Transcript: Orly Stern Izhaki | Takhles Episode: How Do You Drive Change After Previous Attempts Failed?
Host: Eyal David · Guest: Orly Stern Izhaki · Back to episode
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In this Takhles episode, Orly Stern Izhaki of Payoneer describes how she approached rebuilding the onboarding process, an initiative that had been tried before and didn't work. She describes the organizational bottleneck and frustration that build up when a critical problem goes unsolved for a long time, and explains why her first step was to create trust within the company: don't ignore the history, respect those who tried before, and understand what happened without getting stuck in endless analysis.
In this episode
- When an initiative has failed before, the first step is to build trust inside the organization, even before touching the product or the customer.
- You never step into a vacuum: give the previous attempts and the people who led them their place, because they made it possible to get where you are.
- A critical top-of-funnel problem like onboarding that stays unsolved for a long time becomes an organizational bottleneck: the roadmap and backlog fill up and other work can't move forward.
- The frustration from a failed initiative doesn't stay with the team that tried: it reaches waiting stakeholders and management too, and it needs to be calmed.
- Understanding what happened means listening, hearing and looking at data, but knowing where to stop so you don't fall into analysis paralysis.
Driving change after failed attempts
Eyal David: [00:00] So, takhles, how do you drive a product change after previous attempts didn't succeed? Here's a short clip from the full episode with Orly Stern Izhaki.
Organizational bottleneck and frustration from past attempts
Eyal David: [00:11] So you decided to actually take on onboarding.
Orly Stern Izhaki: [00:11] I think the biggest challenge, because many of us have gotten to do onboarding processes before at various companies, I think the very, very big challenge was also an attempt to solve a lot of things over a long time, and the moment they don't get solved an organizational bottleneck is created too, because a lot of things depend on it, since it's at the start of the process. If you don't do it well enough, you can't do additional things afterward, and the roadmap and the backlog basically fill up, and also some frustration is created. And this frustration happens also in teams that already tried to lift this thing and it didn't work before, but it happens in general too, with stakeholders waiting for all kinds of things, and certainly with management. So I think my biggest challenge was, one second before, to understand what's happening, what was and so on, how to create something that, one second, creates trust and calms the situation.
Building trust: don't ignore the history
Eyal David: [01:09] You mean trust within the company.
Orly Stern Izhaki: [01:09] Within the company, yes. Relatively. Even before, one second, with the customer, which is super important, but then a few things I think are important to do in order to create this. One, is not to ignore the history. Usually we don't step into a vacuum, things happened before, give them their place, to them meaning both to the things that happened and to the people who made it possible to get where we got, and from there, one second, you need to take it further. So to listen, to hear, to look at data, to understand what happened, not analysis paralysis, you need to know where to stop, but yes, to understand what happened and give it its place.
Eyal David: [01:38] So what does a process like that look like? Because you're saying there were four, three... we'll try to dig into that, okay?
Eyal David: [01:53] That was a Takhles episode, from Product Builder. Want to hear the full conversation? Look for it in the feed, and don't forget to follow us.