Transcript: From Strategy Consultant to Product Leader at Wix: Learning Fast, Distilling Insights, and the Monetization Dance — Itay Nof

Eyal David: [00:04] Hi everyone, this is Eyal. In this podcast we dive together into conversations with the most interesting people in the industry. And of course, we'll try to be as practical as possible. Alright, let's get started. Itay, how's it going? Good. How are you today? Great. Happy to be here. Wonderful, glad to have you. With us is Itay, who comes to us from Wix, a Product Group Lead.

Itai Nof: [00:31] How many teams do you have under you? I have two teams under me, let's call them development houses, squads like that.

Eyal David: [00:37] With a few product managers. And you also manage the product yourself, right? Of course. And in which — what actually is the domain, what's your business domain?

Itai Nof: [00:46] I'm in a department at Wix that deals with monetization. Specifically, my group really deals with Wix's top-grossing product. We're talking about our premium plan, essentially the premium tier of your site, where you can move from a free site to a paid plan. Domain — you can connect and register custom domains for your site. And business email, which is a significant part for many businesses that come to Wix, to manage a professional email address. These products together are super significant to Wix's monetization, and that's the group I lead. Great.

Eyal David: [01:22] So do you want to tell us a bit about what you do day to day? What does your day look like? Sure.

Itai Nof: [01:28] So we're a product group sitting at this junction of monetization, and as it sounds and maybe seems, it's a dynamic area, that changes all the time, with a lot of implications for the business of Wix as a whole. We're keeping a close eye on everything related to these panels and these flows that are very significant to Wix. That's one hat of ours, and our second hat is to serve as a kind of infrastructure — both an infrastructure of knowledge, but also a technological infrastructure, for other monetization efforts happening at Wix. Wix is a company that's growing 360 all the time, it's a kind of conglomerate of startups that's constantly inventing new things, every day there's something new they want to offer, and as a result you also need to monetize it, naturally. And we support that, whether through infrastructure of billing and subscription management, or through knowledge of what works right in this world of monetization. It sounds mainly like a risky area, right? A stressful role, yours. It's, as I said, very dynamic, and you really need to keep a finger on the pulse, and keep the pulse low. That's our challenge, but it's also what's super interesting, yeah, in the end really, there's never a dull moment — it's really not a cliché in that sense. No, totally, I meant that you support the billing of more sub-teams in the company,

Eyal David: [02:45] and everyone passes through you, a bit stressful. Yes, right, right. So basically, tell us a bit about Wix — where is the company right now?

Itai Nof: [02:54] So Wix is a platform for online presence. Of course, the core business is building websites and launching sites, but also managing online businesses, e-commerce, booking, restaurants, sites dealing with image and portfolio, and the offering keeps expanding all the time. Wix's story is a very very interesting story, an Israeli company, really based in Israel in terms of organization, and growing very very fast — it grew very very fast in recent years. It developed a ton of unique knowledge in this world, and is one of the market leaders in this world of website building. And the world also changed a lot since Wix... Right, you have to consider that Wix was born, and was already successful before Covid, and Covid — as much as Wix was ultimately on this frequency of online presence and its importance, it put this whole thing on a very very fast pace, and we saw a lot of businesses, more traditional, less traditional, that had a successful physical presence, simply jump on this wave of online presence, and that's also what I think forced Wix to diversify and expand its set of capabilities and its offerings.

Eyal David: [04:00] That's it, suddenly businesses arrive, they need email, a domain, you come into the picture, suddenly there's a premium package you need to offer, So how did you actually start stitching this thing together? After all, you didn't know the different segments of the population, verticals you could say — the question about the businesses that came to you, how did you actually start learning? So you have to take into account that Wix,

Itai Nof: [04:21] I've been at Wix 3.5 years already, and when I joined, Wix was a very very large organization with tons and tons of users, and as a result tons and tons of data. Everything at Wix, and particularly in the worlds I'm in of monetization, starts with a ton of data research. Your way to get to know users, I don't know whether to say first and foremost, it's a must-pass phase of digging your hands into the data, and trying to segment and understand, and see signals out of the data, and that's easier said than done, because really the data is at such a volume that you can find yourself justifying anything and its opposite, and there's a lot of work of really separating the wheat from the chaff, and understanding which signal is real and which isn't, and then taking it to users in user talks, and trying to connect to that sentiment side, and the worlds of empathy, and really understanding what sits behind it, and how to talk to these users, and the insights that come from there

