Transcript: Storytelling in Product: Shay Shprank (Empathy) on Making the Product Tell the Story

Eyal David: [00:00] Hey friends, this is Eyal at Product Builder, where together we dive into conversations with the most interesting people in the tech industry who share with us a glimpse into how they think and operate — and of course, as always, we'll try to be as practical as possible In my view this is one of the most mind-opening episodes we've had. I hosted Shay Shprank, who comes to us from Empathy one of the best product people I've had the chance to meet. We talked about storytelling, how you connect a story to a product, with lots of examples from the products Shay has worked on and works on Shay also shares a lot about what he looks for in product managers at Empathy, and about his path from studying at Bezalel, to a startup, and from there to leading product. So without unnecessary rambling, let's go, we're starting. Hey Shay, how's it going? All good, good morning. Good morning, so glad you came. Right, so Shay comes to us from Empathy

Shai Shafrank: [00:52] Tell us a bit about the space. So Empathy is a company that broadly wants to help families cope with the loss of their loved ones. Broadly, we're looking at the American market right now mainly. And that means two things — it means, of course, everything related to emotional support, and then that takes us into all sorts of worlds — things like headspaces, into worlds of service and a team of social workers and all kinds of things like that, and also all the practical coping — literally the checklist of what needs to be done, literally the checklist of what needs to be done It's not just the checklist, it's also the things that let you get that checklist done in a much more efficient, better, organized and collaborative way — with family and with a professional support system and with automations. Yeah, so in the United States it's very — I mean, it's always hard and anyone who has lost someone knows how hard it is even to close a bank account — in the United States it's even harder

Eyal David: [01:53] So tell me, as the VP Product, how many product managers do you have under you?

Shai Shafrank: [01:59] What does it actually look like? Five product managers — it varies, we're hiring a bit right now There are five product managers, and I also manage design broadly, so we also have a Head of Design and a team of designers. Tell me, how does it feel?

Eyal David: [02:17] I know you as someone who's very detail-oriented and really loves to get his hands dirty, to touch things and do things and now you're suddenly up top, managing this whole operation. How is it? I'm curious on a personal level

Shai Shafrank: [02:29] It's challenging. I'm no less detail-obsessed but I think that as I mature into the world of management — because I've gone through other management roles — and just we were laughing about it earlier over coffee, about how I used to move pixels around for the designers, and that was when I was young and energetic and impulsive. Yeah, that I've also learned a bit how to do it in a right way — how to manage to reach the results I want, while also not being hands-on myself and also not steamrolling anyone along the way. There are a lot of challenges here — I think a manager who's on a journey

Eyal David: [03:07] And tell me, you actually joined Empathy three years ago — you joined right at the start, right? Right, right at the very start

Shai Shafrank: [03:13] Were you the first employee? Well, no — I wasn't the first employee, I was somewhere in the first five, probably the first ten. We're just after the seed, but the company essentially didn't have much The company broadly said: we want to help American families dealing with loss there are tons of things — we saw so many problems, lots of trust problems and lots of cost problems, and many broken, complicated processes, and a lot of emotional things It's a whole world of problems with no players in it — like nobody had touched it. On that they probably didn't want to think about it too much, like everyone else, and it just looked like there was a lot of momentum there, and they were like 'we're after it' — like, are you in? And I really joined and we started sitting down, and they made these huge lists of tons and tons and tons of use cases, and built out some kind of journey, and so in the meeting maybe the first or the second one, I think, Yonatan said to me, okay, we want to talk with American families dealing with loss — we'd love for you to set up meetings like that and I walk out of the room like, okay, how the hell do I do that what do I do now — and luckily that got solved too and after two days, I think, we started talking to three people every day How did you solve it? I looked for a research platform I found an amazing product — for anyone who doesn't know it, it's called Respondent, Respondent.io, okay You can recruit people for interviews even in the death space. You write what people you're looking for — okay, what can you go and say, I'm looking for people who have a passion for shoes and you can say, I'm looking for someone who lost a close family member in the past year a first-degree relative, and you have to deal with this thing, and I said okay, I'll put up this listing and there, it even connects to your calendar, to Google Calendar, and you set when you're available, and I remember it was a Thursday, I put this thing up there and I launched it and went home, and on Friday morning two weeks out I had interviews scheduled with people who were — for some reason it was really crazy, like and that's it, we'd come into the office and sit there fucking crying

