Transcript: Netanel Mor | Papaya | We took the Bingo out of Bingo, and then it exploded

Meet Netanel and Papaya

Eyal David: [00:01] Hi, Netanel, how's it going? All good, Eyal, great to be here. Yes, absolutely. Maybe we'll also mention that, you live in a place where something also fell yesterday, right? It was lively. We won't reveal too much, we'll keep the episode a bit evergreen. So let's just say you come from Papaya, you're a product lead. Come on, tell us a little about Papaya.

Netanel Mor: [00:28] So Papaya is in the world of skill-based games. The company was founded a few years ago by its three founders, and unlike what we usually know from the various mobile gaming worlds, casual, hyper-casual, social casino, Playtika, you name it, your ability to win a prize or win the specific challenge or tournament is skill-based. You play against players matched to your skill level, and Papaya does that excellently with the match-making we do in-house. And you can win a prize if you beat a player who gets the same conditions as you, the same conditions, the same board, the same everything. Can you give me an example of some games that... Sure. So first of all, Papaya's portfolio has three main games: Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash and Bubble Cash. We also have a division that works on new games all the time, and whenever a new game catches on, hopefully it'll grow too. Solitaire is just what it sounds like, classic solitaire, where users need to stack cards, and whoever does it fastest wins the tournament. Bingo isn't classic bingo, it's five-by-five bingo, where balls drop and you need to do what's called a daub on the numbers themselves. And whoever does it faster and uses the specific, unique power-ups we have finishes the tournament with more points. And Bubble is popping bubbles, the classic thing we all know.

The three main games: Solitaire, Bingo, Bubble

Eyal David: [02:05] Tell me, and actually, remind me, you know, you came from the gaming industry, so how did you actually end up at Papaya? So I started my romance with gaming at Playtika,

From Playtika to Papaya: a romance with gaming

Netanel Mor: [02:18] like many others, and I really have a good word to say about that place, it was a great school for getting into the gaming world, and a really excellent period. I was at Playtika for three years on Slotomania as a product manager, and before that I was at a bunch of other companies, but not in gaming. So I really entered the gaming world at Playtika. So that's it, and you didn't say excellent period for nothing, a lot of water has flowed down the gaming river,

Eyal David: [02:43] Tell us a bit about the current period, what's different since you came in?

The skill-based games trend across all genres

Netanel Mor: [02:48] So I think one of the main trends we see is really moving in this direction of skill-based games, and we see it not only at Papaya, which was really one of the pioneers that went into it. Lots and lots of companies are doing it today, instead of relying only on classic casual or on the things we know mainly from Playtika, which are actually things we see less of today. So there really is a shift into skill-based games. Across all genres, whatever they are, it doesn't matter which game, it's about finding that niche of how it will actually be skill-based, and bringing players to play against each other on equal terms.

Eyal David: [03:29] So we really see a lot of companies getting into this today. Look, a lot of other things have changed regardless, right? Today it's much more challenging to acquire a customer,

How CAC changed and why retention became the battle

Netanel Mor: [03:37] to keep them. Do you want to expand on that a bit? Sure. I think one of the main things, when I got to Playtika, the talk was that Playtika was founded somewhere a decade, a decade and a half ago, when acquiring a user cost roughly a few cents. Today we're talking about a completely different world. User acquisition has become much more expensive, and the ability to bring in a quality user who stays with you over time is much, much harder, both because of the changes happening in the industry in general, and also think about yourself, about my ability to capture your attention on the device. I'm not competing today only against other games, I'm competing against Netflix, I'm competing with Disney Plus, I'm competing with lots of other things. So the ability to bring in a good user who stays with me over time is very, very hard and very expensive. So there are, I'd say, roughly two arrows I can draw from this. The first arrow is to work closely with marketing, so that any content we release, especially in public IP worlds, which I assume we'll get to later in the episode, is also reflected in the marketing campaign, and a user who comes from the campaign sees that thing as they download the game. And on the other side, how I deal with long-term retention, to really keep quality users for a long time. Yes, these really are problems of, it's not only in gaming, right?

