Transcript: Oriel Raveh | Tippingpoint | How to Understand the Emotion That Drives Your User

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi, this is Eyal, welcome to Product Builder, the home of the most interesting product conversations. I'm the owner of UserFlowzz and, among other things, the host of this podcast, and my goal here is for us to improve our product skills together. If this is your first time here, I hope you enjoy it, and if you've already listened and gotten value, I'd really appreciate it if you shared the podcast with a friend. So let's get started. Oriel, how are you? Doing great. Oriel, how are you? I'm doing great, and I'm really glad you came to us. Happy to be here. With us is Oriel, a co-founder at Tippingpoint, and you also lecture on product and entrepreneurship. Also lecturing on product and entrepreneurship. So give us a few sentences, who are you?

Who is Oriel, and the product skills that matter most

Oriel Raveh: [00:43] A bit about the journey. I'm Oriel, by training I'm an industrial engineer, specializing in information systems, project management and international marketing. In my background, I've founded quite a few ventures so far, some succeeded more, some failed spectacularly. Beyond that, I've held four VP Product roles at different companies. My passion really is the world of product management, it's what I'm, so to speak, drawn to, and it was born along the way in my career. And today I'm a co-founder at a company called Tippingpoint. We support tech companies in growth stages, and traditional companies, helping them improve existing processes inside the company, build systems, let's call them habit-based systems, and a bit of technology here and there where needed. All of it, in the end, to improve the bottom line. In parallel, I also lecture on product management and entrepreneurship in all kinds of frameworks. Gorgeous. So tell me, from this journey you've made, what are, in your eyes, the most important product skills for product people? So, I think there are several things. I think the first thing is really the ability to listen, or to listen in a genuine way. The goal in listening is, as we talked about a bit earlier here in the hallway, listening is an active action. Even though it sometimes sounds like a passive action, it's really an active one. The second part, I think, is the ability, really, emotional intelligence of one kind or another, the ability to empathize with the feelings of that customer I have, that potential customer, potential user. That ability of mine is what will help me understand his actions too, his needs and so on. By the way, those same two abilities will also help me later to deliver the thing, to do good execution and turn a vision into reality. Beyond that, I think also frontal skills and sales skills, because in the end you need to sell that idea you have, whether it's to the development team working with you, and also to be able to sell it inside the company to all sorts of stakeholders.

Eyal David: [02:37] And for those who don't remember, Oriel, you were mentioned, I remember, in the episode with Gal Bendek from Elementor. Okay. We'll put a link there too. Great guy, Gal. Yes. So you basically gave us an opening on what the important things are, I agree with everything you said, and we're basically going to condense a lecture you give. Let's give the title.

The lecture: how to crack success, and the Woofy story

Oriel Raveh: [02:56] So the title we gave it took a number of iterations, like any good product, and it's really this topic of how you crack success, what are the secret tools of a good product manager. The idea behind this lecture was basically that I needed to deliver, let's call it, the bread and butter of product management, in a short time, to people who don't necessarily have a product background, or are now doing the full training, or alternatively are doing one role or another. And we said, okay, let's really focus on mindset, on things that aren't, let's call them, mathematical, they're not less analytical, they're actually more, in my eyes, I like to define it as a kind of art in product management. It's not really an art, but it's a bit like that. So basically, why should anyone listen to us at all? What's actually interesting in the lecture? I really love that question, because it's the question I open every lecture with. I think the reason to listen to a lecture like this is that in a very short time you'll get the unwritten science, the art behind product management, the ability to crack the set of capabilities you need to have in order to really crack how you create a product that becomes oxygen for our users. And also because you're going to see examples of spectacular failures. And that's always my favorite. Gorgeous. So where does it actually start? Honestly, it all started when I began working on a venture we built back in 2013. A venture that started in one direction, like every good venture, from one idea, and pivoted into a different domain. Somehow it actually rolled into the world of dog owners, by the way, a company that was called Woofy at the time. We basically made monthly boxes for dog owners that contained all kinds of goodies a dog owner needs beyond food. And this product started, like every good story, literally in a garage. Did you have a dog at that point in time? I had a dog, I've had dogs my whole life, I raised dogs, but sure, I had a dog, a dog I adopted, amazing, he's still with me to this day, his name is Melech, by the way, funny story. And this company started really fake it till you make it. We made some landing page that, when I look at it today, I'm genuinely embarrassed by, which basically means we launched at the right time. And behind the landing page there was nothing, really nothing at all. We hadn't yet, we said let's see if people sign up for the service, and it started to grow and grow and double and triple itself month over month. And we worked bootstrapped, meaning there wasn't really funding behind it, and that puts you with your back to the wall, you have to be very, very creative. We started doing tons of ideas, this idea, a few iterations here, iterations there,

Eyal David: [05:34] we changed, there were lots of things that didn't work. So let's maybe say in one sentence what the product actually was, the initial idea, what need it answered?

