Transcript: שוקי אהרונוביץ׳ | Augury | The empowered PM

Eyal David: [00:02] Hi everyone, hey Shuki. Hello, hello. With us is Shuki, who comes to us from Augury, where he serves as a Group Product Manager, right? So how many teams do you manage there? Basically three squads, each squad is a PD, a PM and a dev team, plus a product analyst who's shared across the whole group. Oh, really, why is there actually a product analyst? Ah, because we share, since it's a bit of a resource thing you're saying, kind of wasteful to have a product analyst per squad.

Shuki Aharonovich: [00:31] Ah, and also there's a lot of overlap in the content, because in the end all the squads deal with the engagement of our customers, and then there are tons of aspects to engagement, and that same analyst knows the content of everything.

Eyal David: [00:42] That's it, I didn't ask for no reason, because you're basically a data company, it was a bit odd to me for a moment that there's someone being recorded. Right. Well, he's probably really good at something, doing something well. So tell us a bit about your role, what do you do day to day.

Shuki Aharonovich: [00:54] So let me talk for a moment maybe about Augury, and from there also about the industry. About the industry too, right. So Augury is a company that provides a solution that can detect machine failures months before the failure happens. So imagine a production line in a real factory — Guinness, food, pharmaceuticals, you name it — and we come with our hardware, with our sensor. Like, I brought our sensor as an example, it looks a bit like a blue salt shaker, that's how we'll describe it to the listeners at home, and we manufacture and develop the sensor ourselves, and we come and install it ourselves on the machines. The sensor collects data from the machine, mainly vibration data, sends the data to the cloud, and in the cloud we have dozens of models running that try to identify what's happening inside the machine. Mainly anomalies, mainly anomalies, but that's where we started, that was the basis. From the machine we can also detect an electrical problem, it's not just vibrations, but also magnetic fields and temperature. Yes. And can you tell us a bit about the industry? Yes, so the industry is factories. Right now we're focused on the biggest factories in the world, Nestlé, Colgate, and it's a very interesting industry, because on one hand it's very outdated. We enter places where Augury's solution actually replaces a method called route based monitoring, where in the past people would go around. with special equipment, and once a quarter someone comes to the factory, takes samples from each machine, and then in the end sends some kind of file, here's a summary of everything happening in your machines. And we replace that, and you get all the analysis of what's happening in your machines across the entire factory, not once a quarter, not anything, real time, real time, and that's mind-blowing to many of the factories. Of course. Because the ROI is clear, the ROI is clear. And it also changes their operating model, so they're no longer surprised by failures, they anticipate the failures and know how to predict and prepare for them, and it doesn't hit them at some ungodly early morning hour. kind of, they know when to step into the situation, so it really changes how the factories work, and it's a really interesting industry with people where everything we know, working at SaaS companies is a bit different there, because you can't assume everyone has access to a computer, there's one computer on the line, in a locker room or something, and you want to broadcast alerts, so the alerts are there on the computer, but your users are on the floor on the production line, and now if their hands are full, or before they enter the production line they have to go through sanitation, like say it's a food or pharma environment, then it's a whole ordeal to go to the computer and come back, so it's a very different approach, these are people who aren't people like you and me who wander around cafés with their MacBooks, it's stressful and hard work, part of the work also puts their lives at risk, like going to fix a machine that's on the roof of a factory is literally life-threatening, and that's something that happens on a daily basis. Yeah, I suddenly also thought about COVID, and surely during COVID, it's like people are at home, right? Yeah, so during COVID, that's what's interesting, everything about how factories operated changed a lot, because suddenly they had to limit the number of people entering the factory and run tests. But also suddenly our solution became even more essential, because the production lines also ran more, people more at home, and some of our customers are pharma companies, and pharma companies, companies that produce vaccines, and then during COVID that means. Every. Hour. That this line is capable of producing vaccines is the most critical, in short it's the ROI for all of humanity, it's not just a good slogan. Yeah. Do you have competitors? Who are your competitors? So at first we had no competitors, we sort of found the category called machine health, our competitors, like I said, are those same people who come once a quarter and take samples. Today there are already more competitors, the difference being, everyone today is also boosting their AI, so it's becoming a bit of a commodity. In general the difference between the competitors is also the geographic locations where they operate, we have a really strong competitor that started in South America and now they're entering North America, we started from North. Selling here is the tricky thing at the end of the day, it's an enterprise sale that takes time, it's also internal politics between departments. Between, no, because it's really also a local sale to heavy industry factories, like the way I imagine it, it often starts with a model of land and expand, you start with a pilot at one factory in a chain, prove the ROI at that factory, and then okay, let's do it at a slightly bigger scale, they see you're capable of doing it at scale, of supporting X installations per month, at X factories, the organization doesn't collapse in on itself, and then okay, so now across all the factories all over the world everywhere. So tell us about which product you're working on now, like you work. So my group in general is responsible for the user experience of our users at the factories, meaning after we took all the information from the sensors and synthesized it in the cloud, and algorithms ran over it, then my group takes all those insights and tries to reflect them back to the customer — what's the health status of your machines, who do you need to attend to first, what do you need to do about each machine. how much money you've saved thanks to Augury in the recent period, all these flows are part of the group I lead. So basically you also create tools for the folks on the production floor, and also for the managers up top, right, also for corporate, the same person who signed the check. who has to justify that you're worth it, and also tools for that maintenance manager at the level of the individual factory who needs to see which machines I have in red, how long they've been in red, what failures I have, what I need to do to handle them, what the vibration of these machines has looked like recently. do I need to worry, is it getting worse, is it stabilizing, what's going on there, so like just out of curiosity. For them, for the folks on the production floor, it's more actually a push? It's less dashboards, and how does it work? So it depends on the factory, there are factories that adopted us so deeply that there's literally a computer screen on a TV in the factory displaying the Augury dashboard that refreshes for them every few minutes. and then they're like hey, Mom, something came in, and there are factories that wait more for a notification from us, an email, an SMS, something like that. hey, this machine just went to red, you should take care of it soon. It's amazing, I'm honest about the combination of physical, the combination of physical and digital is mind-blowing. When you join Augury and you start, before this I worked only on virtual things in the cloud, not connected to real reality, and it's a completely different experience, it's really special, you feel the thing moving, I don't know, at least that's how I see it.