Eyal David: [05:49] Let me bring us back after the tangent we opened. So really, okay, so you walked out of the room in shock

Shai Shafrank: [05:55] Did you manage to come back with meetings? What happened? So I think that's one of the big wins that happened nobody knew how to get at it, and suddenly it works out — it was amazing I told you earlier, it's money — yeah, in America everything, there are solutions

Eyal David: [06:13] So what was the question — okay, you walked out of the room, they showed you this whole diagram you need to bring people in to interview them, you interviewed, you did it. We interviewed, we talked, we understood

Shai Shafrank: [06:25] I think maybe the most significant insight — we had this huge list of problems and we really wanted to know where we start, what we tackle first and I think what most reinforced it for us from these interviews was that every single person has a different story like everyone suffers terribly, everyone says the process is awful but one woman tells how she was told she had to return her husband's phone to an AT&T store and she had to go with his smartphone, or his phone, and it happened to fall on the day they launched the new iPhone, and she's standing three hours in line with people celebrating, and she just wants to die You hear a thing like that, you hear about someone else who was actually in a family dispute — the sister suddenly comes and decides she found a will, even though it's not the will they had all kinds of things like that. You know, it was amazing because I got to talk there with people After one of the interviews I'll never forget — a woman who cried and cried and cried and told that her father who passed away left them real-estate estates and I don't remember which city — I think it's in Illinois, in a very prestigious area — and she's really, really afraid that it's going to ruin the relationship between her and her brothers, because there's one brother who wants to keep the real estate in the family and develop it alone, and there's one brother who wants to get rid of it. Understand we're talking about real estate probably worth tens of millions of dollars and she sits there crying to us on video that she doesn't know how to hold the family together — amazing that she even came up through this platform Amazing — by the way, this platform really did bring in amazing people

Eyal David: [08:07] Amazing, amazing. And tell me Shay, I understand that basically at the start well, you all essentially researched the market and how it even works, but the focus was really on the users The focus was as a B2C product, right? Yeah, so indeed

Shai Shafrank: [08:25] I didn't finish my earlier point — this insight that everyone experiences something different, and probably that it wouldn't be right to tackle this now with a specific solution — like, let's build a product for closing accounts we understood we needed to come in here with something that's end to end — which is really, really hard for a product a product like that in general — so there really was a process of figuring out how you make something that's both end to end and an MVP and that was basically our first product — a product that relied mainly on a checklist that's personalized, that changes according to the topics you describe and the different properties of each user a checklist, it gets customized — not some vague technology — and lots and lots and lots of guidance, lots of very, very user-friendly articles, short and clear, in order to manage to cover this whole world. And at that stage the company was How many employees? What did you actually have? It varied day to day, but we were around, let's say ten, fifteen or so. So five employees, and there was presumably some money, of course, to run with

Eyal David: [09:34] So when you define this MVP, you also have to coordinate it internally, because you're telling me here content writers How did you write the content? There are people here who maybe also accompany it — how did it work? So first of all