Woofy: a progress bar that looked like buttons, 2% complaints and "hi to the dog"

Oriel Raveh: [05:41] Yes, so the need it answered was basically a monthly box for a dog owner with everything you need beyond food. Of course it's a foot in the door, meaning you're already there, so I'll bring you the food too, and the minimum. I'm just looking at a picture here of the truck with all the goodies. So it was really like that, it was a box with treats inside, toys, and really variety every month, there was something different. We had people who were real experts at building customized boxes for dogs, we had a dog trainer in the company, and so on. Um... the company, I think it was really the best lesson I had in my career, not the best, but one of the best I've had in my career. And really, I learned a ton there, there were many things I did, and, as they say, in hindsight I started to investigate and understand, okay, why did this work? We were very creative, mainly because we had no funding, so you can't be super, you can't do whatever you want, and actually sometimes, in my eyes, that's a good thing. So give an example of things you learned. Um... so first of all, on the website there were lots of things. When we built the site and designed it, it really wasn't a website, it was a system. Meaning, behind our website, whose goal in the end was to get you to enter details and collect the... and create a user for yourself, behind it there was a real personal area, called the Doghouse. Behind it there was a CRM that we literally wrote ourselves, connected to a picking system that was supposed to work later on logistics days, when we pack these boxes. We shipped them from day one across the whole country, and within 48 hours, I don't know how you do that. In the end we also weren't some, you're not talking here about an operation of 100 people. We were four guys with a lot of motivation. And we packed, we sold, we did everything together. So that's how it started, and basically what we saw is that one of the mistakes we made on the website was, we said, let's put a progress bar on the site. Give people the feeling that they're just about done filling in details. That's just, it's the simplest failure at the UX level. The progress bar looked like buttons. And suddenly we see in the analytics, and analytics were less advanced back then than they are today, of course, suddenly we see in the analytics, lots of people clicking on the progress bar, it doesn't work, and they leave. And then all the money we put into marketing went there. We had boxes that sometimes we didn't send, that we didn't invest in enough. There were tons and tons of things, like simply with PayPal, the percentage of people in Israel who had PayPal in 2013 was very, very low. So we lost lots of people in that funnel, but we still converted very, very well, and it succeeded, and it needed to grow and move forward. And then we ran all kinds of experiments. I remember that at the time, one of the months we simply had a relatively large number of complaints. We thought it was large, it was 2%. That's amazing in product terms, we didn't know that, but we learned it from some customer-service expert who agreed to talk with us for 45 minutes, and to this day I remember everything he said in that conversation. It's a physical product. He was more than that, he comes from the restaurant world, but he just... no, I mean for a physical product, two percent, that's actually crazy. Both physical and, really, there was a lot going on there, and I remember that at some point I took the customer service on myself, because I said, okay, this needs to be solved. I knew I could run that kind of conversation and get someone, even if he's very, very angry, to come out at the end with, okay, fine, I'll try another month. And one day I had an idea that I said as a joke, I'll say it and see what it does. And basically in our CRM there was obviously also the customer's name. Now let's think for a moment, our customer, there's the one who pays, but there's the one who actually consumed it, which is the dog. We also had a field called the dog's name. I remember I'd always say at the end of a call, could you please say hi to Bono for me, and I thought, it just made me laugh to say that silly sentence. The effect of it was crazy. Now, I didn't understand why. By the way, that's one of the things that sent me on that journey in my career, to start understanding the emotions behind it. But the first action, when you say to a person, whether he's at work or at home, you say, could you say hi to the dog, so if he's at work he probably has some picture of the dog on his desk, so he looks at it and now he smiles, so he already feels good. If he's at home, he looks at the dog. You smile again. And that basically connects him, I didn't understand it then, today I understand it, it connects him to the same emotion that drove him to buy the product in the first place. Because in the end he didn't buy the product because we had a nice logo or because we were nice guys. In most cases he has no idea who we even are, and probably doesn't even remember the company's name. The only reason he bought the product, the what's in it for him, was that if he buys a product like this for his dog, it says about him that he takes good care of his dog. That's what he wanted to achieve in the end, that's the goal. And when... when I understood that, I really started researching this whole world of what leads us to take a certain action, make a certain decision, and so on.

Eyal David: [10:21] Which connects so much to the basic need of, after all, where did this whole journey start? He searched Google for something very, very basic, and then we showed up and put on an audiovisual show with our company and our brand, which he doesn't care about.

The courier is part of the product: the lesson from Haim Romano

Oriel Raveh: [10:33] Right. It's also, it's also funny, it drove people to take all kinds of actions. We, we told them to, but we didn't really think it would happen. With our box you'd get a kind of letter addressed to the dog, which is also absurd when you think about it. And people would do the actions written inside. It said, take a photo of the dog with the box, send us a video of something. So on delivery day, Facebook back then, that was the network, Instagram a bit, maybe a little. But it would fill up with photos of people, our customers, with our product. That was a kind of, it wasn't word of mouth yet. Later, with the hi to the dog, where I understood it was working was when, inside dog groups, someone would ask, tell me, what is this product, and people would answer him, they're a great company, they even say hi to the dog. What's going on here, like, what is this? That's the smallest part of my operation. No, that silly thing, I said let's see if it works. So really there were a lot of things like that, and there were also a lot of things that didn't work. There were lots of customers who had a problem with delivery and so on... I have to say, one of the mentors dearest to my heart is named Haim Romano, he was formerly the CEO of El Al and the CEO of Partner. I met him and got to know him as a customer of the company. He called to complain, he yelled at me on the phone. He yelled at me because the courier didn't show up. We had switched courier companies, we thought we were solving some problem and we didn't. And something there didn't work out, and I, not in my great wisdom, I have to say exactly the opposite. I told him, listen, I apologize, we switched courier companies, the courier caused some problem and this and that, and he taught me a very, very important lesson right there in that moment. He told me, you have to understand, the courier is an inseparable part of your product. From my point of view I don't care, like, it's end to end, I ordered a product. The fact that the courier didn't come is an inseparable part, you have to take responsibility. And I learned a lot from that, and later I also met him, and since then he's been accompanying me in a lot of things, I got to... It's totally part of the experience, you're saying, that's obvious.

