Transcript: Gilad Livnat | monday | Focus vs. all the noise. A down-to-earth conversation

Intro

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. Gilad, what's up, how are you? I'm good, and happy holiday. Happy holiday, happy holiday, happy Passover. It's great to be here, especially in Israel.

Gilad Livnat: [00:47] Right, you came from London, we tried for a long time, we did a lot of ping-pong on this. Yes, yes, it took a long time. I always joke with my friends that there's a two-hour gap between Israel and England, and those are two hours of putting the kids to sleep. Like, when my friends finish putting their kids to sleep, I start putting mine to sleep, and when I finish, they're already half asleep.

Eyal David: [01:09] That's the toughest gap of all. But yes, I know the metaphor; ours are already a bit bigger, so they put me to sleep. But OK, so how long ago did you move to London?

From eBay to London and monday

Gilad Livnat: [01:22] Soon it'll be four years. Four years of, wow, a lot has happened since. I moved, originally I started with a startup there, I had a startup in education tech, that's where our whole conversation started. And today I work at monday, at the London offices, working on a new, interesting, fascinating product. But tell us a bit about yourself, you actually come from a data background, right? Yes. My first role in tech was really at eBay, at the center in Netanya. Memories. What year was that? I started working there in 2014 or so. Wow, so I'm old, but yes, it was around that period. I actually came in as a data engineer of sorts; I was sure I'd go more into the worlds of data science and statistics. That was exactly the period, I remember there was a clash between writing in R and writing in Python. In the end Python won big. And at some point, after about two years there, a new position suddenly opened at the site to lead a machine learning product, and they gave it to me, and that's basically how I got into the world of product.

Eyal David: [02:52] And then I really got sucked in. Nine years now you've been doing product, you said four of them in London. So I'll shorten it a bit too: there you also did consulting, right, and now you've returned to monday. As you have to tell, before that you also worked at RiseUp, you went through Soluto, you went through a lot, a lot, a lot, and also Mutzarella, right? And what else did I forget? Financial advising for couples. I also, that I just do for

Gilad Livnat: [03:21] but yes, I was also, we're recording at Google for Startups, so here too I had a very nice period, good people, a great facility for anyone looking to found a startup that started here. Yes, that's, I think, my history in short, you could say.

Eyal David: [03:40] And tell me, this is a question we always ask here, usually in a later part of the conversation. But I'll ask now: in your eyes, what are the most important product skills in product people?

The two skills: focus and communication

Gilad Livnat: [03:53] Well, for me it always comes down to two areas. One area is focus and the second area is communication. I think a good product manager must hold focus. Meaning he needs to understand very well what his company, what his product does and what his product doesn't do. That carries into a lot of areas, strategically, in terms of customer segmentation, in customer interviews, like knowing, maybe let's pause for a second and explain, so

Eyal David: [04:27] you mentioned customer segmentation, basically when you're very focused on the specific user and even a segment. Maybe let's give a small example.

Segmentation: the example from the edtech startup

Gilad Livnat: [04:34] Say when I had the education tech startup, everyone really wanted, just briefly what we did: kids have screens and they love tons of games there, and then they spend a lot of time and waste their time and their money, or their parents' money. We wanted to find some supporting experience for that, an educational experience. The number of kids who play and the ages at which they play is simply astronomical, from age 5 to age 18. And we needed to focus really well and tell ourselves which segment of kids we're looking at, because it affects you: who you interview and what questions you ask, what the interview looks like, which devices they use. When they play. And someone who's in a world where the segment is too broad, because the company wants to take over the whole market, or because he chose too few factors to look at when he looks at an average customer. Or the vision is simply too big, and he wants to take over the world here and now and isn't able to step between niches. That just creates a lot, a lot of confusion. You can't tell which signals are really important, and which customers you really want to meet, and which customers you need to tell, or just do an interview with them for the good feeling. Which questions you ask. These things seep into a lot of places, and later too, I mean, you choose strategically which areas to focus on. And then there's always something that comes after you've closed the strategy, something comes from somewhere else, and it sounds the sexiest and the hottest and the most worth doing. And the result of that isn't even a ripple effect, the immediate result is that your team starts to get confused. And they don't understand why yesterday you said this is the most important thing and suddenly this morning you tell them we're doing something else. And that connects to the second thing, communication. Product people must know how to communicate very well what they do. Whether it's in presentations, in one-on-one conversations, or in how they present these things, these worlds of storytelling. It's a skill, you know, you need to know how to talk with the whole spectrum of people, from developers and designers to management and customers. I think people don't understand how critical this is. And if I connect it to focus: when you tell someone in your company we're not doing this, it's also about how you say it without antagonism, but while keeping your team's focus, when you say we're not doing this because it's more important for me to do something else.