Eyal David: [07:19] Okay, so tell me, you also hire PMs from time to time, and again, you have a perspective because you've really been through several companies, several industries, what are actually the skills you look for most in the right interviewee?

Shuki Aharonovich: [07:33] So I think the first thing is storytelling, or effective communication, I think so much of a PM's work a PM's work divides into two, thinking and talking, that's kind of right, and sometimes you take the words and you also put them in a document if you're really, really outstanding, and I think so many PMs aren't good at telling ideas, or telling complex ideas, we see interviewees who come to us and as PMs they can't explain well what the company they work at does, what their part in it is. and then how will such a PM in the end take some really complex concept and manage to explain it to team members, to stakeholders. create alignment, rally people behind them, so in my view the topic of effective communication is it's a must, it's also hard to pass our interview process if you're not an effective communicator, we won't understand you and we won't appreciate you. no matter how smart you are, if you can't express it or explain it, and it's something, I don't know if you'll say if you have more

Eyal David: [08:34] but it's something that throughout your whole career you've placed emphasis on, or is it specific to you at the company.

Shuki Aharonovich: [08:40] it's very technical, and therefore, so I don't know if it's related to the company's domain as much as maybe to the company's organizational culture, I think it's not something I was aware of at the start of my career, but the more time goes by, I simply understand that a lot of it comes down to this, I think it's a bit like the expected value of a lottery draw, even if the draw is for 10 million, but if you buy only one ticket, then your chance is very low, same thing with communication, you can be very smart, but if you can't express it clearly the expected value of the information, the quality of the data that comes out in the end to the people around you is very low, it's very hard to move things forward.