Eyal David: [12:27] And tell me, I'm picking up on something that maybe we'll cut in editing, but basically you took an advisor at the beginning of the journey, you said. No. Afterwards you mentioned Haim, no, you talked about an advisor. Even then I didn't take an advisor, not at all. These were people through the network who agreed to sit with us for 10 minutes and share their wisdom with us. So you're even tightening that, so you talked about listening, and I really hear it in your journey, it's something you basically do all along the way. Actively, zealously. Do you have a mentor today?

Oriel Raveh: [12:52] Today I don't have a mentor, I have, I'll call it, a very extensive network that I maintain zealously. Like, again, the best lesson I learned from my grandfather, of blessed memory, is that your network and your reputation are two things you need to guard zealously, and they arrive before you to every meeting you go to. So how do you use this network today? Do you have some dilemma you're debating how to move forward on? Product, yes? Really, if it's product, then it depends on which nuance within product. I also have today, it's already a network of colleagues, obviously, and Gal, by the way, is one of them, but I have a network of colleagues and even all kinds of WhatsApp groups left over from this company and that company and that company, and I know how to raise issues there, and by the way, people raise issues there on a regular basis, back and forth, and all kinds of ideas, and share. So it's always, and I have that for every nuance. Like, right now we have a company we work with at Tippingpoint that we're supporting through a certain process, and it's currently facing some challenge, and I remember from one of the previous companies I worked at that there was the same nuance, and there was someone there who was an expert in it. I remember it very well, we grab coffee every so often, and I picked up the phone to him and he said, come on, let's talk, let's meet. And really, for every area I have the person I know to turn to. Now, you know, it's never one-sided, it's two-way, people turn to me just as much. I think the most interesting thing, and what intrigued me and drew me most in entrepreneurship, was that people reached out a hand to help without asking for anything in return. I remember that Haim I told you about a moment ago said to me, let's sit, let's meet, we'd be happy to help you. He liked me, he wanted that... I thought and thought, like, you know, what does he get in return for this and that, and he told me, I want to know that you're a good person, and I'm helping you the way others helped me. Yes, but we have an interest in getting Woofy right. You know, it's a small thing for him. In the end, you know, it reached a very large forum of people. Like, whoever brought him was our customer, also a big customer who happened to also come to us. Like, it's all sorts of people where I don't even know how they got to the service, but simply the thing, the customers, and they were satisfied and they told their friends about it. And so then you rolled on with Woofy. Right. You learned lots of things. We learned lots of things from it, and when I left there for the next venture, totally unrelated, in a completely different domain, it already started throwing me toward a kind of journey that really interested me, which is all kinds of specializations I accumulated over time. And the specializations are, first of all it started with behavioral economics, but I dove deeper into the world of consumer psychology and what stands behind it, which is cognitive biases, meaning we make all kinds of decisions, and why. And that came together with the world of negotiation, which really, really intrigued me, mainly because of all kinds of deals that started to form, starting with the company, where I said, okay, there's a domain here I need to learn how it works. And then the whole thing opened up, because I understood that, you know, many times when you say negotiation to someone, the first thing that goes through his head is the situation where he has to negotiate his salary, or with his landlord, or selling his car, and none of those situations is ever really fun. But when you really dive in, you understand that negotiation is every conversation you have in your daily life. You just don't treat it that way, but it's every conversation. And then I understood that if I know how to negotiate well, by definition I'll be a much better product person, because on one hand I'll be able to understand in depth what drives my potential customers, my existing customers. On the other hand, I'll also know how to work with the people beside me, whether it's, for example, the stakeholders I now need to show the vision I want to go toward, or whether it's, for example, the development team who now need to help me, as they say, turn a vision into reality.

Eyal David: [16:25] Yes, that's something very essential. I think we also have a good episode on it. So basically, with Woofy, I feel that was the journey you had, basically a lot of repetition, you tried a lot of things iteratively, and at some point you said that you basically started to synthesize this learning. So let's talk about that, let's talk basically about the whole Dan Ariely side and unconscious decisions.

Dan Ariely, anchoring and framing: the iPhone, Uber and Lyft

Oriel Raveh: [16:49] Okay, so a lot of these things happened, some of them happened along the way, but honestly the understanding itself came afterwards, and a lot of it sometimes long afterwards, actually well into the VP Product roles I held at several interesting companies. But that's where I really dove deep. It started with Dan Ariely and went much, much deeper, as they say, to Kahneman and Tversky, to Thinking, Fast and Slow, and 188 cognitive biases of all kinds. Out of the understanding, honestly, the first thing that threw us into it was our attempt to understand how we build... we really had all kinds of subscription options in that product, and we tried to understand how to build it right, how to present it right, how a person would choose this one and not that one. And we were at that point of, wait, we're rational people, I choose from a logical place. No, I'm not, suddenly it's a different understanding. And when you understand that you're not rational, you understand that everyone isn't rational, and you say, okay, so what does actually happen here, how do things actually get done? So it really started with the well-known Dan Ariely story, from what's called Predictably Irrational, and not by chance there's the test: a vacation in Paris, a vacation in Rome with breakfast, without breakfast. And you haven't described it yet. You basically have to choose between several options. You have one option, Paris, a vacation in Paris with breakfast. You have Rome without breakfast and Rome with breakfast. And then what do you actually choose? And there's no 100% in anything, but in practice what happens is that a very large percentage of those who see these choice options will actually choose Rome with breakfast. The reason is that you have some point of comparison, and that point of comparison is actually based on all kinds of cognitive biases. One of them, by the way, is also true sometimes in negotiation or negotiations, it's the topic of anchoring and adjustment. Once I have a certain anchor, something to rely on, a certain point of comparison, it's much easier for me to choose. When you give me only Rome and Paris, then wait, what do I get there? I need a few more details. And that connects to many, many more biases, because in the end, when you look at a certain decision, it's never on one level and it's never based on just one cognitive bias. There are always several things influencing the range. And it's terribly, terribly intriguing, both at the level of how I sometimes present data, and at the level of the product in general, in how it's perceived. I think one of the even more intriguing things is this whole topic of framing, how I wrap a product. Sometimes people talk about a product and say they're doing repositioning, repositioning, or positioning in general, what, for example, the iPhone did when it came out compared to the devices on the market then. That was crazy repositioning. Why was it crazy repositioning? Because first of all it came with a price tag unrelated to reality, and then people said, no way a phone will cost that much. Apple's answer wasn't defensive, it actually said, it's not a phone. We're not even in the same range, you're talking about a computer, so now measure me against a laptop. It's just that this laptop, you can hold it and put it in your pocket. So once you understand that there are all kinds of things like that you can do, it changes the way you work on your product, but it also changes the way you present the value to your customers. I think they've done it several times since then too, it's worth noting. Yes, they do it endlessly, and a lot of companies do it very, very well. There are lots of products that do it very well. In this deck that I present, I show several examples. I think one of the nicer examples I always like to lean on is really the difference between Uber and Lyft. People don't know Lyft that well, but I think Lyft is the less formal version of Uber. And just from that sentence it shows what positioning work they do, because in everything they do, from the marketing, from beginning to end, they really make sure to position themselves so that they address a different kind of audience. Like, with Uber, also in terms of the logo, but in terms of the company it always feels very formal. Like, in the lectures I give I always ask the audience, what do you think I should wear when I see this logo, and everyone says a suit, or some shirt, some button-down shirt.