Shai Shafrank: [09:46] it's an MVP that's simply not — sorry to cut in — it's an MVP that's not, it's a relatively large scope that apparently needs to be done I think all this talk about MVP is more — it has layers that are a bit deeper than just talking, and we'll talk a lot later about product-market fit and things like that, yeah, but when people say viable what is viable — there's this romantic notion that says if users want it, it's viable. Well, not necessarily — like, the question is what your goal is. Our goal mainly, we were a company that raised a lot of money relative to a seed — we raised 13 million dollars in the seed we knew we had runway, we're not a company in the situation many other companies are in, like you have one shot, or two shots say — we knew we wanted to run some more extended process so mainly what was important for us to do in launching this product was to manage to own the market — that is, to put out something broader and bigger, not a solution for the funeral-homes world not a solution for the account-closing world, not a solution for the legal world and probate and wills and those things it's a broad solution, it comes and shows: this is our arena and it's A to Z. That was the strategy. And yeah, thanks and we had to recruit the people we needed — I mean we brought in amazing content people, because content was really, really important to us, simply even when you present it like this, fine, let's not call it MVP, let's call it Drop 1 — the Drop 1 of this thing was it wasn't so broad as to cover everything, but it basically brought in additional functions in the company that you need to lean on

Eyal David: [11:22] I suddenly wondered whether you used any products here to produce content, or how you somehow bridged the gap on people So do you want to tell a bit anyway what the scope of this thing was, what you included in it what does the scope mean — you'd started to detail, actually, what was in this first version

Shai Shafrank: [11:40] Yeah, so the first version was — first of all there was a special user experience that we defined it was a mobile app only. So look, within this whole world there were a few things it was very, very important for us to say, and again I think a first product, many times comes more to tell a story than to do anything else and the story we wanted to tell was this: one, Empathy deals with loss in the broad sense of the word. We don't deal with it specifically, we deal with the whole world; two,