Eyal David: [09:19] Yeah, because a PM, their job is to think and communicate, so half the job you're struggling with, do you have any tactics that actually helped you

Shuki Aharonovich: [09:25] or that you can recommend? I think the main thing I find is that usually, usually, problem number one is speaking verbosely or writing verbosely or communicating verbosely, I think the most important exercise in storytelling is simply to do your own editing, like choose what you say and trim from it more, and if I can say it in a more ordinary and shorter way — an exercise, tell it to your grandmother or to a child. really, really, tell it, tighten it more. And the second thing that comes together with it, is also to listen more, meaning understand the person in front of you, you'll understand how to approach them, so talk less, listen more, you'll manage to communicate more effectively, in my view that's the number one trait. Trait number two is problem space thinking, which is also a kind of distillation really. it's about distillation, right, it's essentially to come, I think so many product managers struggle with separating solution from problem, and what we came to solve, and whether this problem is important or not important, and I think one of the killer features of product managers at Augury is the ability to distill problems and to talk about a problem, at Augury we almost, we almost apologize when we talk about a solution, it's like we say sorry that I'm jumping for a second to the solution, but such and such and such, it's like a disclaimer, kind of meaning the discussion about the problem is so, so important, and the ability to distill problems and prioritize between them is number two in my view, kind of the most important skill, and the third skill is growth mindset, as a product manager there's something that in the end you need to rally people behind you from a place of professionalism in the content and deep understanding, and, but no one wants to work with arrogant people. no one wants to work with people who assume they know all the answers, no one wants to work with people who don't give space to others to express themselves. so the growth mindset, the assumption of not I'm always right, not I always know all the answers, I always want to learn and improve. I'm not the best product manager, I'm not the best product manager in this industry I'm in, I'm not the best product manager in the company. I have things to learn and things to improve, that's one of the things we look for a lot, it's also the organizational culture, yes yes really, and it also sounds like it's deeply part of who you are, right. Let's really talk about you. So we're in the industrial industry, okay, it's very broad, it's very broad, our customers are factories and we have a solution that's AI, a web interface and a mobile interface, and the AI is simply part of it that we're forced to do, almost, it's — if we could buy such things ready-made off the shelf.

Eyal David: [12:03] there'd be a sticker that this is what it'd be. So let me really introduce you a bit, so you actually started your career in the adtech industry, right, you were at Roundforce, recommendations, right, you were there a few years, you were at Pioneer, three years I was at Pioneer, and then you basically decided you wanted, yeah, I wanted to move to a good product company where you can really deepen the product discipline that I always felt I wanted to be part of, and yeah, and then I got to Augury, okay, so now we'll really dig into this.

Shuki Aharonovich: [12:33] So tell us really how you decided to be a PM. So I think it wasn't exactly a decision, all those years I dealt with entrepreneurial tech projects, some sillier, some less silly, there were also non-silly ones, there were non-silly ones, they didn't progress much, actually with the silly ones I managed to progress more, among the silly ones there was a site that takes photos of cats and puts inspirational quotes on them, because at that time cats were viral, inspirational quotes were viral, and then I said ah I'll combine them, and I don't combine them, with that all day, yeah I'm not defeated, what do you mean, this is going to be the biggest site I ever had, so a project of that kind, other projects, there was one where a friend and I as partners tried to deploy across all of Tel Aviv a network of webcams, to detect via the webcams if there's an open parking spot and make something out of it, the bottom line by the way is that unsurprisingly, on busy streets there's yes, and on quiet streets there's less action and less happens there, and parking spots don't move. so all kinds of projects of that sort, and one day my roommate said to me, tell me, have you ever thought about being a product manager? And what were you doing in those days? In those days I think I was still studying, and I was working meanwhile at a company managing government projects, something for the government. and I went and read what a product manager is, and it sounded, this is what interests me, it's not going too deep into the technology, it's not going too deep into UX, it's not going too deep into anything, but it is being a jack of all trades. knowing everyone to a good degree, building products, dealing with getting things done, and then suddenly a candle lit up for me, and I started to sort of pave the way. So okay, so you paved it, so what did you actually get into at a tech company, so it started, I started in the adtech industry, I started as an operations manager, campaign manager, so they called it pushing ads in front of as many people's eyes as possible, that's more or less the industry.