Eyal David: [05:14] constantly enter the offerings, as features or as an experience. What you said is really interesting — you said you actually start from the quantitative, and then distill and arrive at the qualitative, so it's also interesting, but tell us — so okay, there was Covid, people came in from all kinds of segments, business owners, they have different needs, how did you actually know what to focus on, did you go to where the oil is, where most of the bulk of the users you can diagnose are, or did you actually start sporadically, because you said, there are a few segments here that could grow a lot, and I'm diving in. So I think we immediately saw

Itai Nof: [05:47] that a lot of businesses were arriving that were more veteran than the businesses we'd been seeing up to that point. That is, many times before Covid, we saw a lot of businesses whose first footprint is in the digital world. Meaning, their first presence in the world is online. And in Covid we saw a shift, at least growth in this segment, of businesses that exist, that are established. Sometimes they already have a presence, a certain online presence, that isn't rich enough, and they want to improve it, so a lot more migrations of existing sites, from existing platforms to us, and also users who understand better what they need, their revenue streams, they know which physical revenue streams they're trying to move online, and this forced us to be both clearer about what our offerings are, and also faster along the way, in this journey of from creation to a ready site,

Eyal David: [06:44] and to help users quickly start being online. Okay, so you said you've been at Wix three and a half years already, how did you actually start the learning — this was your first role, right? Actually my first product role,

Itai Nof: [06:58] I arrive, I call myself an immigrant to the product world, I'm not born and raised, I started my career in the world of strategic consulting, at a company called Designit, that does strategy for product, so working with large organizations trying to crack some unified strategic product in this world — it could be organizations like banks, or HMOs, that are trying to understand how their digital offering will answer their future challenges, so really working on strategy, and what the offering should be, and what the setup should be. I really really enjoyed the work on product strategy, but I also had an itch to be the one executing it, and deciding how things will be done, and how they'll be carried out, and what comes first, I really was looking to move to the product world, and I found a role, my first role, this entry role, into the product world at Wix, really at this company I'm in, that really requires a combination of business thinking and product thinking. Who took the risk on you? I really thank everyone who was involved in this decision, here over the airwaves I give my thanks. I think there's also some structure of opportunity here that allowed this thing to happen, the specific place too, and the specific role, requires a more business-oriented orientation than the regular product manager at Wix, and I come with that flavor, and also, I think maybe I was in the right place at the right time, and maybe I managed to instill the confidence that I could learn fast, and that's really what was required of me — in the end, also as someone who dealt with product strategy, and worked with C-Levels and so on, in the end when I entered Wix it was time to roll up my sleeves and learn a new field,

Eyal David: [08:35] not from zero, but certainly not from the middle. So tell us a bit about the process for this, how you do it — so tell us a bit about the process of this learning, very interesting.

Itai Nof: [08:47] I think as an ex-consultant, I arrived with a consultant's toolkit, that a consultant has to think about this, in every consulting project, there's a very very significant learning phase. You learn about the client, you learn about the market, a market you don't know, the competitors. I think my first few months were really like a project, I had a research plan of my own, I managed what I want to know, who I want to talk to about it, questions that come up, and I really used my consulting toolbox, really the methodologies I bring from the consulting world, and I entered this, I said, this is how I know how to learn, this is a learning methodology I'm experienced in, so I approach this thing this way. I think this allowed me very quickly, or at least I could, relatively quickly, develop some understanding of the world, who the significant players are, where you can make impact? Even before concrete ideas of what to do, but where — where are the areas where there's an opportunity to make impact, and where are the areas that are less so, and this allowed me, at the very least, to be relevant, fast.

Eyal David: [09:47] And did that surprise your superiors, when you came with these areas — were these domains known to everyone,

Itai Nof: [09:53] and... I wouldn't want to say that... I don't think I revealed anything new to anyone there, and that it blew someone's mind, and I'd like to believe I asked a few questions that maybe they hadn't thought of before, in the end the features I brought them, they're features that were known even before I joined, that they want to crack, but I think the learning, the learning process I did, allowed me to be effective faster, and to try to bring something to the table, and to shorten the learning year a bit. The learning year, that's right.