Eyal David: [05:05] I want to make a shift for a second before we continue. Something else happened, AI also happened in the world, right? On one hand, I assume it's easier for you to run, create content, do things, he's talking about it, but

AI lowers the barrier to entry, but distribution is still nearly impossible

Netanel Mor: [05:19] it's also seemingly easier for competitors to spring up, right? Totally. So first of all, things we see today, both as product on my side and with others, colleagues and so on: the ability to run a POC is much, much faster, the ability to develop something yourself is much, much faster. You, we're no longer talking in terms of a studio with hundreds of employees now to get this machine moving and launch a game. Sometimes it's a one-man show with AI capabilities that can create a game for you, even if it's at the PAC, POC, sorry, level, which is, let's say, shallower, but in the end you ship a game much faster, and then your competition gets harder. So we're definitely seeing that. Like, but they don't really stand a chance, right? I have friends who are doing exactly that now,

Eyal David: [06:09] who went in the direction of starting to make games. It's complicated, beyond the fact that it's really super easy, you get to a result very quickly,

Netanel Mor: [06:17] it's very hard to distribute. Very hard, very. I also have a few friends who did it, people I knew from Papaya who left and are trying, other people too, and I always, always see it. Very hard, really very hard in this world, even for people who are already well-funded, and startups that already succeeded and are trying, for example, people who succeeded with casual games and are now trying to come into the skill world. Very hard. It's absolutely a red ocean, and if you don't bring your uniqueness, and a lot of luck too, let's say, then

Eyal David: [06:52] it's hard. Really. I also thought about another thing, about the AI you mentioned. You listed Netflix and other places where you can spend your time, also LLMs, like, now in ChatGPT or in Claude I can spend my time, and that also actually competes for your slot. Right. Tell me, how is it in terms of, I think it's very unproductive, but how is it in terms of exposure in general? Do you know where you're working towards? What do I mean? Let me explain exactly. Suddenly you're not, it's already an old world, people don't look for you only in the store or only on Google, right? Right. What are you doing in those areas?

Not just Netflix: what we compete with for attention

Netanel Mor: [07:30] Honestly, that's something I can expand on less, specifically that topic, so more about classic marketing, to keep expanding, like.

Eyal David: [07:40] Inside the product, but you also do things, no? Like, to actually bring in more customers and users, what does it look like?

Netanel Mor: [07:48] So inside the product we have all kinds of things we're trying to expand into. By the way, one of the things we really want to try is bringing users from one game to another, for example, to really broaden our user base. If I'm targeting you as a player, tell him, maybe, and even though players differ by nature, maybe I really could also get you to play Solitaire. So from within the Bingo game itself, knowing how to bring you to Solitaire too. There's also a risk of cannibalization and so on, but looking at it as a whole Papaya ecosystem, and that's one of the things we want to do too. Like, Duolingo did that very well.

Duolingo, Netflix and the inspiration for a competition platform

Eyal David: [08:29] They converted me to aspire to Portuguese. They did it very well. Right, exactly, exactly that. Tell me, who are you really looking at? Say, just, I said Duolingo, who else do you look at as, you know, a source of inspiration?

Netanel Mor: [08:45] So I think in the end we want to really be one of the biggest competition platforms out there, not necessarily as one game or another. By the way, just now we had the World Solitaire Championship, imagine something like the WSOP of poker, it was in Miami just now. We flew a few hundred players to it, really to build that community. So in the end we look at every platform that leads its field, whether it's Netflix in its entertainment world or elsewhere, and we want to get there. In the end, to create that competition platform on which we can layer a lot of things, and not only from the specific perspective of a game.

The story of the kids who switched to Netflix games

Eyal David: [09:32] Something else suddenly came up for me, you know, you said Netflix not by chance, because Netflix is saying, add games to their suite, right? What does it look like? Can you tell us about it?