Eyal David: [12:16] we're a technology company, and that's why we put out a mobile app By the way, the V0 version of Empathy was a website we built, that we called Helping Families Deal with Loss. We employed two young social workers in the United States, gave them a phone line — we set this thing up on Squarespace, a basic page like that — we bought traffic and started sending them people who needed help with loss-related things, and they helped out one time they helped close an account, one time they helped arrange a funeral, one time they helped, like, and talked with people and so on and through that we also saw what people really need — that's our V0. Okay, the V1, the initial product basically included again all the building blocks we need to tell their product story: one, end to end; two, technological; three, chat — it was very important to us to have real-time chat, because we always wanted to say we're also a service, like, we're also a human service, we're not just a technology company but also, say, features like a vault for documents. Yeah, one of the things we understood that happen within this journey is that there's tons of paperwork — you know, someone passes away, you walk into his office and start rummaging — so the ability to quickly photograph things with your phone, organize them well, tag them here's what needs to be done, here's a debt, here's this, here's that — to pay, to close, to whatever we created some kind of special scanner for this — a scanner, meaning it scans the documents. Yeah, you can photograph with your phone and it scans, and it's nice — and it wasn't because that was, say, the most urgent problem we'd mapped, but rather, you just need this input — within the story we told, we needed to show that we're also a utility — we're also support, we're also content, we're also a utility, we're also human, we're also end to end. So I think, when you assemble a product you have to ask yourself what the things are that it's really important for me to convey Okay, and in that respect this product did the job — I mean, nobody had any doubt we're a technology company nobody had any doubt we're a service company, nobody had any doubt we're end to end and that we don't deal with one problem within the world, nobody had any doubt we're a company doing something that nobody else basically did — dealing with loss in the broad sense of the word. By the way, also grief support was very, very important to us — we brought in David Kessler, who is maybe one of the leading experts on grief in the United States. He's the co-author of Five Stages of Grief — it's a very famous book and we brought him in as a real part of the team, like, we actually recruited him to the company and he helped us write a lot of content in audio — it was very important to us that it be audio — we went with an approach that says we don't want people to read content about grief support, like, reading is work — we want people, it really connects to people's state of mind totally, yeah, like, what does it even mean to be empathetic — that's the thing, I mean the company is called Empathy how this thing — it's also something that was really important to us within the product, within the company. A lot of our investment at this stage in preparing to go out with our story to the world was: how do you speak as a company called Empathy, how does a company called Empathy look — like, a lot of investment in branding and those things. I mean, in the end it's all one whole package, so that when you go out, you're holding the something that you hope will land a precise hit in the place you wanted — and that was with investors it was with media, it was with the ecosystem, it was within the ecosystem of end of life, which is also an ecosystem and not just tech — to come with something that does the job. That was my work as a product person. So let's dig into this for a second because I know you a bit — how you actually, how you approached this, because at each stage you basically — we did this, we did that — what you actually did here is to look very broadly at the existing industry, to look at the promise the central promise of Empathy, because that's both what you said and also, if you look forward to where you want to go, and then you stitch in here some solution that, as you said, is broad enough and answers even a future need there'll be, in order to So how did you approach this at the start, because you said 'we, we, we' — but where were you as the product manager here? Look, it's hard to answer, because in the company — I don't know — product manager, like, and CEO and CTO and Head of Design, that was the core team we had back then, and Marketing, yeah so about storytelling — the smaller the company, the harder it is to distinguish between where you are and where they are; in the end it's a small group that, again, is together and trying to do something. So first of all, I had a role, I think a very important one, in defining what this thing is — like, to help and translate the desires, this thing of coming and doing, yeah, of telling the story. For me, say, it was very clear that this is a desire, and I basically need that desire to be expressed within a product. How do you manage to productize the story you want to tell and the impact you want to make — yeah, it's not a user who comes and uses — that's important too, obviously — but at this initial stage there are other things that matter no less. Let's touch on them — I touched on them earlier. I think this matter of whether I manage whether I manage to float above the noise — we're talking here about 2020, late 2020, tech is booming, yeah, there are thousands of startups death too, right — that was happening too, right. The truth is yes, also COVID, also the talk about empathy yeah, Joe Biden entered the White House and talked about empathy — it's a word that accompanies him a lot in the United States — that word was very trending at that time so in that respect we had some right timing — the world was preoccupied with loss then, with COVID of course, but I think my ability as a product person — not only mine, yeah, it's also a designer's responsibility and other people's — but it's to try and pour things, in