Eyal David: [14:27] I have to ask, you talked a lot about side projects, so basically also when you started working this job

Shuki Aharonovich: [14:33] did you start dropping the side projects? Side projects always come up over the years, like I think until my daughter was born two years ago I had side projects all the time.

Eyal David: [14:42] now it's the side project of my life, yeah, skyrocketing, over all the other side projects. So how was it, what did you actually start to rally, I'm just saying rally, but stakeholders from the company, and start developing things.

Shuki Aharonovich: [14:55] Yeah, so within the companies I passed through I really tried to reach a situation where I build products or work close to the development of new products, within HireSource that was one of my stops, I led the building of a site with video content that we tried to set up at HireSource, and I got to experiment with it, and then really also my first role as a product person was a startup in the industry I came from, adtech, that basically built a system for companies like HireSource or like other companies in the field. systems for serving video ads, where until a minute ago I was their user, and now suddenly I moved to the other side to build such a system, I understand, and there was another change I understand you made in your career, do you want to describe it, when I got to Pioneer somewhere in my second year I heard Gil Hirsch's podcast, and he talks, I don't remember which podcast it was, but he talks there about what a world-class product manager is, and he described there a certain style of work that I felt like, wait a second, this isn't what I'm doing. but it's very very much what I would want to do, it's what I dreamed of, when I, describe to us the difference, so in those days I didn't yet have good terminology, and only after I read Marty Cagan did I suddenly grasp this insight, this concept, but I basically wanted to be a product manager who gets up in the morning and talks to customers and identifies problems and builds a roadmap and builds solutions together with their team, more to initiate really, more to initiate, more ownership, more closeness to the customer and the problem, and yeah, and what I felt in those days also at Pioneer and also at other companies I worked at, was that product management is a bit of a work contractor, you, there's some committee that decides what to do and what the roadmap is and what the projects are that get done. and you arrive as a product manager and you get cell number 13 in the projects Excel, and you go and you implement it and you build it, and then you finish it and you never look at it again. and you go and move to row number 14 in the projects Excel, and it's a really frustrating feeling, because you don't always understand why you're building what you're building. and it's also hard for you to rally the team behind you, there's a chance you shouldn't do this project. there's a chance this isn't the right way to do this project, it doesn't matter, listen, it also really contradicts, what she did, right, right, really really. and then I started a process following Gil Hirsch's podcast, of listening and researching, and podcasts and books, and then also listening to Marty Cagan's book, which I listened to while running in the park. I listened to Marty Cagan's book and tears started streaming from my eyes, because he actually described so well the feelings I felt about how I work today. and gave me the world of concepts to talk about how I want to work, about the fact that I, like you say, I want to have impact, I want to initiate. I want to solve real problems of real customers, I want to rally a team behind me, I want to feel that we're all here building, and not there's the R&D guild and the product guild and they're in endless clashes, like R&D don't want to be here, kind of angry at you that you're bringing a feature. like no, you're here to build, I'm here to build, come with me everyone together, yeah, so what's this title, Empowered PM? Empowered PM as I said, he describes in his book multidisciplinary teams, metrics-driven, autonomous, which means for example the way we implement it at Augury. so you found, let me tell it for a second, so I found, so right, so when I started to understand what I want, I started interviewing at companies in Israel. and I interviewed at many companies, and I was surprised by how few companies even speak the language I want. I got to companies like, brand names we all know in the Israeli ecosystem, and they talk to you about, yes, did you work in Jira or in Microsoft's TFS. kind of, did he talk to you? Yes, he, what are you even talking about, or is part of the process, the idea is to try to think what spec you'll define for the developers to write, I'm like, that's not what I bring to the table, I don't bring writing logic. and working with a team and searching, I think it took me almost a year, it was a really hard year, like also I felt like I was some kind of Don Quixote searching for something that might not be there, because you talk to more and more companies and names, that you say there's no way, they surely do good product, you talk to them and you understand it's not, they don't do good product. you ask them, tell me how you decide on a roadmap, and you hear fairy tales about how the roadmap is set, and you say ah cool, you don't actually set a roadmap. that's what you're trying to say here between the lines, so I basically got to Augury, Augury in my view is one of the product companies the best in Israel, wonderful product culture, our product people are very good people. smart, who want to learn and grow and get tons of responsibility and tons of autonomy, and it's on them, the company's success.