Eyal David: [10:23] And tell me, the products now under you, entering the onboarding process at the company,

Itai Nof: [10:29] do you lead them the same way, or how does it look? I very very much believe in a learning process that's led by, call it, the employee, or the professional, self-driven, and that it be as contextual as possible, to the questions that come up for you, as the one doing the onboarding. I can say that this is a tip I got when I joined, and I preserve it today, and I ask people to keep some sheet like that, of questions you run into that don't add up for you. So the meetings, my accompaniment in the onboarding is often around the points they bring to the table. In the end there are playbooks like that, come read this, come get to know this, come do these steps, but from what I know about myself, and from what I also see from my employees, when you deal with things that came up naturally in the research process, then you're also connected to the curiosity of the person doing the onboarding, and also the things sit more correctly contextually — meaning, we ran into some question, now we enter a deeper discussion around this issue, and this allows us to dig deeper, and I also think that in the end many of the product people arrive, not necessarily as a first role, they bring relevant experience you don't know, a way of thinking you don't know, and many times I discover that I gain from flowing with people's stream of thought, because it takes us to places that I naturally wouldn't always go to. That's it, there's a certain period for a new employee,

Eyal David: [11:51] really critical, of first impression, before they've yet sunk in,

Itai Nof: [11:57] and talked with people, so it's really something that... I always, when I start working with companies, I really start from some first impression, and usually you really find... Totally, 'fresh eye' is the two words, there was a manager who... who would say, 'fresh eye' is like effective, there's nothing more effective than that, and that's how I managed my learning. I will say, honestly, that... I think there's a lot of credit to give to the team that received me, and to the managers who received me, who were very very good teachers, so both to give the credit and the desire to learn, and also to invest the time. In the end you can, as a product manager, you can learn, sometimes, and most importantly, not at all from your product colleague, or from your manager, but from the developer who knows how to tell you, come listen a moment, this is how this thing works, this is how it should be, here are our challenges, there are insights, I can tell you there are really amazing insights that come from developers, my conversations with developers, and not only developers, UX and content. It's the opposite, it doesn't work, and here's why it doesn't work, and then you can already

Eyal David: [13:03] find it interesting, it's very interesting, because you actually started at Wix, which is a kind of school for product. Do you want to tell us a moment about this experience, and how it was, because there really are a few companies in Israel

Itai Nof: [13:15] that are like that. So Wix, there's a process, I'm familiar with the recruitment process for the product guild naturally, the onboarding process, and the bootcamp — there's a bootcamp like that of a few weeks the moment you arrive, that's disconnected from the specific company you're in, meaning, the product guild leads it, and it's a very very good process, it's a process that also includes a lot of learning of tools and materials. I think one of the most significant peaks in it is that you bring a feature you're supposed to work on there, you work on it with the guild's experts, and in the end present it to Wix's VP Product, who sits with you and does a review, screen by screen, insight by insight, challenges your thinking. It's not something that happens every day at Wix, you don't take every feature to the VP Product, but actually the opportunity to do this thing and see how he thinks, how he approaches things, not only about your feature, also about others' features, gives you a kind of imprint, of organizational DNA, and you say, okay, I'm learning more about organizational thinking, plus it creates connections for you in the organization and connections

Eyal David: [14:15] that are maybe the most important driver for learning. That's it, so as you talked about — I'll jump back a moment — really as you talked about the process you did when you entered, that's another thing that happened, that you got to know a ton of stakeholders, it actually created the connections along the way, right, which is amazing. So I'll close these parentheses a moment, and return to the question I wanted to ask earlier — so the employees you recruit, the employees who are already there, what actually are the skills

Itai Nof: [14:39] that you find are the most important in your eyes? So a product manager is really a kind of strange creature, right, it's not — I'm not revealing anything new if I say you need to be so multidisciplinary and understand many fields and be able to learn new fields fast, and I also think the role changes from place to place, even in the same company and the needs are different, but if I try to distill one thing that's shared, and I think it's also irreplaceable, it's the ability to analytically distill insights from all kinds of data points, and when I say data points I don't necessarily mean only quantitative data but also competitive research, or internal reports, or interviews with users, or self-experimentation, in the end the world in which the product manager operates is a tangled, complex world, rich in data, and very confusing, and the ability — people who have the ability to systematically analyze these information sources analytically, to reject hypotheses, generate new hypotheses, and in the end produce something that's a strong signal about what needs to happen in the product — is very hard to teach, it's very very very unteachable, even if we look at the rest of the toolkit, the rest of the tools the product manager has, there are many things you can teach, you can teach working in Agile, you can teach working with developers of one kind or another, you can change work processes, you can also improve UX skills and visual thinking, and you can also teach data analysis tools, but a way of thinking and an analytical mindset that generates hypotheses, rejects them, tests them, understands what to ask its analyst and its designer, is hard to teach, and that I think is the first trait I look for in every team member, that they know how