the end, into, into a product. I saw you going through the process similar at Fiverr, I know you also from other initiatives you did with it WeBetter, from what I heard, and so on — how you distill a thing like that — do you sit and compose with yourself and write? What do you think? Actually, I want to talk about a company you haven't mentioned Please. I had a certain episode in New York I lived a few years in New York — I moved there to set up the arm there for Fiverr of product and design and category development, and I was there a few years and then I left and I did consulting, and one of the companies I consulted for, for a short period I was also on their team it's a company called Lili that does freelancer banking — an Israeli company that was also based there in New York and Lili — I think before I joined I helped as a consultant, maybe a year, in recurring meetings and so on and I met them and she told me, they told me — yeah, I worked mainly with the CEO — we want to build a bank for freelancers — this is a period when digital banks are, like, an emerging thing they came with knowledge of how to build — they'd built Pepper here — how you build a digital bank, and they want a piece of that the reason they came to me is because I was at Fiverr and they thought freelancer, so they told me we want to build a bank for freelancers — but I think that somewhere the thinking was, freelancer is simply a segment you can serve, and it has needs and I sat with them a few times and I think that through joint conversations and through so that's nice, we'll get to some — but I arrived at the fact that it's not enough — when you say I want to build a bank and I want to sell it to a freelancer, you have to understand what it means — what it means to sell a bank to a freelancer so I said — I was also a freelancer myself, so a freelancer has this problem twice, because he manages both his private life and also manages his business life — no, many times, if you're — surely, if you're small, then it's in the same bank account, and how do you? How do you? And I told her, like, we need to design one bank account that lets me manage two people — the one that's a business, and the one that's a person, or private. And then we started talking about it a bit, and then I arrived at the phrase Work-Life-Balance. Okay. I said, we need to make a bank account that has Work, has Life, and has Balance. And the first product Lili put out was the app, which had three tabs — Work, which basically shows all the expenses I tagged as work-related, and all the income that's work-related, and everything about how I am in the Work world. A tab called Life, which basically shows all my expenses that aren't work-related, and so on. And Balance — features related to my life, and Balance, where I stand, so what's the bottom line? How much money do I have in the account? How much money did I spend this month? Overall, very — so there's a bit of a play on words here, yeah, of course, but... There are three words here that you need no more than to say in the context of banking — Work, Life, Balance, to understand what Lili does. So that was the MVP at Lili. After that they added tons and tons of features and things related to invoices and taxes, and all sorts of things, but long, long before that, just this small option — to look at things separately. You say it like it's a small thing, but actually what you did here, you take very complex things — very complex in many people's eyes — and you distill them into some simplicity, a bit like branding you could say, and then from that you basically derive everything that will now attach to this vision. It's branding because it's storytelling, okay? It's product, in the end it's storytelling. When I open a product — I remember, when WeBetter — we'll talk about WeBetter. Hold on — a company I founded in 2008, I think, even earlier, an outgrowth of a graduation project at Bezalel, in the industrial design department I studied in, with a classmate, Zeev, and we had an idea — the iPhone came out, the iPhone had GPS, you had a small idea and... we had a small idea, we said, why don't we change the way public transportation works in the world, and instead of people carrying and instead of public transportation working in this rigid way — stations and lines and so on — it would work dynamically and it would pass through everyone at home — no, you'd take maybe some need, but at large scale, we'd do an AI of routes, some idea... Speaking of young and... young and dreamy, yeah? That period was without a doubt the craziest and most amazing and hard I've been through, but we did it, we went for it, like, we raised money on it — it was very hard to raise, some money, and 2008, who was investing in you in anything, and every investor we came to at that time said, transportation? I don't know this, I don't invest in it. Afterward Uber and Gett and all these companies came out and so on, but at WeBetter we actually managed to get this service off the ground and let people order special shared taxis, like Via afterward and Lyft Line and Uber Pool, and order it and share the ride and pay less. I can do a bit of a spoiler to your point, because I'm starting to understand — actually what you're saying here, so WeBetter, it's the same thing. You took the... okay, what does this thing need to do? WeBetter, and there's also the 'we' inside the name, and then you basically boiled it down into a very simple concept, everything the company is supposed to do and is oriented toward. Right, so it's like a brand, right, but the product also told this story, yeah? For example, I remember people would open Uber even before Gett, like Gett did it too, but you open Uber — and I'm talking about the first Uber, okay? A product — broken, ugly, all of it was ugly — but you open it and what do you see? Everything was ugly. You see a — you see a pin in the middle of this map, which is you, and you see icons of cars driving on the roads around you, and you don't need a big button for order, for Book Now, yeah? or... you don't need to understand more than that. You don't need to understand more than that. It's a product where the story is an inseparable part of the product.