Eyal David: [07:38] I can tell you that in all the companies I've worked at, the salespeople always come with that refrain that says, I have a customer, let's just do this and that's it, we're at the next stage. You need to be there and say, this isn't in our focus, we can't do it, it'll clutter our system. Look, yes, yes, absolutely, with an asterisk, there are always exceptions, and maybe this is where processes come in, which is something you really love. Maybe let's take that example of the salespeople and try to bring a process in there that will both help us with focus and help us not miss

A process with salespeople that produces data

Gilad Livnat: [08:13] the opportunity if it happens. Yes, so yes, I really love trying to turn things that happen in the companies I work at into processes that make sense to everyone and also help people not drop balls at all kinds of junctions. So if a salesperson comes to me, first of all I try to understand from him quantitatively, not qualitatively, how much this thing he's talking about really comes up. The reason is that he may now have some conversation with a customer that really tickles him, whether in terms of his incentive, his closeness to the customer, or the shouting he hears from the customer saying, fix this for me, solve this for me. And then when there's no real quantitative data behind it, it's already something where I say, OK, maybe this is just a very loud customer, and he just met a salesperson who really wants to help him. So one of the things I push is to take the call summary and run it through something that transcribes it, pull insights out of it, and then push all these calls into some database. And then you have something like an awareness layer that sees all the signals, really as tags, like, we talked here about XYZ, about these features. And then, you know, data that shows you the quality of the customer, OK? How much he's going to use it, what the ARR from him is, you know, what industry he's in, we talked about customer segmentation. Once you have a database like that, it can be in Excel or in monday or any other platform, you suddenly start getting trends and you can start filtering them. And then when some customer arrives, or a salesperson with a very, very angry or excited customer who really wants the feature in question added already, you put it into that database and do a few manipulations on it to understand what you're seeing there, and you can suddenly see that this thing is simply an outlier.

Eyal David: [10:37] Or even let the salespeople use it, or the very fact that they started collecting data over time will already develop them, and then, we already talked about communication, they're already part of the communication and already inside the thing. By the way, from those manipulations on the database, if you now build a dashboard, some simple analysis,

Gilad Livnat: [10:56] you and the salesperson who brings you that summary, and you put it into the database and you sit on it together, and you can show him that either it really is an outlier, or it's already a topic we know about, we're going to talk about it, we're going to solve it in Q4, so let's align expectations. Or he really is riding some trend here, he's showing you a trend that exists in your database of more and more customers who've been talking about a certain topic recently, and that's really a tool to work with. But those emotional conversations of a highly motivated salesperson who catches you at the coffee machine in the hallway and tells you we need this now, suddenly you quantify them into a data process, and there's a shared language, and then our communication is much better and our expectations of each other are much better.

Eyal David: [11:46] Totally, suddenly that meeting with sales also has meaning, right? Yes, yes. Everything looks different. I really love it, I also really believe in processes. Let's touch on focus again before we run on. If three months have now passed and you want to refer someone to this episode and say, OK, what's the best thing I can give listeners around processes and focus? What would that thing be? I, I have something like, we talked about processes and focus.

A data review every morning

Gilad Livnat: [12:16] I start every morning, like every morning at the office, with some data review. I really have a blocked half hour for it, I sort of eat sadly in front of the computer and look at all kinds of graphs. I think creating that time for yourselves, time that doesn't get run over, time when you go over the important metrics and make sure you stay focused on the things that really matter. It's a kind of combination of setting myself time in the calendar, always time outside the rush of the meetings that happen during the day, and that keeps me focused. I mean, I know what our metric was this morning, and I know if we had some drop or something like that. You know, it puts me in a frame for that whole day, so that even if some urgent or pressing issue now comes to me, I can tell whether it's really something. You know, in the morning I saw some decline in some metric, and now people come and tell me we must deal with this, so every day I can tell myself whether this is really the most important thing I need to handle today, or whether it's just another person who isn't connected to the product the way the product team is.