Netanel Mor: [09:39] Totally, totally. Netflix understands who its audience is, and understands, you know, I'll even give you an example. We hosted on Friday, now, you know, with the war with Iran and so on, you don't go out much, so on Friday evening we hosted friends, and they came with their two kids, and they're our friends, theirs and my kids', and we put on some movie for them, okay? Zootopia on Disney. And suddenly we realize they'd switched to playing a game, like on Netflix, with the remote. And then I understand that Netflix, or any other platform, knows exactly who its audience is, and they know they can convert them to supply games, because in the end you want them on your platform as long as possible, staying with you as long as possible in the subscription. So Netflix knows how to do that very well, take its audience, see exactly what your organs are, and send you to a game that might suit you. Because the games they showed my kid, playing on his profile, aren't GTA, they're just, they're games like "go build" and that kind of thing, all sorts of things like that.

Eyal David: [10:45] So that's totally the respected heavyweight there. And how was it, tell me, since you opened this, did he kind of get hooked there? Like, did they pick a good game that actually kept them, or did they go back to the movie?

Netanel Mor: [10:55] So they picked a game, and they didn't go back to the movie, which is what's amazing. Which is what's amazing. And after that I remember my kid got up in the morning, it was Saturday morning, and he said, I want to play on the TV.

Eyal David: [11:08] Wow. So how can you, tell me, how can you win against something like that? Because if on the phone, people play your games both on the phone and on the TV, for that matter,

Netanel Mor: [11:16] and it's an audience that gets worn out, how do you win against something like that? So here it's exactly what we said before, your ability to bring in a quality user and keep them over time, and that's very, very, very content-dependent and, honestly, about how interesting your game is. If the game, your core game, isn't interesting, the user will abandon you. And we see it, and we also see it in the changes that happened in Bingo when I took on the role, changing the core game. We really did it there, we changed the status quo in that sense, and how that brought in quality users and kept them over time.

Lessons from gaming you can apply to any product

Eyal David: [11:52] Yes, so come on, I suggest we really move to the topic we tried to cover in this episode: bringing lessons or insights you learned from gaming that we can apply to products to increase engagement, to lower CAC.

Netanel Mor: [12:08] So you prepared a few things, right? Where do you want to start? Right, so I'd like to start with what I think was the strongest thing for us, specifically in Bingo, and that's using public IP, or using IPs and brands in general. That's one of the strongest things we have today, and within the monetization calendar, not a day goes by when you don't see it as part of the game. So what happened is that when I took on the role, at the start, when I joined Papaya to actually set up the product department for Bingo, we thought hard about how we deepen the core game itself, how we make it more interesting, how we make it much more diverse, both to bring in a new audience of customers and to keep them longer, and in the end my north star is that you play more and with more money. And after I looked at competitors, and also research and in-depth interviews with players and focus groups and you name it, the understanding emerged that we needed something here, you know, speaking our everyday language, something fairytale-like, a fairytale theme, or whatever you want to call it. A bit about our players' demographics, by the way: mainly female players, over 60% are women, 40-45 plus, US. So we understood the potential, and I started by understanding who our audience is. Once I understood that, plus the competitor research we did, I understood I wanted to go into the world of bringing characters into the game, and if I brought in a character that's familiar, apropos Disney and what we talked about, it would be the strongest thing. And that's really where we got to: public IP that's allowed to be used, Alice in Wonderland, the strongest feature we've shipped, changed the core game. What I actually did, and it really was changing the status quo in that sense, was to take the bingo out of the game and leave no bingo, so that your end game is doing all kinds of things inside the game itself that aren't necessarily bingo. And it exploded, it was an insane success, and from there we also did Oz, and now we're doing a few more things,

Public IP: how Alice in Wonderland changed everything

Eyal David: [14:31] so it's really something that works very, very strongly. So what you're actually saying is, first, you went to public IP, beyond it being free, if I understand, right? Right, right. It's to start from a place that's actually a camp everyone knows, easier to connect to, and you don't need to start getting to know something new. Very interesting. And what does it actually mean to take out, because your goal was to keep them in the app, no matter by what, as long as possible. What does it actually mean to take out the bingo, so what did you do? Did you let them assemble the Alice character? What did you do? Almost, almost. So first of all, in our game,