Shai Shafrank: [25:29] You look at the product, you understand the story, okay? And I really, really believe that a big part of the work on products, certainly and especially in early-stage startups, is this thing. It's to succeed in telling a story, to the user, telling a story in a way where the product is the thing itself. You look at a hammer, no one needs to explain it to you, yeah? You show — if you start hammering, even if you've never hammered in your life, yeah? A product needs to — that's a good product.

Eyal David: [26:01] The question? Would you say this is something you distilled over your career? No — did you actually arrive with it, what, from Bezalel, or did you arrive with it from within, yeah?

Shai Shafrank: [26:09] How was it? I don't know. Bezalel helped a lot, yeah? At Bezalel I studied industrial design, which is basically physical product design. Physical product design. I think it really sharpened this place of something that's maybe a little lacking sometimes in the digital worlds — the tangible aspect of the product. In a physical product you feel it, you hold it, you feel it, you see it. Many times, because of the digital format, and because everything goes through a screen, people forget the physicality, they forget that, like, the product needs to be there. Yeah, although actually at WeBetter, for the consumer, the physical dimension was here — there was what happened in front of you when you ordered a taxi. But what was important to us throughout at WeBetter? That when you enter the app, for example, one of the things we said — we must let people also order a private taxi. Why? Because I must have you be able to see that this costs 50, obviously. And this costs 30. which is better. When you enter the app — and not only that — this one is estimated time 13 minutes, and this one is estimated time 16 minutes. I mean, for me at WeBetter this was, all the time, the most significant thing in the product. That you can enter the origin and destination, get two offers — one a special taxi, next to it a shared taxi, and understand it's a no-brainer. There's another thing here — right, it sounds obvious, but there's another thing,

Eyal David: [27:36] there's also the pricing of your coverage, in case it doesn't work out, what to offer — so you still want to provide a service that's... right.

Shai Shafrank: [27:42] Although here we did back then what many did after us, and still apparently didn't succeed at, which is committing to a price in advance. I mean, we said, wait — if we take a 50-shekel ride, and let you ride an extra 3 minutes or 5 minutes or 10 minutes, and give it to you for 30 shekels, but bring two people — we've profited. Right? That's the model that basically all these companies today, or not today anymore, for many years now. When I lived in New York, I would ride Via, or I would ride Uber Pool, alone, and pay pennies. Because the calculation was not... no, because Via, because there was a belief, okay? That if you bring an offer this good, you'll manage to reach a critical mass that justifies the business model. That's what we thought here too. The problem is that we — we raised, we managed to raise in total one million dollars, and the money ran out. And... here we're talking about entirely different amounts. Take how much Uber and how much Lyft and how much Via invested together, in subsidizing rides for people, and that's without another thousand other companies that sprang up and tried to do this thing — you'll get to billions poured into trying to reach a critical mass of shared ride,

Eyal David: [28:53] and they still haven't managed to get there. As far as I know. How amazing that you identified it back then. Let me switch records for a second, so... If we stick for a second to the story you described about Empathy, and this precision you did here, so broadly, if we're talking here at all about product-market fit, then the moment you do this process, everything's already... supposed to fall into place. Supposed to fall into place, at least in terms of planning and understanding and what you broadcast outward — now you need to know at all who you're broadcasting it to, right?

Shai Shafrank: [29:23] You must know from the start who you're broadcasting it to, because a story you tell, and value you give... product, again, product-market fit, but the maturity of a product is... it's a changing, dynamic thing. Now I think that... every company — you know, we're used to thinking, saying, okay, there's zero to one, right? There's that belief, and then there's growth. I mean, zero to one means, I haven't managed to find product-market fit yet — I did, I move to the growth stage. The reality is that good companies never stop doing zero to one, yeah? Let's talk about Fiverr. We were at Fiverr — at Fiverr there was product-market fit, right? People came and bought gigs for five dollars, and the company really made a lot of money, grew very fast. Leveled up. And... and you could say, you know, there's product-market fit, let's do growth. And a lot of people did growth at Fiverr too, you know, did emailer, and retentions, and conversion optimization, and things more from the world of growth activity, yeah? But where were Fiverr's significant step functions? Not in... in my opinion, not in... not in the optimizations, but in product-market fit. It's coming and understanding at some stage, yeah? We understood this back then... it was clear, yeah? But we decided to do something with it, yeah? True, the company is called Fiverr, that's true, they called the gigs — all the services on it — five dollars, that's how it started once, but the people are kicking against the company's model, yeah? The sellers tell the buyer, come buy two, come buy with an extra, come talk to me, I'll send you a custom offer, yeah? All these things. It was clear the model here is the big growth engine, so in this whole process we did of Beyond Five Dollars, yeah, letting people price beyond — we basically didn't do growth, we did product-market fit, we opened the marketplace to a more significant market of freelancers who want to charge more money. Exactly, and if I wait a second — you surely did a simplification of the story there

Eyal David: [31:18] and also really understood there are freelancers behind it, so another thing you didn't mention is also, actually, at the catalog level, you needed to create these services in all sorts of areas, and also to clean up things that were weirder back then, around the five dollars, so there was a comprehensive move here that you basically boiled down to something quite simple, and essentially the whole company followed it. Yeah, it wasn't simple.