Eyal David: [13:44] So he doesn't know what our focus is. Yes, that's great, it's also good advice for life in general, even if you're looking for a job, whoever here is looking for a job, it's really great to be fluent in the numbers and start the morning like that. I want to say one more thing about focus. I really believe in it. You need to think about how it fits now with the changes in the world, when on one hand you're focused and doing the right thing and you're only on the thing that, OK, this is the company's vision, I'm running toward it. On the other hand there are trends in the industry, and in general listening to customers, with a grain of salt I think in that respect, because the customer will tell you what he needs now, or in half a year. Right. You still need an ear tuned to trends and to things that are really happening

Trends, AI and the customer's real problem

Gilad Livnat: [14:29] especially now. Yes, first of all we're talking about this now, in a period when AI has been with us for about two years, and for anyone trying to follow the AI world it really feels like it's moving faster than anything else that's been here. I gave a talk at some AI meetup a few weeks ago, and I remember that while preparing for the talk I noticed there were more and more topics I didn't know, and that's only because, you know, this world simply moves too fast. People talked about RAG for a while, they still do, and then they realized you need to move to graph RAG. I may be throwing around terms people don't know, but Google it, Google it. And just a while ago, a few days ago, Facebook released the new Llama model, which can overcome RAG problems. So this thing just moves so fast that trends can't occupy you all the time. I mean, you have to understand your customer and their problem, even if they now want to solve a problem using some trend because they heard something works. You know, in the end your customers who hear about a certain trend are mostly exposed to some marketing material. That marketing material isn't always the most connected to reality; it feels to them like at another company they solve it faster with that trend. I'm not saying ignore trends, of course, but you need to understand that your customer's problem doesn't change at the speed of trends.

Eyal David: [16:18] Absolutely, I'm just saying, and that's completely right, yes, I'm just saying: put AI aside for a second, even though it's huge, but it's enough that you don't listen to your industry. Trends can also be in the industry, not necessarily technological ones; it's enough that there's a new tax or some regulation or other, or a competitor has now found a way to solve the problem faster. Yes, I think you also have to listen to that. I think we both agree on that, you just need to understand how to do it. As you say, there's a lot of noise out there. I work, maybe, we work as an agency, maybe it's a bit more spread out there, but as an agency we're constantly listening to many industries and to the customer's industry without them asking us, as part of the ongoing work. And when I was a salaried PM I actually didn't do that, so I'm really curious how you handle it, to get it precise.

Market research with ChatGPT and NotebookLM

Gilad Livnat: [17:06] You've basically just entered a new role and you're doing onboarding, so you're learning the industry in depth, I assume, right? Yes, learning the industry. monday in the end is already an established company, obviously, so I have to say there are many people in different roles who help you in those areas. When I had the startup, I'd do the research and competitors and user research and everything. Suddenly here you have people who help you with it, and even if they can't help you immediately, they can give you materials, they've already done it in the past. So that's how I follow it, but I'll never give up on customer interviews. And reading it today, you know, with ChatGPT you understand your market's movements much faster. Like, you just give it to NotebookLM, you just throw tons and tons of reports in there and tell it summarize this for me, and that keeps you very focused on your areas. I think today it's actually become even easier; you don't need a whole team to do all this research, because there are so many tools that I think as product managers we've become much less researchers and more people who digest a lot of material, because access to material has already become a commodity. So I think if we have product managers listening who find themselves doing market research that demands a lot of grinding from them, let them jump on the AI trend, so to speak, because those tools are there.

Eyal David: [18:59] I think that's it. We talked a lot about 0 to 1, so there's really a lot of learning you need to do, and you always need to be very precise. Now, in what you're doing now and in general in the various products you've led, where do you remember falling the most, in assumptions, in the questions you asked, in distilling, that today, in your view, tools can help bridge much better?