Eyal David: [20:38] When you show them the logo of Uber, sorry, of Lyft, what does everyone say? I don't know, pajamas, from home, and just grab a Lyft. It's also the difference between New York and San Francisco. Exactly like that, exactly like that. When I look at this nice picture of basically the cognitive bias index, or whatever's written up there, there are basically a few pillars. We basically have too much information, which in my opinion is one of the most significant things products suffer from. Do you want to expand on that a bit? If we talked about pricing, for example, or about positioning a product, even about Woofy, when we said, okay, the user arrives, arrived

Oriel Raveh: [21:13] from some ad, say, and boom, we give him Woofy and all the glory of the team, what do we do? A lot of products fall short there. Right, listen, in the end there's the phrase less is more, and the hardest thing to do, it's funny, because many times people think, where do I write information about this now, forget it, we're in the world of GPT, you throw it at it and it writes on its own. But actually condensing is the strength, and not just condensing, distilling. If I close the whole loop for a second, then distilling the why from it. Because in the end, when a person connects to a certain product, he doesn't connect to features, to the logo, to that. That's the story you tell yourself afterwards. You connect to the mission that stands behind it. There's Simon Sinek's book, he has a few other good ones, but his most prominent is Start With Why, and I think everyone knows the Golden Circle, which is that theory of why, how and what. But it really is true, because that why... the how is basically how I do things, and the what is what I do. And if I now show you the features of, for example, this laptop that's here on our table, based on the technical specs you won't connect to it, but based on the reason that stands behind the company, what gets people up in the morning,

Eyal David: [22:22] that's what you connect to. It's the only thing we can connect with on a human level. We can't connect to a product any other way. I'll tell you more than that, for me it's also the fear that if I now switched, say, to another product, even just moving the data over. Right, it's magic. If I buy another Mac now, it's magic. Now what, switch to a PC? That's always the idea. It's not only that, it's also reliability, meaning you have a product, you know it works, you press and it works. On top of all that, it also sits on fears, or on concern, or on time. Most of it is driven by fears. And by the way, I'm not some big Apple freak, it's a bit funny because in the end there's a non-Apple product, for years I wasn't necessarily with Apple. They make really amazing products. Maybe I'll say something here now that's this, this, you know, but I still say it, like, with confidence behind it, that that's how it is, you connect to that why now.

Oriel Raveh: [23:12] It's much more deep-rooted than that, it sits inside the brain, in things that, you know, are stronger than us, as they say. That's how it seems to me. But now about Apple, I don't know, it's a sharpening of the definition, but the fact that they don't have an AI product, or that AI isn't in their core, seems problematic to me. That's a point. They already have touches of it, but yes. But yes, relative to the others. I'm sure they're cooking something up.

Eyal David: [23:31] I hope they're buying something. So I think there are a few pillars here, if we go back to this slide for a second. There's too much information and not enough meaning, which honestly goes pretty much to the same place, either it's a lot of fluff, right? So you're not saying much. The whole thing about condensing that you described is very true. And I, to act fast,