Eyal David: [19:59] it's great that you found that, yeah, okay, and tell me, and throughout this extensive career, what's actually the skill you feel is your sharpest, that's most at the forefront, because is it actually the storytelling, or rather

Shuki Aharonovich: [20:12] so I think it's between the two things I said are important to me in a PM, so maybe unsurprisingly it's things that I also think I'm good at, more than I'm good at storytelling I think I'm good at taking complex concepts and simplifying them and explaining them. at the time my manager told me, he promoted me to be a Group Product Manager, I don't know if you're the best PM, but you're a person who knows how to talk about product management and Figma and reading conversions, the best person I know. and it's true, not only things I experience here, but also in other places, that I manage to take, say today mostly I feel a lot, like regression, it's something I studied in my degree and didn't understand. and today I'm the one who explains it to people, there are many people smarter than me, Weizmann graduates around me, who can explain it. and yet I feel that I'm the person who explains it best. Don't explain, I think it'll eat up the whole episode. Yeah, yeah, no, I won't go into that corner. So I feel that the one thing is it can be taking complex concepts and explaining them and making them accessible, and the second thing is I think deep discussion in the problem space. which is also what we talked about, talking about problems, not talking about solutions, understanding when you've crossed the line from problem to solution, and then how to prioritize between problems. In the problem space I feel very comfortable. Really staying away from how actually, from how to solve it. In a proactive way, meaning, when the stage comes to switch the disk and such, to move to talk about the solution, all in on the solution too. but making that dichotomy is something I think I'm good at. Mm-hmm. You wanted to talk about the Opportunity Tree,

Eyal David: [21:44] so let's actually move to the part about the method. Do you want to explain in a few words how it works? Right, so Opportunity

Shuki Aharonovich: [21:50] Tree, whoever wants to go deeper into it, there are tons of posts and podcasts by Teresa Torres, who's the one who brought this story to the world. Opportunity Tree, in the end, it's not rocket science, it's a diagram of boxes connected to other boxes, like every diagram we've ever seen in work places. And yet, its importance in my view, is first of all a tool for the product manager, to sharpen their thinking, certainly when you talk about problem space thinking. to understand what the goal is that I'm trying to achieve, what all the ways are to achieve that goal, what all the problems are that prevent me from achieving that goal, and then from there to continue the discussion toward solutions. It really really helps sharpen the discussion. Today even at Augury, we define that as part of a product manager's discovery on a metric, or on a very very amorphous problem, the first output

Eyal David: [22:38] of your discovery is an Opportunity Tree. Where you break down the problem and map it. And do you do this alone, or do you do it in a room with more people, how does it work?