Eyal David: [16:22] to do this thing and also lead it as a process. That's it, you kind of said it as one trait, but it actually includes within it several traits. Yes, and it's something that I assume you also have, and it helps you,

Itai Nof: [16:34] it's your superpower for that matter. I think that if I can exaggerate and say I have a superpower, then maybe it's this thing. I at least very much enjoy it — that's in a first stage, I very much enjoy being in the problem space, raising hypotheses, trying to ideate new directions. I can tell you that I'm often the first to propose probably the stupidest idea in the room, and I'm fine with that, you know, labeling it as such, and in a brainstorm it's important to create an atmosphere that will allow everyone to raise such ideas because they often expand the boundaries of the discussion. Okay, not that, but why not that? Because it doesn't sit well with us. Okay, so let's just explore this dimension — we've finished with an idea that actually does make sense. So at the very least I very very much enjoy it, and another advantage of this thing, if we also connect it to learning, brainstorming happens best in a team and in a group, and if you work that way then a lot of your work process is collaborative, you sit with people, you work together, the output is a shared output, you learn from the other people, the idea is better, you don't need all the shoulders of the product, only shoulders of the product, to shine and bring the invention, but a team that works together,

Eyal David: [17:46] and that's also something that's very much at Wix, right? It's like everyone contributes, everyone knows the domain.

Itai Nof: [17:52] Totally, in the end the teams are multidisciplinary teams and really working that way and involving everyone, dev, UX and content and sometimes also finance and legal, at very very early stages, this statement is written in blood because really talented people, they're smart, know the domain from different angles, different glasses, and they have some kind of relevant input, it's true that my natural partner is the analyst but no less than that also the people who really understand the business model and the bottom line, Wix is very geared toward this thing both in the structure of the teams, and in the structure of the campus, cool? Right, rooms — the rooms on campus are team rooms, kind of open spaces like that, they sit, there's no like, you know, back-end floor, front-end floor, they sit together next to each other, and out of this thinking, really that there be cross-pollination all the time. One of the things I like is to go behind someone's computer to see what they're working on and try to also ask the questions. It's probably, I'll say, 70 percent of the time I annoy them, 30 percent of the time effective, but cool, yeah, it's probably one of your tools as a manager, I understand.

Eyal David: [18:59] So give an example, if you can, from life, of something that actually happened — how you dug into the data, maybe it happened at Wix, maybe it actually happened in some domain of yours — how you dug into the data, found the wheat among the chaff.

Itai Nof: [19:11] So one of the products I was responsible for when I joined Wix is really this world of domains. Now domains is a super basic product, anyone who wants to have an online presence needs a customized domain, it's really a must-have, but it's a technical flow, meaning someone who in the end comes to sell cupcakes or dolls doesn't want to do a master's degree in domains and DNS records and understand the technical world of it, and indeed at Wix this is one of our pain points — meaning the flow there is technical and it requires our users to really understand, and this thing also created support tickets and also friction for our users, and it's a very very central flow that also affected monetization at Wix,

Eyal David: [19:53] it's also the gateway of a business at Wix to becoming premium, it's important to note that. Right, right, it's very very connected,