Taking the Bingo out of Bingo: changing the status quo

Netanel Mor: [15:10] numbers come up and you tap the numbers, and then you complete rows and can tap bingo, and you get a score for each bingo, and whoever does it fastest would win. So here I actually took out this thing called bingo. You don't need to make bingos anymore, the numbers disappear when you tap them, it doesn't really matter, and your goal is to bring Alice to all kinds of different destinations within the board itself, to bring her there. We wrapped it in a theme and all kinds of things related to her story. It could be a puzzle you assemble, it could be a hidden object on the screen itself, it's lots of game modes we have that are now in the game. And my goal in the end was, I want to create interest for you. You talked about it, you mentioned it, the wow effect, and that's also, by the way, not only in gaming, I think anywhere I'd be now, I'd do this. Create that wow effect inside my product, inside the core itself, so the user feels what they're getting is unique, that it grabs them, that it grabs a broad audience, like you said, specifically, a theme that's very, very familiar. And it was simply interesting, it was simply interesting, and users responded to it excellently.

Understanding what the audience really wants (the Playtika secret)

Eyal David: [16:23] What you're saying is, you started very broad, again, with something very familiar with pearls, and then you made users actually invested in it, by having them customize it one way or another, or they also accumulated, probably, through scoring, and then you actually give them that place of their own. So we started, again, with something very broad, that would be easy to market and also to enter later in the funnel, and then actually stay engaged within the funnel, because I'm actually invested in the event. Tell me another thing, I'm going back a second, you said, and it really interested me, that you did the user interviews, and then you used the word fairytale, I understood it needed to be something fairytale-like.

Netanel Mor: [16:58] How did you understand that exactly? So, and here again, a good word for Playtika, which, you know, was a school that guided me and prepared me on how to talk and how to get to know and how and so on. In conversations with our players and in focus groups and surveys and so on, it's really important for me to ask: what do you love, what drives you? Forget the game for a moment, forget Bingo, Solitaire or Bubble now, what do you do in your daily life? And then we really understood the kinds of things they do. Other games they enjoy. I ask them about Christmas, when you celebrate with the family, I do things on purpose, I ask the questions that steer me to understand who my player is. And you see that what comes up is watching movies and watching old classics. Classic is a word that came up many times, and that steered me to the world of, okay, who needs to be given something here that they know, something magical, something that... The example of my kids opening and watching Disney, and it's that familiar brand, or whatever, or a family watching something, that's where I want to be. And it doesn't matter if it's a Papaya game or another product in another industry, that's the wow effect I wanted to create.

How to measure a WOW moment (in short intervals)

Eyal David: [18:12] Excellent. You're actually also saying that especially at these ages, nostalgia sells. Tell me, how do you measure a wow moment?

Netanel Mor: [18:20] How do you know you're really turning something into a wow moment? So first of all, in the numbers, okay? We're B2C, we're gaming, you see the numbers in a second, and that's one of the things I personally am most motivated by and enjoy the most,

Eyal David: [18:35] that what you ship is in short intervals in your ability to measure it. So let me be precise, sorry for interrupting, let me be precise. How do you plan a wow moment?

Netanel Mor: [18:45] So the way I plan it, first of all, it really, really depends on how I'm planning the feature and what we're talking about, whether it's a standalone game mode or one also wrapped in a live layer or a layer on top, and it really depends on how many days and so on. But in the end, once that content goes live in the game, I want to see my game metrics explode. I want to see users playing more sessions, I want to see them putting more money into it, that they're willing to enter more expensive tournaments. I want to see crazy buzz across our whole community, both on Facebook and inside the game itself.

Eyal David: [19:20] So across all those things, in the end, I measure whether it's wow or not. That's it, those are measurements. Excellent. But take me through planning those. Say I now want to plan a wow moment in my product. I did research, I sat with lots of grandmothers from Nashville, I don't know, I'm joking, but I sat with them, I really started interviewing them, I managed to come up with a moment I want to deliver, or a feature I want to deliver. Okay, how do I plan such a wow moment? How do I know in advance that I'm going to deliver that wow moment, and how do I even approach it?