Challenging assumptions: ask as if the assumption were reversed

Gilad Livnat: [19:32] The biggest difficulty for us as product managers is that some assumption about the market gets fixed in our minds, and now we need to, and now we actually believe that assumption, and we start our research, whether it's user interviews or Google searches, and today it's with ChatGPT questions. We start, we're already phrasing the question, what we want to know, according to our assumption. And one of the most powerful things I've learned is that when you approach your research, open another thread with the AI tool you're using, where in that thread you ask questions as if your assumption were the complete opposite. If it's your strongest competitor, then ask, you know, ask what your smallest competitor did in a very innovative way, or which customers love your smallest competitor. I think at the start of a career, or before the AI era, it was very easy to fall into these assumptions. I mean, you come in, you do a few user interviews, some assumption forms, it's a certain truth where you say, OK, this is how the market behaves, this is how people see this, and you continue from there. And then later on, if something pulls the ground out from under that assumption, it's very hard for you to recover from it. And that really reflects, you know, product management that isn't at its best. Today we have the ability to come and say, take this collection of data and make me a report that is the exact opposite of what you made me. And suddenly you'll see, like, you'll see there are lots of signals, or lots of evidence, showing you there's another truth. And now, as a product manager, you need your common sense to understand: could it be that everything I believed is wrong? Could it be that the market behaves completely differently from what I think?

Eyal David: [21:57] That's the challenge. That, I think, also distills, at least for me, how significant the role of product people is. Uh... in the foreseeable future, no, I look at it, OK, God forbid, not that, but if I were a developer, or a data person, or even a marketer, I see tools coming in that will basically take things down and bring things up. And when we look at product people, and we're talking here now about communication and focus, and OK, maybe focus is debatable, but the example you gave just now, about focus on what matters and also focus on the counter-argument, basically creating some alternative truth and starting to research around it. Uh... it gives me, gives me confidence, it gives me, I think, the desire to keep going on this path of improving as a product person and leveling up. Yes, I can tell you, now let's say, uh... in research I did

Gilad Livnat: [22:59] on the product I'm working on at monday, so uh... we have a set of jobs to be done that we understand our users need to do. And... uh... and I took that thing and asked uh... GPT, I told it, describe to me the jobs to be done of that customer segment, and I asked it to detail each of those jobs for me, and then we really found two jobs I didn't know about. Like, I was working less with our research team at that moment, but I didn't know those things, and you realize these are two very painful points our customer has that I hadn't imagined they had. And if I had continued the same way, like, if I hadn't told ChatGPT, tell me what other things there are, what things I'm not thinking about exist, then I'd really have been, you know, perceived by customers as unprofessional, as someone who doesn't understand everything they do. And it would have put me in a place where, you know, I'd be looking at the truth through a very specific slit, and for me anything that doesn't happen within that slit... doesn't happen. You're laser-focused. Right, it doesn't happen. Now, you know, you need to be focused, but you can't not know all these things. And it's a great way to challenge our perception of reality.

Eyal David: [24:36] Totally. So tell us for a second about the story from the Air Force. Oh. Tell us a bit, I think it's a really good example of how to take a torch and run with it. Hold on, it's also interesting, AI, it's a very good story. Will you tell us about it a bit? Yes, sure. It was really Operation Protective Edge, exactly

Iron Dome: a data dashboard from scratch during Protective Edge

Gilad Livnat: [24:53] when they were in the processes of making Iron Dome operational, and they didn't know whether this thing would work or not. A war started, and they simply told me and a few other people in the Bor at the Kirya: go figure out how we take control of this thing, how we manage an event like this. They gave us a room with a few screens and we really just started building it. In the end, all of Protective Edge lasted a few weeks, I think, I don't remember the exact number, but not a very long period. But we had to understand how we start working with Iron Dome. Just to explain the situation: planes and helicopters and drones are flying in the sky, and meanwhile missiles are flying there after all kinds of Qassams and things like that. A very fast zero to one. Yes, and we start working, and within some, I don't remember the time frame anymore, but it was probably, probably hours, I realize we're kind of blind. We don't know what's happening, we're standing at screens, but we don't really understand what's happening in terms of data. And then I simply started creating a data-collection mechanism for everything happening around the system: missiles flying at us, interceptors we fire at the rockets. And very quickly we added more and more columns, we built a dashboard that brought together all the activity around this thing. And this thing gained really crazy logistical momentum, to the point that within a few days they started presenting that same dashboard to the Air Force commander, and then also to the prime minister, so we could basically understand how we manage this event called Iron Dome. It was new to everyone, and it had a crazy impact on that whole area, from the number of interceptors we fired at the rockets to how many interceptors the IDF bought from the industry. It was simply this crazy ripple effect, because from not knowing anything about what's happening, within a few days we were in a frenzy of collecting data and presenting it to everyone. That's it, it was simply a very interesting event, and I have to say, it was also without internet, because you know, you're underground and you can go up, go up to...