Cognitive load, urgency and the pitch as a Netflix trailer

Oriel Raveh: [23:49] for crying out loud, let me, let me understand for a second what's going on and move fast. Now if you basically put lots of things in front of me, lots of stuff, to choose from, a lot of products suffer from that. Right, too many options, you can almost never choose. There's also, at the beginning of Thinking, Fast and Slow, he does an exercise, a real cognitive exercise where you have to add and subtract numbers, for several numbers in a row, and you really see what happens to the brain there. I think I've experienced that feeling twice, once when I tried to do that exercise and a second time after the first boxing training of my life. Cognitive load, you're exhausted, you're not tired-exhausted, you have air, but you come out and you're like, my nervous system was just running at two thousand. Wow, I really remember I couldn't lift my arms afterwards. That's also about the arms, but fine. You start from that, that cognitive load, and that's of course at a high scale. Now at a low scale, it's you gave me too many options, I can't choose, so the number of options matters too. The sense of urgency, which is why all the sites, all the products play on it. Only two left, four people are currently viewing this product, all kinds of things like that, nuances to create a sense of urgency, and really to condense. You'll see that most of the way, by the way, you see it in presentations too. Like, many times, when I remember my first presentations, there was tons and tons of text. How does that not happen. And today, actually, when I work with product people on this, whether in a course or in roles of one kind or another, I explain to them, in the end you need to tell a story. Because if you notice, I always take the example of Netflix, and not necessarily Netflix as a company, as a product, but what Netflix does in a trailer. After all, what do you get in a trailer in the end? You get the plot cut into segments, with gaps on purpose. What happens in the human brain? You try to fill in those layers, you try to fill in those layers, and afterwards you ask yourself, maybe I have to watch it to see if I was really right. You don't say it at all, and the what's in it for me is also something you don't say at all, it's inside, the systems inside, your subconscious is basically saying what's in it for me. But you're not thinking along the way, okay, I'm going to spend these five minutes, I'm going to spend the next two hours, okay, what's in it for me, you go through it, but it has to grab you and it has to intrigue you, because you'll try to complete it, and especially you say, I managed to complete it, I don't need to... I have to see it now, now I have to watch the movie. And sometimes there are trailers that don't manage to convey that.

Eyal David: [26:07] And the pillar, I love this slide, we'll put it here, we'll put it in the show notes. The pillar is a website, like, each of these here is clickable and you can see the whole cognitive bias inside.

Oriel Raveh: [26:18] It's very, very interesting, yes. I'll definitely put it in. Funny, actually, in presentations I usually don't dwell on it too much. I say, it's here, whoever wants to dig into it later, go ahead.

Eyal David: [26:27] So we're apparently among the ones who dig in. But no, excellent. The fourth pillar is What should we remember, and that too,

Oriel Raveh: [26:34] again, if you were concise enough and didn't flood, that's exactly it, right? It's that thing you'll take with you out of... it's even one step further in. Meaning, What should we remember, you know, there's a sentence people always say, and I think people sometimes don't digest it properly. You know it, you've surely come across it, in the end it's this: when you meet someone, he won't remember what you said, he'll remember how you made him feel. That's the truest thing in the world. In every business meeting you'll be in, many times people don't really remember the action items, they remember whether a meeting was good or not. You come out of a meeting, people ask you, so, was it good or not good? What does it mean that it was good? If I list for you now the action items we came out with, will you be able to say whether it was good or not? Probably not, you'll know on the level of feeling.

Eyal David: [27:10] In my feeling it's heading in a good direction. I think it's very much related to how deep we are in the relationship, so to speak. Just saying, if it's now an introductory meeting, right?

Oriel Raveh: [27:20] So yes, everyone has their own sense, and we'll also know how to measure it by whether we wanted another meeting, right? Or alternatively, if we have no choice. By the way, you're really, you're getting into the huge pool of cognitive biases here now.

Eyal David: [27:31] Interesting, so now you'll analyze me. Not you, but just, I'll tell you, I'll help you with all kinds of elements. Of course, I'd be happy to. And on the other hand, work meetings, where okay, there's a goal, there's this, there the world actually does measure by action items, like when you're already running.

The triune brain theory and why the Why lives in emotion

Oriel Raveh: [27:45] That's on a very, very dry level, but it's true, some kind of relationship has to form there. It's also, I think, the truest saying that you need to remember all the time, which is that in the end, you know, people develop crazy technologies, and features, and so on, this and that, but in the end business is done between people, so if that human connection doesn't form, many times the deal can fall through. That's very true. In a dry way, at the level of what I told you about cognitive biases, it's not analyzing you, but there are very interesting elements that were discovered, for example. One of the things is that in a meeting where I'm present and I talk a lot, many times I'll come out of it with a much better feeling. Why is that? Usually, probably because I feel I was listened to. Maybe they didn't listen to me at all, but that's how I feel. There are also all kinds of additional elements. When, for example, two people talk, usually the one asking the questions is the one who is, so to speak, examining. Now, the human brain can't both examine and be examined at the same time. So if, for example, I'm asking questions, many times the other side will feel he's answering my test, but he doesn't feel he's the examiner, and sometimes he leaves the meeting wondering for a moment, what happened here. There are the elements of mirroring, sitting with body language exactly like you're sitting right now, automatically we'll feel more connected. And that's true both for verbal mirroring and for behavioral mirroring and so on. That's it, so I think that in meetings of this type, which are more initial, listening is an important key, but really, after the listening there needs to be the response, and it also needs to be very condensed and precise, and then again you need, it's a kind of ping-pong that's very delicate in the first encounters. Good point. I keep looking at the deck, wow, we're really racing here, and we're getting to the theory of, what's it called? In English it's called the triune brain, in Hebrew it's called the theory of the triangular brain, or the brain, the triune brain, I think that's the best, best direction. It's a theory that, in my eyes, is fascinating. There are some doubts about whether it's correct or not, but the bottom line is that the person who discovered it is Paul MacLean, a neurologist and psychologist who researched the brain. And basically what the theory says is, and by the way this connects to those same worlds of why that Start with Why is so important. That was the additional layer I wanted to dive into. It's very hard for me to see something without taking it apart and trying to understand what stands behind it. So it put a lot of order in things for me. Basically this theory says the brain developed evolutionarily in stages. And there are several layers. The most basic layer is the survival layer. It's responsible for, as they say, drinking, eating, breathing, reproducing. That's also where a mechanism sits that we all know because we've experienced it, certainly in Israel, but sometimes we don't know what to call it. It's called freeze, fight or flight. It's a survival mechanism, which is basically what the body does in stressful situations. It's very hard to predict, even people who train and prepare for it their whole lives, it's very, very hard to understand what you'll do. So that mechanism sits there, and it has all kinds of elements where it comes into play. It's even a bit funny, but for example a red light in certain situations can trigger it with a certain connotation. Or a car's brake lights are red not by chance, also because they're very, very visible in the dark, but also because they trigger a certain system in us. Also blood being red, it comes a bit from there. A classic example of this: when we're startled, we do something like this, this action, if you listen to the sound for a moment, I basically compressed air into my lungs, and blood starts flowing to my arms too, and to let me run away.