Netanel Mor: [19:53] Okay, so let's go through how we actually did it specifically at Papaya and Bingo, because it was a long road. So that wow doesn't come in one day, okay? And as a product person, and as I tell my product managers, you need to plan the product, the MVP, correctly, so the time to market gets shorter, and see that we're casting the line and really hitting something, and continuing from there. So I split that wow moment into several moments. The first thing is to understand that if I change something inside my game, inside Bingo, it succeeds. We continued with me bringing in some character. My first feature ever at Papaya was Bunny Trail, it's a rabbit that kind of walks inside the game itself, something very fast, I shipped it within two sprints. Once I saw the feedback was positive and the metrics went up, I understood I needed to go toward something that's multi-task within the board itself, and also combine public IP and legal and so on and all those things. So that's actually the planning: understanding that I'm heading to a certain place, that I put it into the game and it'll work for me, as a POC for a moment, as an MVP, to see that I'm even there. Once that succeeded, I thicken it with public IP, with a theme that's very, very magical, with something much more complex. And all of this, by the way, I wrap in a usage plan with monetization, with marketing, with all the layers we actually have in the organization, to create that wow effect. And that's videos marketing prepares for me, and you name it, everything really. But at the start, when you're still sampling the hypothesis, you're not doing that yet, Nati, if I understand. No, no, no, no, no. I'm still really not doing that, and that's really one of the things I always try hard to teach young product managers, which I myself was guilty of early in my career,

How to plan a WOW: from Bunny Trail to a full theme

Eyal David: [21:42] not to build the biggest monster right at the start. Excellent. Now let's go, I know you have all kinds of other things you planned, but let's go for a second to magic moments. So let's stick for a second with the tutorial or... you know, a successful onboarding, right? That's always the thing. For you too, you told me before that, that's the biggest drop. Right. Take me there, how do you plan a successful onboarding or tutorial? So one of the things we want to create right at the start

Onboarding that works: "I know it" vs. "Guide me"

Netanel Mor: [22:13] is to give you the hook, so that once you've downloaded the game, and marketing did their job wonderfully, I get you to stay in the game in the first minutes, the first hours, the first day and so on. And so, and by the way, here too this applies not only to gaming, to any product you ship, it could be a SaaS product, it could be, it doesn't matter what, apropos Netflix and so on. So we actually want to create the most precise tutorial possible for our player. In our world specifically, the way we planned it is to make it relatively short and not too tedious, because in the end it's bingo, you're not creating something from scratch here. People know bingo? Getting to know it in a relatively quick way. By the way, one of the successful tests we ran in Solitaire was to let users actually choose: I know it, or guide me through, something like that. And we really saw that users who know it go to the faster funnel and convert faster, and whoever needs the help chooses that. So that's one thing. Creating rising difficulty, really in level design: in the first levels, a board, for example, that's easier to solve. That's also a test we ran and saw it did really, really well. You get an easier board and then you solve it, and from there you continue to something harder with rising difficulty, and so on and so on, up to the point where we expose all the content to the user in the first days.

Eyal David: [23:40] How do you measure the beginning, the first period? You have, I remember, we started from day one and there's the first session, how does it work?

Netanel Mor: [23:51] So actually how we measure, and that was really one of the first things we started doing, is you look at the funnel right from the moment of the user's install, at the first session they get, the third session, the fourth, after day 0: what's my ability to keep you on that specific day of the install. Day 1: did you come back tomorrow? And here I'll need to create a hook with the content I'll expose to you in the future, which will be very interesting, by the way, apropos all the themes we brought in, and Alice comes into the picture here, to say, here, come back tomorrow and the day after, you'll have something interesting. Into day 2, day 4, day 7, day 30, day 60, and after that deep, deep into months ahead. And we also started talking, you probably prepared other things, if not, we'll continue. Did you prepare something else you want to ask? No, it's fine, I want us to continue.

AI in gaming: 250K personalized segments

Eyal David: [24:46] Perfectly fine. And we actually started thinking, I asked you how you use AI today, how in your view it can come into play and improve your efficiency, but also the game experience, or games in general? Yes.