Eyal David: [27:23] So tell me, it's a fascinating story, that's why I brought it up, but when you look at it like this, what's the most significant thing we can learn from it? First of all, that you operate under pressure and know how to act fast,

Gilad Livnat: [27:34] and you love seeing it flow. Yes, but I think what was really interesting there is that I think I brought it from the worlds of product management and data engineering, but today, in hindsight, I can say I understood very quickly what we were missing as an Air Force, which was something very basic. It was like, what's happening with the... what's happening, the idea is bring data, but what's happening on this front called Hamas versus Iron Dome? We were in complete blindness, we didn't know how to manage this thing, we didn't know how to control it. And that was basically asking yourself what my customer's biggest problem is, and that was a lot of people inside the Air Force and beyond, but understanding what the biggest problem is, and then the solution was the most duct-tape-and-mud solution. Like, we simply sat someone down and told him, every time there's a launch you log it here, and every time we fire you log it here, and within a few days we had thousands of records in that database. And then we also started analyzing it and adding more data to it, and then when you pull insights out of that data and send them to all kinds of different areas in the Air Force, suddenly you see people, it's really like product-market fit. People, like, someone literally came into our room for a few seconds, looked at it, said, what's this? OK, bring me this, I want to present it to the Air Force commander. It was really, you know, a matter of seconds, and then you understand you've solved someone's problem. Like, if before that the commander would ask questions and nobody knew how to answer him, suddenly there's the ability to answer, and then you also make decisions based on it. It was really about understanding the problem, in hindsight. It's not that I ran some process that today I'd probably know how to do in a more structured and smooth way, but it simply screamed that we were missing a lot, and we just started filling that gap. Yes, you as a data person arrive there, how can decisions be made, right?

Eyal David: [29:44] Yes. And you patched it. First of all, I hope whoever tagged all those things is listening to us and knows we appreciate it a lot. But there was also, I think, a very quick patch here, and it doesn't matter that it isn't scalable, and let's be honest, in the end an army or an Air Force can't rely on someone sitting in... Yes, totally, totally. I, yes, also, you know,

Gilad Livnat: [30:07] you can sit a person down and tell him, type it all in, which is something you don't have everywhere, but exactly like when you start with a product and you have no data, you just start with something. That's exactly where I'm taking it. And then basically, like,

Eyal David: [30:24] if now, OK, that's an excellent example about the Air Force and about how an organization like that gets organized, a lot of ego too, it must be said, and very fateful decisions. Like, what are the things, the key points, that from this story, and maybe also from the story of a young company, we can take and adopt?