Eyal David: [31:13] Let's analyze me again. So if, say, when Covid happened, as soon as Covid started, I ran, you know, to the supermarket and bought like crazy. That's exactly from there. It's from there combined with all kinds of other things. Meaning basically the next layer that developed is the more interesting layer for product people,

Oriel Raveh: [31:33] which is the layer of the emotional brain. Okay, that's basically where the Why sits. If you share the slide with the audience too, everyone will be able to see it. Or the limbic brain, and that's basically where all our emotions run. The third layer that developed evolutionarily is basically the neocortex, or the logical brain, where the What, the logical part, takes place. Now, the theory says that each layer of the human brain does its job nothing short of excellently. Meaning we survive, factually, the survival brain keeps us alive. We feel what we know how to feel, and very, very strongly too. Where does the problem fall, like in any bad relationship that sometimes limps? Communication. Meaning when one layer operates in a certain way and another layer operates in another way. A classic example of this, there's the saying: never talk when you're angry. You've surely heard it at some point, because you say things you regret. Why? Because when you're angry, the emotional brain works very, very hard and runs over the logical brain. The logical one will say the next day, when I calm down, I shouldn't have said that. Or an example: you tell yourself, I want to eat healthy now, I'll stick to such and such a menu, and then 11:30 at night arrives, a bit, after all, the emotions are working, click, you open the fridge and finish off a chocolate bar. It's exactly these connections, these nuances between, and all kinds of decision-making processes. And then when you understand this, you understand how even more important it is, you have to deeply understand this topic of the Why. Meaning, what's the Why behind my product, what's the Why behind my company. That Why is what will make potential customers connect to the product, investors invest in the company, team members come work with me, developers rally behind my mission. Meaning this whole process happens thanks to those same emotions. How I communicate it, that's already the negotiation. I think that maybe even closes the loop. So, really, if we make it concrete for a moment, now I'm basically building a product.

Eyal David: [33:24] And I'm basically going through the orderly process, where I start researching, I do discovery, blah blah blah. Looking at competitors, seeing what others are doing, good, not good. Now basically we're talking here about understanding the user in depth, the emotions that basically drive him. So I go and interview a few users, and now I want to start succeeding, I want to ask questions that might point to the answers that are basically more emotional, deeper, and afterwards I want to always cross-reference basically. So by the way, today it's probably much simpler with Gen AI. But not sure, because you're actually touching here on something Gen AI doesn't know how to do.

The customer is right about the problem, not the solution; Waze Later

Oriel Raveh: [34:00] No, I mean basically analyzing a few answers and saying maybe what sentiments repeat. Also no, I'll tell you why, because the truth is between the lines and doesn't necessarily come in words. Like, usually when you talk with customers there's always this kind of clash. I also go over this in the deck, and I say, there's always the most common phrase we all learn, the customer is always right. But what does the customer is always right mean, what is he right about? Marty Cagan says you don't sit and write requirements based on what your customers say, and he's right. In that respect he's right. So the customer is right in understanding best what hurts him, or what emotion drives him, and what emotions aren't being addressed. What is he not right about? Defining the solution. If you go by what the customer asks you to build, in most cases you'll build a feature that's relevant only to that customer, at best, and it also probably won't give him the full answer.

Eyal David: [34:48] And there are tons of examples of that. But what you're describing here, what you described at least earlier, is more from logical thinking. It's basically the emotion. I want to know, just saying, that in his childhood he experienced such and such, and because of that he's now afraid to buy this product, or he won't touch this product. That I won't be able to understand. So I'm kind of wondering with you how you actually run a process like that to get to the bottom of things.

Oriel Raveh: [35:12] So look, you need, you need to attack it from several places. First of all, the first thing, like you said, really looking at the competitors and trying to understand the users, what they need and so on, that's nice and good, but you need to remember here all the time, at the base, that the forces that need to act for a potential customer to move from one product to another are very large. Meaning, for that to happen you need to touch his needs in a better way, to give him significantly greater value. Not a little, not even similar. If you give similar, you're irrelevant. You have to be significantly greater. Second, you also need to touch what's called an underserved need, which is like Marc Andreessen's holy grail for product-market fit, and not for nothing. Because that's the oxygen, that's the nuance, and you'll understand it, and it won't necessarily be said in words. You'll hear it in small nuances, you'll hear him say, yeah, this worries me a bit, or this frustrates me a bit. In the lecture I always give the example, a classic example of Waze with their Later feature. I love this example, I also ask about it in job interviews, because Later touches emotion in the strongest way there is. Because in the end it's not about getting from A to B, it isn't. The solution is to that feeling of anxiety, the feeling of worry about uncertainty, when do I need to leave, I don't want to be late, I have to be there on time. The Later feature in Waze, which if you think for a moment at the operational level of an app, it's a bit absurd. Because on one hand it really is, I use it 4-5 times a day, but in the nuance, at the bottom line, Waze is an app you're supposed to use when you're in the car, or before you start a drive and during the drive. The Later feature you use when you're at home, when you're at the office, before you head out. I think it's actually the app for planning trips, and in the end there are several use cases.