Shuki Aharonovich: [22:46] So the PM takes the lead and starts, but it's very very important that they constantly share the outputs. A breathing document. A breathing document, both with their team, with R&D and design,

Eyal David: [22:56] and also with the stakeholder with a refined method. The thing I wanted to say in this context, is that when an Opportunity Tree is done well, it's an excellent tool for alignment within teams or within the organization. When a stakeholder comes to you who's very much probably in the solution space, or very much on a specific problem that bothers them, and you show them an Opportunity Tree that maps this whole world in which that problem sits. then it's clear why we're doing it. Then it's clear why we're doing it, and it's clear what the difference is between this problem and that problem, and why we chose this solution, and the discussion is much more constructive and not so abstract. everyone throwing in something, pulling the blanket in a different direction. So let's really describe how it works. Meaning, you start with some goal, with some KPI into the matter?

Shuki Aharonovich: [23:33] We start with some target. It's important to say that a target usually comes when you have a clear product strategy, and you know what you want to optimize for, and then you say, okay, so these are the things I want to optimize in my product, from here I derive some metric and give it to my teams. and like you said, the metric and the whole Opportunity Tree, it's a breathing document. What you do to it on day one, is different from what you do to it on day thirty, on day ninety. It's constantly, we always say inside Augury, that in general being a PM at Augury or at an Empowered Team, is very much optimized for your shower time. It's optimized for you being in the shower one day, and suddenly while you're lathering up, you'll think, wait. Eureka. Eureka, I need to build my Opportunity Tree completely differently. This isn't the right way to present the problem at all, and therefore what you did in your first week on the Opportunity Tree, won't be what you do in week 19 on the Opportunity Tree. and yeah, it starts from a metric, and you try to start breaking it down, into which problems prevent you from reaching that metric. Problems or opportunities. Problems or opportunities, right? And slowly, as you break them into more use cases, and more use cases, and more use cases, you start to reach almost atomic problems, where you say, this is an atomic unit, there's no way to break it down further, and now I move on from here to a solution, of how I'm going to solve this specific atomic problem, and a thought that it will serve my metric onward.

Eyal David: [24:52] Okay, I have a question. One, first of all how do you avoid setting up random problems, from your experience, how do you stick to data, because you didn't talk about that, and produce problems that are really real, presumably they're user pains, I don't know, you'll describe how it happens for you, and the thing, there's also a matter here of parallelism of problems, because it could be that I see several problems, that's also where there's power in this method in my opinion, if I imagine it like a tree, it has all kinds of branches, I can take several branches and connect them together, and then say, wow, suddenly the problems are much more worth solving, and maybe it's worth talking about that too. So regarding the building, so really what builds the tree for you,

Shuki Aharonovich: [25:29] is the discovery you do, which is partly with customers, partly with internal stakeholders, and partly with data, and the more you learn on your discovery, the more the tree changes, and branches are created, closed, folded into themselves, everything is open to changes. And what was the second point? The second point is actually the merging of problems. Yes. So merging of problems is good for prioritization, you say, wait, if I solve this, and this, and this, and this, they're actually all the same sub-problem of some bigger problem. It's very easy to see that. Right, it's very easy to see that. But when it comes to thinking about solutions, and solving just that one for a moment. If along the way we see that it solves this branch, and this branch, and this branch, well nothing to be done, nothing is in a silo. you improve the UX in something, there's a chance it touches all kinds of other parts in the product, excellent. But first of all let's make sure we solved the smallest problem we found. Right, so you start from small wins? Is that the idea? I don't know if it's small wins, more like really well-defined wins. I agree, but...

Eyal David: [26:27] Okay, so I'm missing something. We have the KPI up top. Yes. Well, at the branch level there are also actions I take, we didn't talk about it, there are all kinds of... basically I start doing experiments, like maybe it's worth digging into this, but when I choose what to focus on actually just, I say, if I know what my metric is, do you put some kind of estimate of how much this problem is worth to me? When I can. When I can connect it with data and come and say,

Shuki Aharonovich: [26:49] this problem recurs X times a month, and this problem recurs Y times a month, or this problem is, if we solve it, it'll unlock X percent of something something for us, then yes. And sometimes you don't have it, but you have to go on gut feeling and familiarity with the domain, but yes. but yes, I actually do want to nuance this, that it's really important to build it with data. Sure, sure. As much as possible, when you have it then of course.