Itai Nof: [19:59] like otherwise you're stuck with this URL of a Wix site, right, it's all by definition in the main panel of Wix, like if you look at domain, premium plan and mailbox, and when I arrived at Wix I remember, and a few months after I joined they gave me the task, the modest, light, realistic one, to reduce by 90 percent the amount of support on this topic. Wow, how much was it before, really like — and actually also every such call is now to sit with the person, explain to them, walk them step by step. These are also not tickets that are necessarily easy to solve, you have to go in with the person, you also depend on other factors, yeah, so it was also per-ticket, there was a relatively high cost here, so also in terms of cost there was an aspiration to reduce this thing, but also in terms of the friction for the user, I think that was our central motivation. And we went out there on some research process, both of competitors and of the users' pains, and we completely changed the flow of connecting the domain from something that required a higher level of professionalism and expertise from the user to something that's much more plug-and-play for our users, and we very very much believed in this feature, we called it Concierge, Domain Concierge, we really branded it, we branded it, we really put effort into it — so we'll return to that, it's interesting, yes, it's one of my hobbies — and we went out to a test after a development time not not so short, we went out to a test and saw we're not winning, and the analyst and I sat, I think on a daily basis, every day while the test was running, from 4 to 6 in the evening, going over the numbers and trying to understand where this drop comes from, where the decline comes from in... in what you'd defined for yourself, basically every day sitting — amazing, this was our daily. I think at first it happened spontaneously out of the passion of both of us for this feature, to solve the thing. Yeah no, no way it's a downside, no, no way, you're free, you're available, come on let's go, and it became this kind of thing that happens. I can tell you it's among the most fun hours of mine as a product manager, this intellectual discourse of cracking it, generating, and then also going to check them live, ah okay that's not it, fine let's find something else — super fun, super sharpening, super educational, you also learn about the unit built and what can be known — what can be known, super educational — a tip here for every product manager, sit with raw data, you'll learn a ton about your product. So we really investigated it from every direction, and I think after about two weeks that this test ran we were, we were almost convinced we simply need to close the feature, that it isn't good enough, and the concept we chose in terms of UI, in terms of flow, isn't the right flow. We were already almost ready with a completely alternative UI version, a different concept, and something in me wasn't calm, I think it was actually the emotional connection to the product, and I continued digging together with the analyst, and in the end after about two weeks we managed to find some specific segment that didn't look right, a Voucher, free domain for one year, that was supposed to pop up in this flow, and the decline came from there, and once we changed this little thing at the no-code-change level we managed to flip the results, so like, users arrived, didn't find the thing that was promised to them — which is the voucher — and then they abandoned, right, right, and what's interesting is that it wasn't necessarily the biggest segment out of the test's audience, but it's the segment that had enough of an effect — small enough to fall in love with for two weeks. I think one of the things that were most fun there is that we reached it not through some rampage over the data and checking everything, but in an analytical way that in the end led us to understand the problem is probably there. We identified the segment where the decline comes from, we tried to raise hypotheses for why it could be that someone suddenly a very very specific segment, for no visible reason, doesn't add up, and on this hypothesis of probably something maybe pricing, or maybe purchasing ability, or maybe payment method, Apple Pay — suddenly we lifted some stone, and it was there. It was really such a eureka moment, of ah, this is where we expected it to be, here's the problem,

Eyal David: [23:59] that's it, it's amazing, like you really approached it — it's clear you approached this from the quantitative in order to isolate the segment, but from that moment like exactly you need to move to the qualitative, I think that's the thing I'd run to see, interesting when you did it that way. And another question I have, is you actually said we were invested in this feature for two weeks, then it wouldn't leave us alone, we invested another two weeks to investigate it, meaning a month, when we have during this period, there's already a UI ready — how did you manage on one hand to enlist that same same data scientist to continue investigating with you, and on the other hand actually to push back all the development, or whoever's waiting for the feature, like for work, for the two weeks — how was it?

Itai Nof: [24:41] So really Wix is an organization where the pipeline is large and full, and there's always the next feature they want to check, and in the areas I'm in it's also really probably potentially worth millions of dollars, so they push you, so that's true, I think here there was a process that from its start was very very collaborative, everyone was very very involved and onboarded, and knowledgeable about the insights we extracted around the problem, and on top of which the solution was built. People were very very involved, invested, and I think they believed in the solution, we approached this feature really in a festive way, I said Domain Concierge, it had a name, so you remembered to return to that, okay yes, so it had a name, it had a logo, we talked about it — to this day people turn to me in premium and like as a concierge — and I think the people were also emotionally — I also want to believe they were convinced in the solution, but also emotionally they wanted this thing to win, and that allowed pulling, you know, holding the sun in the sky one more hour, in order to, yeah, to enter this thing, and we had the luck or the ability to really find this thing. It could also have ended differently — there's the feature that could also end differently, you don't find it, you very much believe, you go back to the drawing board, and here fortunately, we succeeded, and it also — this new engine allowed us afterward to build on top of it a lot of new things we couldn't with the previous engine, and that's one of its advantages. So it seems to me that