Eyal David: [37:06] I'm wondering, there's an emotional element here, no doubt, an element of even outright anxiety. I'm actually trying to think about products that really cracked, because I love this example, but that really cracked the emotion, right. Airbnb for example, that's an example you gave earlier in the deck, maybe expand on it, because there, in my opinion, there's an amazing cracking of the thing. It started basically, they know how to crack the feeling of vacation without me being there. Absolutely. They did tons and tons of work there, both at the UX level, first of all the founders themselves are design and UX people,

Airbnb: going to users and repositioning around emotion

Oriel Raveh: [37:43] and also at the level of cracking the market. There's a story, there's a video, you can find it on YouTube, every time its versions get deleted, but the first thousand days of Airbnb, it's two parts. Where the CEO of Airbnb, I think, Brian Chesky, is speaking there, he tells the story, and the real insight was when they went to their users. Paul Graham from YC tells them there, go to your users, do things that don't scale. And the interesting element there, the additional nuance of it, is that they start, they call one of their customers, they want to go meet them, and one of them is, if I remember correctly, the drummer of the Dave Matthews Band, and when they call him they hear rehearsals in the background. So they say to him, wait, where are you? Like, I'm on tour with the band. So they say to him, one second, we don't get it, because the initial product, for those who know Airbnb, is bed and breakfast, meaning you need to be home to make breakfast. There's nothing weirder than that, breakfast for people you don't know who are staying at your home. In this case, at the same time, they also sleep on an air mattress, because it's an airbed, in your living room or in some separate room. That was Airbnb's product. And then they call and say, wait, wait, you're on tour, you're not home to make them breakfast? So he said, I need to make them breakfast? They don't know how to make it themselves? I think they'd be more comfortable if I'm not there. And then that thing was completely removed from the list, because at the beginning the initial requirement was that this is what would happen.

Eyal David: [39:05] That's really interesting, I thought about it from a different angle. By the way, they actually started with cornflakes or something like that, right? There was some cornflakes marketing element there. Right. Basically they tried to reach, they understood, they kind of said, they said where are we most relevant, when there are conferences in various cities. It was Obama something, right? That's it, there were Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's. There was, they basically started, they said where are we most relevant, in cities that have conferences, and then all the hotels are fully booked, that's how it started, and that's a hell of a crack. It didn't really work for them at first, and at the second conference there was the debate with Barack Obama, and that's basically where the Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's came from. And at that debate they said, everything here will be packed, so we'll offer this, and along the way, to also make noise, like marketing buzz, we'll make a limited edition of Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's. In practice it was Cheerios inside, just two designed boxes. Sold out on Obama O's, they were left with lots and lots of Cap'n McCain's.

Oriel Raveh: [40:03] Afterwards they also ate it for three months at lunch and dinner. It's a great story, but it's a hell of a crack, I think, because if you think about it, what was there until that point, I didn't mention it either, before Airbnb there was Couchsurfing. Couchsurfing came and solved the primitive need of, hey, I have no money, or I have a small budget, and I need to crash somewhere. Right.

Eyal David: [40:21] I did Couchsurfing in Australia back in 2007, it was something like that, '08. And then Airbnb came and blew it into a different place, that it doesn't have to be just a Couchsurfing experience. Although I know, I also did Couchsurfing and it wasn't just crashing, on the contrary, I could also get a room.

Oriel Raveh: [40:37] In most cases it was weird, but it was like, it wasn't the ideal. But it's a bit like Apple and what they did to the phone, it's the same thing. You take something, reposition it around something emotional, something that's a need like that, and it takes off. There's a company that's worth it. There's another element here, there's a huge element here in my opinion, that many times you say, okay, a hotel is fun, but a hotel isn't necessarily fun. A hotel at the business level, like when you fly for business and things like that, and it's not a vacation where you go to some hotel to pamper yourself, it's not that fun. That's already market education they did later on. I promise it's not necessarily, it's true, like, on the face of it, yes, it's market education, but when you look at things for a moment, it can be much more pleasant when you come to an orderly home, there's everything you need here. In a hotel, what do you have?

Eyal David: [41:20] Especially when you have a family. No, I'm totally with you. Either family or even alone, but yes. Okay, so I want us to take this to a more practical place. Let's talk about job interviews, product job interviews. There are lots of things there, tons of things I have to say about them, but let's actually talk maybe about those uncomfortable questions, those questions that make you, as you called it earlier, squirm uncomfortably in your chair.

Job interviews: the failure question, experience vs. drive, and free points

Oriel Raveh: [41:42] Yes, I love them, by the way. I think the best thing to do, and I'll try, as they say, so that whoever listens to this comes away with, like, a set of instructions for how to approach it, but you really need to know how to turn it into a game, and make it so I'm as comfortable with them as can be. There are always those questions, tell me about something you failed at, or tell me about something that didn't go well, or all kinds of things like that. In my eyes that's gold. It's the opportunity to be the light in the room. And when they ask me that, I usually, most people immediately shrink and close up, I say, what do you mean? Someone asks me when I failed, I said twice, I try to fail twice every day if I can. Like, not on the same mistake, not repeating it twice, but failing is really, in my eyes, success is a by-product of failure and not the other way around. So I very, very much believe in approaching these things, and many times when they ask me, I also have examples that, when I tell them, I really feel inside, that same, how I felt at that moment. Examples from one of the companies where I led the product department, and I really remember a blunder I made there in the product in front of a not-small customer, I'll even mention its name, easyJet,

Eyal David: [42:51] at the beginning of the company, in a demo process with them, and it simply crashed after ten minutes. Yes, but the reason you went to that example is because, what are they trying to understand with that question?