When founders arrive with the solution already in hand

Gilad Livnat: [30:41] Yes, I can tell you the things I do pay attention to, also, you know, at Google for Startups, I was here with my own startup and I was also a product mentor here for several startups. And it always comes back to the same founders' conflict. Now, founders isn't, it's a code name, it can also be your managers at the company. But when they come with a certain truth and they want to run toward it, and they really believe it exists, and they're now looking for a way to prove it exists or to solve a problem they think exists, but it isn't necessarily there, it isn't necessarily accurate. I can tell you, say, when I joined a company, there were two developers working on a very specific technological solution, a heavy technological solution, it really required them to do a lot of somersaults to build this thing. And it was around a very, very specific problem space. Let me elaborate a bit: imagine there's, like the Uber model, you have a technician, you have someone who wants their problem solved, so we connected those two people. Just like the Uber model, you enter some chat, say I have a problem, someone helps you, and so on. And when I joined, they said, let's give them the option of screen sharing. OK? And that's a super dark technological solution. How do you now do screen sharing between two people at two ends of the world, I'm talking about the pre-Zoom era and all that. There was TeamViewer, which also took you seven hours of... Just say what the problem was that they tried to bridge. Yes, so basically they said, it's hard for a person who has a problem, a technological problem, it's hard for him to explain the problem. And then they said, OK, let's give him the option to broadcast his screen somewhere else, so that someone else looks at the screen and understands the problem. And that required two very talented developers who racked their brains over how to do screen sharing between two people at two ends of the world. And it didn't work, it just didn't work, it was heavy and dark. Did they come out with a product in the end? Was there a product? There was a product in alpha that, I think, you know, worked less often than it, like, didn't work more than it worked. And then we tried to take it and understand the problem space better, and we took two steps back, and we really understood there's a communication gap. Because sometimes you don't know how to explain the problem you have with your device. And then we said, let's try going into the solution space and give a different solution there. And we gave the technician the ability to run all kinds of processes in the background and understand things about the device of the person requesting the service. And that really gave, you know, that was really the step change in usage. And that's an example of how many founders or managers already come with their solution to a certain problem. And when the product team tries to build that thing, it doesn't succeed. So you're trying to build a 0-to-1 product that doesn't interest anyone, because they aren't connected well enough to the problem.

Eyal David: [34:17] Yes, I've also seen this happen a lot. It's very true when the founders are first-time founders, or founders who don't come from the field, then it's very noticeable. I usually run into it when it comes to, say, product onboarding, and then they come to consult with me, and I feel, OK, you don't understand this well enough. There, when you come to explain your product to a new user, that's usually where it surfaces most strongly, and then it also hurts you when you're trying to bring users into the product, because you... Yes, you see it,

Onboarding, context and humility toward the user

Gilad Livnat: [34:47] it's a problem that happens a lot. Picture your product: how many icons are in it that you need a lot of context to understand, how many terms there are that you need a lot of context to understand, how many screens like that. Here too, focus. Yes. Your focus, the user's, everything. It's focus but it's also a bit of humility, when you come and look at something and say, a person who has no idea, who isn't on the team 24/7, and who doesn't see this icon, you know, eight times a day, a person who doesn't have these things, does he really understand what he's seeing here? Does he really understand that this is the button that's supposed to help him?

Eyal David: [35:29] I don't know. Compared to what I'm saying, you want your user as focused as possible, we all have attention deficit, even if he understood what that gear icon on the right means.

Gilad Livnat: [35:36] Yes. By the way, it's funny, we're in a generation, right, where the save button is a floppy disk button? Right. People, like, you know, people don't understand what it is, most people no longer understand what it is. But yes. Let's go up for a minute,

Eyal David: [35:54] let's take advantage of you for another moment. Let's go up to a bigger company. So OK, you worked at bigger companies. You were, say, at eBay, a monster, a monster in 2014, it must be said. Looking back, they were a marketplace. Granted, after it passed its peak, I think, they were crazy, right? Yes, it was pretty, like, yes, not at its peak, but at a time when eBay was definitely considered, not top 7, but at the top. Still doing excellently, yes. Yes. And now you basically go in there to create some internal product, right? What does 0 to 1 look like for an internal product at a company like that?

0 to 1 for an internal product at eBay

Gilad Livnat: [36:30] Wow, great question. A 0-to-1 internal product at a company like that looks like one big madness. Let me just explain: we basically provided a processed piece of data that we ran machine learning on, and we gave it in all kinds of forms to different teams inside eBay. I was an inexperienced product manager then, and I worked with a lot of teams. We started as a very, very small team: me, a data scientist and an analyst. We basically wanted to bring a processed piece of data, one that went through machine learning, to many internal teams in the company. And every time we reached a new team, we reached the search team and business and fraud and so on, every time we got the same reaction of, like, this is great data, it really interests me, I want x more signals related to this area of data. They basically wanted to turn you into their BI people along the way. Something like that, yes. And there I also learned how hard it is to hold product focus versus being some feature team or BI team, and I have a lot of respect for that, OK? It's just that when everyone comes and wants to pull you in many, many directions, A, it's all cool, you understand you're bringing them value, but there's strength in saying we're not doing this now, we have a roadmap, a strategic plan for when we want to solve each of these problems. In the end they also appreciate you more for it. At first it sounds like you're not collaborative, and gradually people understand that, OK, this person holds a certain product and we get certain value from him, and this thing is going to grow, and there's communication around it.