Eyal David: [26:05] a few more things happened here — one, you probably have an amazing manager who gives you backing, totally. Two, it sounds like the drive of yours also allowed you to actually convince, actually with the team, actually about the fact that you continue, they believe in you, and also it's probably an area where, as you say, there are a lot of technical-debt tasks and such that in the meantime you can work on and they have a lot of impact — it's a kind of dance always, if you're a product manager, you need to dance this combined dance of advancing the business and generating progression, and also handling infrastructure, and the more your backlogs are suited to that then you can kind of really find what the team will work on while you continue testing hypotheses. And I really loved that you leverage efforts, Itay, so you described your learning process at Wix — can you describe what methodology you used?

Itai Nof: [26:53] Yes, so as I said, I myself am a gamer, I know it — one of the methodologies I brought with me from Designit is a methodology called The Four C's, essentially some four buckets that you approach the investigation of a new business field with. The Four C's are Customer, Company, Competitors and Category, which is more the broad industry in which the company operates, and first of all it's a methodology I like because it creates order in learning, you have only four buckets, you know what you're investigating, there's an organized brief around each of these categories, what the questions you want to ask are, and it already lets you reach some achievement of — a moment, I've mapped all the areas I want to map. So in Customer, naturally if we're a product, we look at the end user, whether through data or through interviews; in Company, we look at strengths and weaknesses, strategic advantages of the company. Company — that's my company? Right, the one I work at. Sometimes there are strategic advantages that stem from the structure, from the human capital, from the market they operate in, history, from technological assets; and Competitors is of course my competitors, direct and indirect, what they do; in Category it's really the industry I'm in, in a sense it's broader — for example a good example of that is Covid, what happened in Covid, Covid did a disruption to the entire online-presence market, it's a stage actually only for website builders — if you look only at website building, you might miss this thing and the wider implications, so that's the first stage in the methodology that I, when I entered Wix, naturally that's where I went, I created for myself a big Miro board like that with four quadrants, I started filling it, it helped me very very much to map the world and process the information, there was also a beginning and an end, and then the second stage is to try to synthesize between the different worlds that exist on the consumer, together with strengths of the company, together with the data on the competitors, and this allows generating a bit of insights that are new, they're not only descriptive — competitors or similar — but something that combines together with an insight about our consumer and with a unique capability the company has, you've already brought something new here that's actionable, you've won something good, there's some project to work on. I think in my first stages at Wix, it was very intuitive for me to work this way, and when I got a chance to share and expose this thing to my colleagues, then suddenly there was some interest in this thing, and only then I understood that it isn't necessarily trivial to approach learning this way, I very much enjoyed sharing it, meaning explaining to my colleagues how I use it, and today is it a methodology used at Wix? So no, not officially, and I can tell you that I too do it a bit more formally than before, but it's totally buckets that serve me in every challenge I arrive at and approach, trying to fill these buckets and think about what I know about each of these things. I think every challenge also has the adaptation of which of the buckets are relevant and which aren't, not always maybe all are relevant, but in new learning of a new field it's very very useful, because it maps the boundaries, and then you know where you operate, and consciously choose where to go deep and where not,

Eyal David: [30:05] it's really successful, thank you for sharing that. What now is your biggest challenge, it could be business, in the product, or like — I'm really curious, the place you're in today, because the reason I'm asking is, you actually became a product manager very young, very fast, from what I understand within two years you actually already jumped to leading teams, so what today is your biggest challenge? I think if I look a moment

Itai Nof: [30:29] at the group level, then we, as mentioned, really sit at this junction of monetization at Wix, and Wix is a large and fast organization, and the scale is larger than ever, the amount of offerings living at Wix, the amount of segments we serve, just keeps growing, I think that, you know, think — B2C, B2B — it already really challenges a lot of the existing flows, whether it's you know, a B2C user who wants to open a shoe store, comes, has a credit card in his pocket, buys premium and proceeds, a B2B user which is now whatever, some conglomerate retailer that wants to open two hundred-something pages, whoever builds the sites there isn't walking around with a corporate credit card, they pay at the end of the month, the flow isn't suited to this thing, so this growth both in offerings and in segments breaks or at least challenges a lot of basic assumptions. I think the group, one of its challenges is to preserve the growth engine that's proven and exists and works, and every percent of optimization in it is worth a lot of money, alongside constantly nurturing our platform, our ability to onboard more verticals and more offering fast, to enable a fast go-to-market to test hypotheses and validate them, and it's a kind of dance that sometimes is in contradiction, because if you have an opportunity of a million dollars, two million dollars, you certainly want to take a bite of it, but when it comes at the expense of platformization that will allow you next time and in half the time, there's already a dilemma. I think that's one of our biggest challenges, and also now all this challenges us as a group and challenges the product managers, how every feature you release has both of these in it, how you kind of, I'll say, steal platformization and infrastructure improvement

