can say, if you do one, two, three, that will be your path to product management. People really come from different backgrounds, different degrees, from the army, from civilian life, from companies in all kinds of different industries. In the end, that's what makes us unique. We're a kind of role you grow into from all kinds of different places, and in the end, if you have that certain set of skills we talked about earlier, which is curiosity, knowing how to prioritize, trying to understand the user as much as possible and being empathetic to them and their pains and needs, if you have that, you'll probably be a good product manager. And the way there isn't fixed and isn't orderly. It will often be easier to do it from within the organization, which is something I did. Sometimes people manage to do it when moving between organizations too, but with some initial background they come with; maybe they bring the industry knowledge but switch roles, or when they're inside the company and switch roles.

Eyal David: [44:42] If I look at your path, then allow me, OK? I think, so one is maybe saying I want it. Yes. Right? That's the first thing you did. And then you also said, I was on really good terms with the product team, so there was probably already something between you; even as a developer you were involved, right? You asked questions. Like, you were interested, you were curious, right? After that, basically, when you entered that role, I don't know, all the roles you mentioned, mainly you did a lot of learning and really worked your butt off, you learned, right? Yes, that's true. That's something I can do even if I'm not a product manager now. I can start learning, asking questions. You said you mentor, so maybe I could pester you, right? I'll ask you lots of questions that interest me. Yes. Do you have, for example, some program in the company to encourage internal mobility or something like that, let's say? If I'm now a developer at your company, or, I don't know, marketing, data, can I raise my hand and say yes, I want this?

Chen Ben Artzi: [45:44] I wouldn't go as far as to say there's a program, but it's definitely something that's accepted, and your managers will encourage you to do it if you're good at what you do, as you said, if you come to learn and work and want to do more,

Eyal David: [46:00] it's something that happens, yes, sure. Right, I think that's critical, like, you probably need to find that someone who'll agree to let you do that shadowing, because these are super busy people, so somehow you need to find the way to their hearts, as you basically did, right? So that's a good thing to take away. Tell me, and for the curious among us: you mentioned that as a curious person you listen to lots of podcasts and consume a lot of information. Do you have any recommendations you can share?

Recommendations: Lenny's Podcast and the interview with OpenAI's CPO

Chen Ben Artzi: [46:27] I listen to lots of podcasts, and not necessarily professional ones; I also love listening to culture podcasts and ones about music and TV series and so on. There's a guy named Lenny who has both a newsletter and a podcast on product management, it's called Lenny's Podcast, very easy to find, and he really interviews product leaders from the most senior and leading companies in the industry. Recently I heard his interview with the Chief Product Officer of OpenAI. Yes, what did you take from it? Tell us, what did you hear? First of all, one of the most interesting things is really hearing each person's path, how they got there. I heard an interview where he talked with the first product manager at Facebook, who of course didn't come from any product management background and simply pushed herself within the organization and made sure everyone in the organization knew her and knew who she was, and gradually she just started doing things related to product management, and at some point she simply became a product manager without anyone noticing, and then they also gave her the real product management title. So it's very intriguing to hear all kinds of senior people at leading companies, how they got into product management, what matters to them as product managers, how they prioritize things, how they listen to the market and their customers. I learn a lot from it, and it also really helps to understand that in the end, even the Chief Product Officer of OpenAI is a product manager like me, and he deals with very, very similar challenges of now figuring out what I need to prioritize here and there, and management pulls this way, and the board pulls that way, and development pulls that way, and how do I ultimately bring value to my users, and how do I really give that extra. Tell me, if someone wants to consult with you now, she wants to get into product management,

Eyal David: [48:24] where can people find you? How do they get in touch with you? On LinkedIn. Yes? Yes, that's great. Lovely. And I'll ask one more question, we're really at the end of the episode, so I'll ask,

Wishes for the future

Chen Ben Artzi: [48:34] what do you wish for yourself in five years? I wish myself to keep learning and advancing in my knowledge. I wish myself to be in a place that I feel keeps challenging me, the way I feel today, and where I keep growing both professionally and personally. And I wish all of us a quiet and calm future, and that everyone comes home and it all ends.

Eyal David: [49:04] Amen.

Chen Ben Artzi: [49:06] And also that maybe this AI will stop for a bit, take a rest. Right, for you it became a big interest.

Eyal David: [49:14] OK, so we had a really great time, and we'd love for you to come back. Gladly. Yalla. Bye for now. Hi friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe and 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 love for you to write to us. We'd really appreciate five stars on every platform and for you to follow us, so more listeners can discover us and find the podcast. You can also find 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.