Eyal David: [38:31] Because you said it with communication: if you don't communicate that you're part of a bigger move and that you're part of an infrastructure, and nobody knows, you're that uncollaborative person. That's something you do along the way, right? Right, right, right. Yes, there's that immortal saying, you can't over-communicate, so it was really there. It was a very interesting lesson in the world of eBay, and beyond that, other lessons about working at a big company. And we talked a little, just briefly, about eBay's product, which has somewhat fallen from its greatness.

Gilad Livnat: [39:05] eBay is a place where you need to arrive with a lot of context to understand what you're seeing there. There are lots of numbers and lots of what's the product's rating and what's the seller's rating, and it starts to become a monster, and very quickly you lose interest because you arrive there without context. But yes, I learned a lot of lessons at eBay.

Eyal David: [39:28] I remember that in a marketplace, in the end, there's a very clear dollar sign. It does split into buyer and seller, segments, verticals, different industries, which is completely crazy, but actually there I loved the simplicity that you don't wait for that yearly cycle to end, or tell me if what I did works or not. I'm crazy about it.

Where marketplaces are heading

Gilad Livnat: [39:50] It's really interesting where marketplaces of that kind are heading. I think it's going more toward niches. In the end you look for a marketplace that specializes in the niche where you want to find the product. You see it today in a lot of apps, whether it's Etsy or Vinted, there are many marketplaces that understand you need a certain specialization in the product you're looking for, rather than a general marketplace. I think only Amazon really succeeds there in giving that kind of value, and there the worlds of their value are in other places, in the places of

Eyal David: [40:37] shipping and customer support, that's where they bring you real value. Totally. I'm just thinking about eBay as a marketplace of that kind, which over the years really became sort of second-hand, right? Yes, also collectibles, all kinds of things you can't find anywhere else. Exactly. And then suddenly, like, the significant thing is also that long tail of results, no doubt, of listings, but also the communication with the seller, because basically it's something I want to finish as fast as possible and I need trust in it. Or alternatively, I have lots of questions, and then, like, if I'm buying a boat, I don't know how significant it is that I talk with the seller, and then communication becomes a very significant thing, which would be the strength here, I think. OK, cool. So leave us with something. It was a very interesting conversation, Gilad. I'm really glad we waited until you came to Israel and managed to make it happen. Do you have a piece of advice to wrap up? Maybe we can talk about curiosity and learning in this period, you touched on it earlier.

Growing the team: development goals and peer-learning sessions

Gilad Livnat: [41:43] Yes, I really love this whole topic of seeing the people around me develop. I do it with, let's say broadly, two techniques. One technique is around people management, their one-on-one management. We really set development goals within professional metrics and really talk about how to move from one level to another. And then we also set a series of actions we take to make that happen. But also, in general, product teams are multidisciplinary, and so when the team reaches a certain maturity, not exactly when the product is already, sorry, when the product is already at some product-market fit and everything already works, even at early stages, I ask each person to give the team a session on a certain topic, a professional topic, so the other members learn from them. And then, you know, suddenly the marketing person teaches the developers and everyone what a brand is and why you choose certain fonts and what it does to you when you see an ad from a certain brand. And the developer suddenly explains, in a very, very simple way, how our code works and why sometimes there's a blank screen in some flow. Now, it's not that this is a must, but first of all, it really improves communication within the team, because the marketing person suddenly says, oh, they have that architecture problem again, he said they have some database that doesn't work. Like, suddenly there's a certain communication. And also everyone steps a bit outside their boundaries and learns a bit about other areas, and you stimulate everyone's curiosity. Beyond that, as I said, it also really helps interpersonal communication within the team, in standing in front of an audience; suddenly everyone gets that fun of speaking in front of the team and explaining a topic. I think these are two tools that it would be a shame to miss: in people management, building that engine of professional development and curiosity, and within the team, you know, sharing topics that are a bit under everyone's radar. Love it, love it.