Netanel Mor: [25:01] So as we're all experiencing, AI is really creating a revolution here, alongside a lot of fears, but also opportunities. So what I, as, expect from myself, first I'll talk about our daily use of AI, and what I expect from myself as a product manager, or what I expect from my product managers. You know, Nati, I'll stop you for a second before that. Sure.

Eyal David: [25:27] You, as, you play a lot, right? I'm guessing. Yes. What do you play? Everything, everything of everything. Okay. How would you expect AI to catapult this industry forward? Again, you probably play completely different games, but what would you expect to happen?

Netanel Mor: [25:44] I think in the end, a lot of new content opening up, much, much, much, much more content, because there's a difficulty in producing, you know, new content all the time. You have art capacity and development capacity. So if I open the game, in our Bingo say, and you have new content every month, as far as I'm concerned, new content every day, every half day, because it's AI, and that's what it produces for you. Much more precision at the economy level too. If I'm an economist now, you have a game economist, he has a certain capacity, he splits it into segments for you, okay? Eyal is in a high segment, he's a whale, fine, you go into one segment, I go into another segment. AI that creates 250,000 segments for me, at the highest possible precision, what do I care, AI is doing it.

Eyal David: [26:30] So in those worlds. So you're saying content as unique and personal as possible, and in heaps. And in heaps. Interesting.

Netanel Mor: [26:40] Okay, excellent. So tell us a bit about what you're doing. No, I'm saying, and also, like, in heaps isn't necessarily always good, but those heaps, the AI will know how to keep for you what's really relevant. So like, that's what closes the loop. Now I can talk a bit about, like, I don't know, so we talked about how we as product managers use it. Yalla, run with it, run. So yes, AI is really grabbing all of us and you can't escape it, it's really creating a lot of buzz and a lot of things, and also a lot of fears and a lot of opportunities. I can say that as someone who works in product management, I really see it as an opportunity, and that's what we do day to day at Papaya too. What I expect from myself, as a product manager, and from those under me, all my product managers, is to widen the shot, to actually widen that umbrella of yours as a product manager using AI tools, to do more in less time. Which means day to day, if you have AI tools you use, your ability to create a PRD much faster and at higher volumes, and you teach, doesn't matter if you're in Gemini or in Chat or whatever, and your ability to generate a PRD in the end, because in the end it's all on the same template, much, much faster. If once we'd take, I don't know, take two weeks to do a concept design and so on, it needs to be faster. Your ability to write all the storylines, all the copy inside the game itself, that's something you as a product manager can do, you no longer need someone for it. Your ability to do research and deep research, you need to be careful here, because you need to make it precise and so on, but the ability to run fast on it. Lots of conclusions, lots of insights, use within the company itself of tools we're rolling out, we have all kinds of POCs on it, a product manager's ability to query data, without necessarily knowing SQL, without necessarily coming from the data world proper. So I expect us to do many more things in less time, and much more precisely and personally.

How Netanel and his team use AI in day-to-day product management

Eyal David: [28:49] And that's why I see it as an opportunity, certainly for the product management world. Exactly. Tell me, and what does it look like with planning processes with AI? Like, you can load it with all your data, remote data you have and others don't, right?

Netanel Mor: [29:02] Right. And make more informed decisions, what does that look like? Totally. Yes, so we're in the middle of a lot of processes, and we also have a team that was set up to deal specifically with this, and there are lots of small things we're now trying to bring in, and lots of automations, and many of the things we're planning will really be done through it. And in the end, drawing conclusions based on all this huge data we have, again, to bring you to a more personal, more precise place,

Eyal David: [29:32] on things we're working on. The wow moments you talked about, what you're actually saying is that with AI it'll be much easier to create wow moments, at the end of the day.