Eyal David: [32:11] in every step forward you take, yeah, it's completely parallel, wow, and probably your background, really the strategic one, really comes into expression — the ability or at least the aspiration to think in vision, to think ahead where I want to be in another X, even though you don't know what this X is, is a very important tool in the product managers' toolbox, because the day-to-day is draining, you can perform a series of 300 optimizations, each pulling the blanket in a different direction; if you manage to synchronize these 300 optimizations in one coherent direction, that there's some good synergetic value here, then — we're already close to wrapping up, it was really fascinating. Do you have any recommendations for product managers?

Itai Nof: [32:55] I think a product manager is a creature that needs to be the world champion in learning, even if you're in the same product area, our users change all the time, technology changes all the time, your team changes all the time. I think a good product manager, whether he's a beginner or whether he's a veteran, needs to be a sponge of ideas and new learnings, and to generate some routine that allows you to be exposed to new ideas, whether it's reading in various places the thought leaders you follow — and that by the way can be within the organization, the whole team parallel to you, the person you know is an expert in something, learning from him and trying to challenge your way of thinking, and really to understand that the more, as a product manager, you're exposed to more ideas and more thinking outside the box, you'll manage to challenge your product and your current way of working. What routine works for you? So I try to read a ton on Medium, thought leaders of one kind or another in the product world, Marty Cagan and associates, to get to know what competing companies do, what new business models, what new trends lead our competitors, and bring that to the conversation within the team, I said earlier, I'm not ashamed to propose the worst idea in the room, ever, and sometimes to come from home armed with some crazy idea like why don't we do this and that — it ends in a completely different idea but it generates

Eyal David: [34:29] some disruptive conversation in the organization. Amazing. Tell me, and you mentioned it earlier too, I have to ask — you mentioned competitors,

Itai Nof: [34:35] so the specific competitors in your domain are? Wix has a few types of competitors, there are now on website building platforms that are really direct competitors, Weebly, Shopify, Squarespace and so on, and there are, because Wix operates in tons and tons of industries and verticals, there are also competitors that are specific — competitors that are only in the restaurants world or only in the bookings world,

Eyal David: [34:59] yeah, Shopify too is probably specific to e-com, right, actually it's very very specific, and there's

Itai Nof: [35:05] a challenge all the time to balance how you compete with these players, because you can't be the world champion in everything, because it comes at some price, you need to try to identify all the time the segments that are growing, relevant, and what's the minimal competitive offering you need to have in this world, and we investigate all the time both these worlds and those worlds, both direct competitors and vertical-specific competitors. Think that as premium — what is a premium plan, a collection of about 90 features that you get eligibility to on your site. Now the features — what are these 90 features — some belong to e-com, some to restaurants, some to the site's performance, some to storage, and we as the ones who manage this offering together with our partners in marketing need to be mini-experts in everything, to know what it means to be competitive in e-com, some learning process all the time, you find yourself like, you know, learning some feature that isn't your product but you understand for all kinds of reasons that it's important, important, business-wise, and it can have very very significant impact, so we're very kind of spread across a lot of fields of knowledge within Wix and touch everything, that's it, so it's quite a learning process, really curious, and there's also AI entering here and also

Eyal David: [36:23] it's also a kind of competition — if until today it was terribly complicated to build a site, it's becoming terribly easy, you also integrated it into the product, it's maybe a topic for another conversation, actually terribly terribly curious, yeah, not sure I'm the most relevant at Wix

Itai Nof: [36:35] to talk about it, but I'd be happy to learn a lot, cool, so we'll talk about that too,

Eyal David: [36:41] amazing, I had a terribly terribly fun time. Itay, thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. Bye for now, bye bye.