Eyal David: [44:16] Maybe people will also record themselves while they talk, maybe they'll learn about themselves too, maybe it could even become a craze. Before we wrap up the episode, tell us for a minute a bit about Mutzarella, a bit about the episodes you're working on now. You also wanted to tell, you're also working on a CPO series, tell us a bit about it.

Mutzarella and the CPO series

Gilad Livnat: [44:31] Yes, so at Mutzarella we're working on a few series now. For anyone interested in listening, there's also a very interesting AI series with leading product managers working on products that have a strong connection, what, for example, are the things you touch on there? At Mutzarella we're now working on a few very interesting series. One series is about AI products, where we do episodes that are really oriented around specific topics in AI: product managers explaining how they implemented it, and product managers explaining how they use it day to day. And there's the series I'm leading now, called CPO, the CPO series, where I meet different CPOs from the industry. And we talk about topics that are obviously relevant to CPOs, but I think for people climbing those steps of the hierarchy in the product management world, I learn a lot from it. About what that shift should look like in terms of what you deal with. I mean, from a product manager who today is very busy with discovery around a specific problem he's working on, to how CPOs look at that set of problems, how they look at it, how much time they dedicate to strategy, how they solve problems at the really high level of the company, say, problems between go-to-market and product-market fit. Sometimes you can solve a problem for a user who isn't at all the user who's supposed to buy the product from you; that happens in quite a few products. And then when you hear about a CPO who dealt with that, and how she crossed between the business world and the product world, and how she struck a certain balance between how much you develop your product, where you develop it by giving value to someone who isn't the one going to buy it from you, and the balance on the other side, where you constantly need to deliver value in the business worlds of, she specifically sells to insurance companies, so there was a very, very delicate weight she had to play with, between what the product teams are going to do. Suddenly you run into problems much higher in the hierarchy, and it really opens your mind to how you need to play these roles. There's an episode there on all the communication with management, senior management, where suddenly you work with the CMO and the Chief Revenue Officer, and on how you bring those messages down into the product organization.

Eyal David: [47:20] It's a lot, a lot of balance. Let me add to that: I think also as a product manager, I won't say young, but a product manager who's already working, a product man, a product woman. Basically, these skills are very important, this perspective is very important even when working on the smallest feature, or when you're planning who my persona is and who I'll target. There always needs to be the business perspective of what the company does, who I'm even targeting, who I'm serving, and how I really move the ball forward to help, as you said, that employee at an insurance company show her management how amazing this product is and that its ROI is worth it. All the more so when you talked about communication, that's true: when I talk with the CMO, at a small company, at a big company, if I get to him, or if I can, that's amazing, but if not I'll talk with someone else, and still those messages, I'll need my messages, I need to communicate them anyway to many stakeholders, whether it's the CMO or the developer working beside me, and I need to get him to work and do and get on board with what I want. So that sounds really interesting to me. So I'd love to put links, so we'll put a link to you in the show notes. And by the way, LinkedIn, where do people find you? Yes, I'm mainly on LinkedIn. I have a blog in the drawer, but someday I'll share it. So maybe put a link to a Linktree or something, and then we'll find all your stuff, that'll be lovely. So OK, Gilad, before we part, what do you wish for yourself in five years?

Financial independence and wrap-up

Gilad Livnat: [48:50] Wow, we talked about this when we were offline, but I'll share: to be financially independent. Yes, we didn't say five years, we didn't put a ruler on it, but OK, there's a goal here. Yes. From a lot of things that happened to me in recent years, I understood it's a goal I want to achieve, financial independence. Yes, I also kind of help people around me understand the path there, but I think it's something

Eyal David: [49:26] we don't put enough emphasis on, and I'd love to help people put emphasis on it. So you added even more value to that question, lovely. OK, so we'd love for you to come back here, not in another five years but even in another year. We'd love it, next time you're in Israel. Yalla. I also hope that next time I won't have to stop because of sirens. Yalla, have a lovely week, and great that you came. Thank you very much. Bye for now, bye bye, bye. 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.