Netanel Mor: [29:39] Totally, totally, exactly. Think about the amount of knowledge we have, how well I know my player, and I know how they react to every post I've ever published,

Eyal David: [29:49] where it can take me at the level of personalization and the level of content. Absolutely, but it also means that if I'm developing some product today, again, let's step out of gaming for a second, I don't need that much data, I don't need the amount of data you have, to catch on my hook magic moments I can weave into the app, because I can consult, because I can bring best practices, because I can bring some kind of psychological data, and that's a really interesting direction to go in. Cool. Okay, Nati, we're really getting close to the end here. Tell us what else you do besides being a product person and dodging missiles?

Mentoring at ADPList and Mesayaim

Netanel Mor: [30:27] Just kidding. I'm stopping for a second, in terms of how you present me and that, to talk about it, or leave it and go to "the mentors" and so on?

Eyal David: [30:34] Go for it. Go to "the mentors," Tomer.

Netanel Mor: [30:39] So yes, besides my work at Papaya, where today I actually manage the three games, the product itself across our three games in Papaya's portfolio, I also accompany and mentor product managers at the start of their careers, and prepare people for how to get into product management. So you can find me on LinkedIn and on other platforms, like techgenet, adplist.org and so on. I also volunteer at Mesayaim Tech, for reservists, one of the more meaningful things I get to do, and that's really preparing people who want to get into product management, we know many want to, preparing them for job interviews, working with them on home assignments, actually learning the language of what it means to be a product manager. And that's it, I'm happy to be with my people and see them progress, and some have found jobs, so that's amazing in that sense.

Eyal David: [31:38] What you're saying, can you tell us a bit about them? Sure. So honestly, they really come,

Netanel Mor: [31:46] and I think we all know this, because many want to be product managers, really from every discipline in the organization. Lots of people from the data world, lots of people from development, lots of people from customer success, and I think each one really has their own advantage, and that's what I really try to work on with them, because a product manager, under their umbrella, actually needs to have that set of capabilities to really succeed. So each one, whether you're a data person or you're from development, having worked as a developer, you'll know that best, really refining those things with them and bringing it to the fore both in the job interview and in the process they go through with the organization. And many times, people inside the organization itself who want to move into product management, so how do you take on a project? How do you take that initiative? You initiate something you actually move forward with, you show end-to-end ownership to your managers,

Eyal David: [32:45] so that you can come and compete for a product management position, that's something I also do with a lot of people at Papaya. Tell me, and I think you also interview a lot, I don't know what it's looked like here in the last year, how much has the job interview in this field changed in the last year? Or has it not changed at all?

How to interview product managers in the AI era

Netanel Mor: [33:03] So honestly, the methods are the same methods. It's very, very important, in everything related to the home assignment and the more technical things, to see the candidate. Sometimes, many times, I pretty much toss that aside, because of all the AI tools, apropos AI. Even though you can see, you can kind of smell who's using it and who isn't, and it's totally fine to use it, but copy-paste is less fine. So I even, for a second, toss it aside, and really in interviews I take out the phone, open the game, let them play, it loads, and I tell them: what would you do now, what would you change, what do you think works less well, here's a feature we just launched, what do you think, what not to improve, what yes. And I think you really, really see who's in front of you and how they react to it. Again, because of the AI world, your ability to give answers when you're at home has grown significantly, which is great, but I want to really see how the person thinks. And what are you going to look for there? Well, that's the question of questions with product managers. I think in gaming specifically I want to see creativity, I want to see inventiveness, a person who thinks outside the box, because probably if I ask which feature you'd put in, or what isn't working, I've already heard every answer in the world. So it's really, really important to me how a person thinks outside the box, how they bring creativity, that extra mile in that sense. And users who I recognize it in... users, okay, in the end probably users too. You see what it already is. And candidates I recognize it in, that's where a light bulb goes on for me.

What to look for in an interview: creativity and WOW

Eyal David: [34:36] Excellent. Okay, I think that's really the most interesting muscle right now. Totally. Cool, Nati. Okay, so you already gave it, you said to reach out to you, so we can even, we'll just put a link. Excellent. I had fun, and thank you very much. Thank you. That's it, and as I said, we'll leave a link, and thank you very much. Yalla, bye bye.

Netanel Mor: [34:57] Thanks, yalla bye. Thank you very much.