Shai Shafrank: [31:40] At Fiverr we had to really, really, really preserve the story, and that was maybe the big challenge in going to Beyond Five, because what is it — Fiverr, everything for five dollars, right? It's called Fiverr, how do you dare come and change it, yeah? And one of the things we understood we needed to do was to find an alternative story. And the alternative story was basically what became service as a product. The ability for people — after all, when the whole marketplace is at five dollars, this logo, this, the translation, the whatever — what are you actually saying? You're basically saying, I save the whole process of working with a freelancer, let's decide on the price and the scope and those things — I simplify it, I let people do a one-click purchase. And then we said, okay, we need to build on this matter of productizing a product, because that's actually the story, not 5 dollars. And then we created this concept of the packages, of the products, that are priced at whatever price you want, but they're very much packages — it's very productized — in order to preserve the ability to buy from a freelancer in one click without having to negotiate. And essentially the company's story changed in order to enable the product's evolution.

Eyal David: [32:53] Exactly, and nobody did it back then either, but that's exactly what you said, and it exactly steered me to the question I wanted to ask a second earlier, how do you rally people to this story, because you really did a pivot of the story — everyone has to accept this thing and follow it, because it changes the whole strategy of the product company — how do you do something like that?

Shai Shafrank: [33:16] It's probably still very much action, let's start with that. Yeah, I think that... I think maybe my biggest lesson from Fiverr, is first of all, I learned from the leadership there what it means to be enablers. I mean, I did several significant things at Fiverr, yeah, I changed the reputation system. It was... it had to be phased down, I said, we need to do it differently, we took a big backlash from sellers over this thing — it caused a real stir — but they supported me, and believed, and when I knew how to give the right reasoning, which is to pull out the data and show that, look, we have a problem... a problem distinguishing between things that are good and things that are excellent, because our reputation system is very basic — and again, I'm talking about many years back, yeah, it's not... most startups then were undeveloped, yeah? It was a young world. So first of all, I think this matter — at Fiverr I managed to get all the backing to do these things, Fiverr Pro at a later stage, Beyond Five, so that's one thing I learned, I think, about what it means to be a leader, and the second thing, I also learned what it means to be... almost a junior team member, I'll say — like, I wasn't junior, yeah, I was, say, a senior product manager, whatever, but I was an employee, I wasn't a VP, and I wasn't a director, and I wasn't at those levels, and I managed to do crazy things. So explain, because I see it happening now too. I did a lot of selling inside the organization, for my ideas. Exactly, can you expand on that a bit? Yeah, I saw things I didn't like. By the way, I see it in every company I consult for, always, thanks — the employees always have their opinions, and they always see the things that aren't good, and often are also frustrated that it's not being prioritized, because business-wise it's not... I invested a great deal of effort in... telling my story to the leadership, in a way that would convince them. I would sit for a lot, a lot of time on internal presentations where I now want to sit and present my hypothesis about something that I think is burning in me, that needs to change. I did it, I did it several times at Fiverr, and it always worked, I also saw other people do things like that, and it always worked. It's clear it's easier as a PM to look for the opportunity, to look for the low-hanging fruit, to do... to look at the roadmap, to say what's in the backlog, to give work to the team... than to flip the table, yeah. Than to now stop, say wait, everyone here knows there's a problem. Everyone here sees this thing, I want to solve this thing, and go do it. It's really rallying — but the whole management chain, to take it to the board too, and approve this whole thing going forward,

Eyal David: [36:09] right? So at Empathy too you did this — I'm just asking, because you described, actually, at the start of the conversation, some process where you joined the company, you started looking at diagrams, at all the accumulated knowledge, you drilled down to a point, then you made ideas, you went in some direction with a first version — what happened after that? Was there also a moment where you flipped the table and changed direction?