Oriel Raveh: [43:02] I think they're trying to understand the most basic thing there is: are you able to experience failure, learn from it and move on. And maybe also the aspect of ego. Absolutely, I think you need to know how to put the ego aside. I don't know if you can put it completely aside, you can learn to manage it and not let it manage you. So it's something that's very, very important, and I think that if we talk for a moment about, you know, you can come to a job interview and tell me, I have experience, I don't have experience, I have enough experience, there's no end to it. Because if you go now to all kinds of job postings, they want specific experience in this, in that, here and there. I, both as an interviewee and as someone who has sat many times in the interviewer's chair, can say wholeheartedly that 20-30 years of experience in a specific product interests me less, I'm actually against it. I'll say why: because it brings you with a lot of somewhat outdated perceptions, or some prejudices, and it doesn't bring with you the huge advantage that people who are relatively new and relatively younger in the job market have, which is the drive and the innovation and the ability to really think and look at things differently. There's that meme, We've always done it this way, which is one of the most dangerous sentences for innovation. So I think you need to understand, many times people sit in a job interview and don't feel comfortable because they feel they don't have enough experience, because they... and so on. Actually the opposite, I think drive and motivation have much, much higher value than another five years, or minus three years, of experience, it can take you much further, and not being afraid to talk about the places where things didn't go well. Because someone who's looking for a person where things only went well, that's not the place you want to work, because there's no such thing, we're human beings, that's what makes us unique. I'll take a few more things from what you said,

Eyal David: [44:48] and what you said earlier, and I connect with them a lot, we talked about them in the context of websites and pricing, the whole thing about fluff and the thing about... being very precise in what you say. I believe in that a lot, if it's a presentation you can prepare for in advance and strip things out of, I really believe in that,

Oriel Raveh: [45:06] and people pick up on it in interviews. Right. It's something that's very noticeable, that either you, even you feel very much that you want to share and show how much you know and how technical you are and how much you're this, sometimes it's really, it's really noise. I'll even tell you more than that, I'll connect it to something else we started with, which is the what's in it for me. If one of the... and maybe this goes even a bit more back to what we started with, which is what skill set is important as a product manager. So if I don't have in my awareness all the time the what's in it for him, him or her, that person sitting across from me right now, all the time while I'm talking, then by definition my message won't get through to him. Because maybe I enjoy talking about myself and telling lots and lots of things, but on the other side, the person isn't open to listening. So that's why condensing, you need to touch these things. You also see it classically in job interviews, where suddenly the interviewee throws out something, and then the interviewer reacts to it, oh, I was there too, oh wait, you were in that, and certainly in Israel people always do those connections of where you served in the army, or where you used to work, or something like that. So those are the nuances, those are the things that really catch the other side, and then real listening opens up, and then a conversation opens up. It's all about communication at the beginning, the what's in it for me, really, of life. What they're looking for is simply someone who'll take care of things for them. You're measured on communication, you're measured on quick thinking, but in the end it's communication. In my opinion that's the thing many people fall on. Do you have any more insights you want to share around this? If not, that's fine. There are things that are free points: smiling, arriving on time, dressing well. Like, these are things that in my eyes are free points. There was a period like that, still exists I think, some mantra, I don't know if it started in Silicon Valley and so on, of showing up to meetings in a certain way, or in high-tech people don't dress like this and that. Great, I agree, you don't need to come in a suit or a tuxedo to a job interview now, but being well dressed mainly shows that you respect the other side you're going to meet. Arriving on time is always, for me, ironclad. A smile is free. A smile in general has a crazy effect on both sides. You smile at a person, he smiles back at you, it's like when you see someone yawn, the same thing happens. It really, it also releases, like, things in the brain. Communication, right, the basics. It's what's called nonverbal cues, it's not exactly nonverbal cues, but it's the side of communication that's non-verbal, bigger than what you say, so many times it doesn't matter that much what you say, but how you say it. Really, come prepared, right? No, no, of course, of course, you need to come prepared, do your homework, understand what the company does, what the role is, do as much research as possible and not be, like, completely surprised by what they're going to tell you. Absolutely.

Eyal David: [47:41] Okay, Oriel, it was so much fun, it was really interesting. If people want to get in touch with you, how do they do it? Email, LinkedIn. So LinkedIn? Sure. If in three months you need to point back to this podcast, like, refer to it and say wow, this is something you have to hear, what's the biggest bombshell you can leave us with, that will give the most value? Actually, to my episode. First of all, I refer to this podcast regardless, but

Oriel Raveh: [48:07] I think the elements we touched on here, on the side of cognitive biases and how the brain works and what drives it, because when you understand that, it's an opening to everything. And it also never ends, because on the face of it, I think I understand it a bit more, but I don't think I've mastered it. But I really do a lot to learn it, and I also try all the time to look and say, okay, wait, wait, what happened here? What did I miss? In almost every interaction I've had. And many times it's funny, even when you know these things, you still sin with them, you still fall into them. I really try to put emphasis on it, so I think specifically these cognitive worlds, and of course also, you know, really anyone going to job interviews and so on, which, I know it's something, always a burning topic, so I think there are some very good nuances here you can take, but there was a lot here, we talked about lots of things. Above all, invest in communication. Absolutely, I think it leads to lots of good things. Excellent.

Eyal David: [49:02] So that's it, Oriel, thank you very much, and we'll call on you again. Okay, bye, bye. Friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe, follow us of course for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other app. And of course, if you didn't find us on some app, I'd be happy if you wrote 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, come on, be effective, and bye bye.