Eyal David: [27:13] and if not, then maybe there are other tactics worth it. Right, which is in the end, it's your common sense,

Shuki Aharonovich: [27:20] from having sat and talked with lots of stakeholders. Which is data. Right, it's qualitative data, right, it totally is. But you have to use data, and it really, just, I, would do, they didn't call it that back then, but when I had a startup, so 12 years ago, so we also did something like that, we didn't call it that, and we found problems, that's the truth. And if there's no data,

Eyal David: [27:43] then it really can go in less good directions. Right, and your safeguard here, is that you share the Opportunity Trees, other people, other PMs, other stakeholders, and they can call your bluff, right, they kind of tell you, wait, why is this even here?

Shuki Aharonovich: [27:57] it's not interesting. It really shapes the story for you, essentially. We're in the end an enterprise company, and it's enterprises, it's not big data, it's not big scale, it's very qualitative, we have a hypothesis, we go, and talk, users, talk, two, three, users, research the problem in depth, if we have a solution to present, we try to present it to the customer and get feedback. Apologize for it and present it? As you said earlier that you apologize, when you present. Yeah, yeah, so sorry that we're dragging you into a discussion about a solution, dear customer, but yeah. so we of course try to do as much validation as possible for our solutions before we release them, lots of videos like Shuki said and it's a really good concept. To close, Shuki, we've reached the end, so very practical. Cool, any recommendations? So I know, understand that you read a lot, listen to podcasts, do you have some recommendations? So I think my tip number one is a quote I heard and I don't remember where, that even the best athletes in the world need coaches, and I want to say that every product manager needs to constantly look for how to improve and learn, on the assumption that the way we do product management. at the company you work at is probably not the best in the world, on the assumption that both in Israel and even if it were the best in the world, things are constantly changing, and tactics that helped you, helped a certain company win the competition in a certain area, aren't tactics that are right now, or they've become more of commodities and everyone knows them, and you have to keep sharpening these skills, and there's so much help available out there, books, articles, podcasts, etc. etc., and the second thing within that, is that I think. that landing at a good product company and working with good product leaders is a crazy unlock for product management. you basically don't know what you don't know, so when you work at such companies with such people, you can't believe that such work processes are possible. Many times when I talk with other people about how we work at Augury, their eyes light up for a moment, wait, does that really work for you.

Eyal David: [29:59] but what happens with R&D, what happens with R&D, and R&D don't understand when you talk about business or things? It seems, I don't think so, when you talk.

Shuki Aharonovich: [30:08] they talk about business and everyone's rallied to it, so yes, totally. And then to see it happening, it's something people don't believe you about. So I think as a product manager, if you can work hard, or can, can work hard, to get to a good, in the end to a good product company, and then also do validation that it's a good product company, and there are tons of questions about what to ask in the interview process for a workplace, in order to understand. would you suggest this also to someone who isn't yet a product manager, and wants to get into a company actually through a different role? It's the best thing to do, but that product work for sure. If you can join and start earlier at a good product company, and not pass through less good product companies, and then in the end arrive. I went through the path of starting at less good product companies and then advancing to better product companies. It taught me a lot, and I think a lot of that experience is worthwhile, to see a picture of the world. coming up. And also to appreciate what I see now in the work process, and also to understand how the work process, it's like sometimes I see at Augury signs where we're moving in the wrong direction, and I know how to flag it, because I saw what happens at the end of this process. In the end we end up as a company where there's some C-level dictating your roadmap, I think, but that it's both this and also actually finding the company that suits you better from a product standpoint.

Eyal David: [31:24] Mm-hmm, so along the way we also gave a tip for PMs and beginner PMs. Thank you so much, Shuki, it was wonderful. Thank you very much. Bye bye.