Shai Shafrank: [36:31] No. I've never flipped tables, and look, A, I'm more senior, and B, the company is smaller and less set in its ways, and no, I feel that in general, look, there's constant discussion, there's constant conversation, there are things people agree with me on, things they don't agree with me on, there are many things I have to give up on, but in the end the important thing is not that whatever Shay thinks will happen, what matters is that the organization moves forward, that everyone is on board, and that there's shared effort, and that there be — there are many things I do there that maybe, you know, I wouldn't have chosen to do, yeah? Today we're a B2B2C company. I'm a person who's, like, connected to the consumer, yeah?

Eyal David: [37:21] A lot of the work is B2B work in essence. Shay, can you in a few words here tell us about the company's situation today? Like, where are you headed? What does it look like? So the company today... good shape.

Shai Shafrank: [37:36] Did you just raise... we raised, right, right. We just recently announced a Series B round, and what's gratifying about it is that they, beyond the fact that... they invested significant amounts, like Index, and others — actually about half of this round is invested by our customers. Essentially those you mentioned, the insurance companies. Insurance companies — again, these are large financial bodies that manage a lot of money — themselves chose to invest in Empathy, and actually today... wow, a very strong statement from them. Totally — MetLife, New York Life, Allianz, like, very, very significant companies, who are both our customers and our investors, which I think is great, a great statement and a great... really, how long have you been running with them already, just so it settles in my ear? It varies — I mean, with some of the insurance companies that invested in us, for example, we're not running at all, because they're not American companies, so they invested in us and they want to work with us from the moment we expand to the United States, and some of the companies, actually, New York Life is basically the first insurer we worked with, which means it's very deep, about two years, honestly, to distribute well — it's a bit after, it varies. Wow. Wow, I mean, the statement is very strong,

Eyal David: [38:57] if after a year or two you already see, if even you don't... cool. Besides that, you're hiring, right?

Shai Shafrank: [39:03] Employees? We're hiring employees all the time, honestly it changes all the time, so I don't know, by the time someone hears the podcast, it seems to me the best way is simply to look at our website. Yeah, if there's something relevant, then gladly. Yeah, and to prepare a one-pager that really contains the most important things, and that doesn't spill over beyond a single one-pager. Yeah, although that's not the main thing, I mean, the product. I know you. Yeah, no. Look. I can tell you that in my experience, yeah, a resume for a product role, a resume is a product. Yeah, I mean, when you come and you now want to present yourself, that's the product you make, which has a function it needs to fulfill, has success metrics, has a user experience — I think that's a good tip for people applying for a product manager role, with me at least. It's... it doesn't matter, say, that it's one page, because everyone says it's one page, so people cram everything into font nine, single line spacing, cramped and so on, yeah? I mean, invest in the usability of this thing, A very large share of resumes I disqualify because of how they look. So there you go, we got a tip too. And I'll also say, by the way, on the other side I'll continue the tip — that it's not only... I mean, it's not that I want... resumes to be very designed, with all kinds of sliders, of progress bars, of how well you know English, and how well you know Hebrew, and how well — that's, like, not important. What matters is the substance. The substance and the readability and the ease. And probably also the first impression, when you actually encounter the page for the first time,

Eyal David: [40:49] you don't want to fall down at that point. Totally. Shay, it was so much fun hosting you, and we talked a lot — this was an unusual episode.

Shai Shafrank: [40:56] Right, I had fun, thanks. And we'll invite you again, we'll talk about cycles and more things,

Eyal David: [41:02] and we'll surely get questions too, so we'll build another episode. Cool, take care. Thank you very much Shay, bye bye. Thanks, bye.