Making Product Management Great Again
Over the last decade, we have seen the “Startup Nation” story become a main Israeli narrative, worldwide. The world’s opinion of Israel is that we are remarkably innovative and expeditious in problem solving and delivery. However, to date, we have not been overly successful in building many substantial internet businesses. Excluding a few outliers, the numbers tell an interesting story about Israeli exits — they stayed constant over the last decade, at around 100 per annum. Even though the exit value doubled over that time, it is still under USD80mn. What does it say about us, in the startup arena?
There are many theories. My opinion is that we don’t know how to systematically create success and improve on it, using experience-based, collectively acquired knowledge.
Growing a startup from 0 to 1 is difficult. Growing it from 1 to global success requires a different skill set, best practices and essential processes. In this latter case, the goal should be reaching product-market-fit in a variety of markets and user cohorts. I call all of the above “Product Management”.
Product Management is not about the product manager alone. It’s about how to think, as a leader of a company, in a product-driven fashion. How to focus on what impacts customers most. How to chase a long-term vision while achieving commercial short-term success. How to connect the whole company to the global problem and motivate solutions, as a collective effort.
I believe world class product execution is the best lever to pull, to increase the value of the Israeli startup arena in an order of magnitude. Over the years, such experience has been a scarce talent in the Israeli community. It is a fairly new skill, in comparison to other participants in the product execution cycle. Software engineers and designers have been around for decades. Product Management as a core skill has not developed in a meaningful way in Israel to date.
The reasons for this reality are many. While the Israeli military is a significant source of engineering talent, it has not been successful in training PMs. Military Products are still managed by committees, so the fresh talent pipeline is weak. There are no benchmark standards for Product Management across different Israeli companies. There is no recognised organisation that offers recognised courses for budding Product Managers. The education of most Israeli companies’ leaders does not emphasize the development of product management skills. Hence, leaders do not consider applying PM methodologies to achieve success and the awareness for the value of strong PM is low. The list goes on.
A bunch of us product management leaders have joined forces to find the most efficient way to improve this reality, by an order of magnitude. We have identified several courses of action, such as training and certifying new product managers and mentoring companies’ leadership teams to become product-driven. By working on simultaneous efforts, we can meaningfully improve the current state of Israeli Product Management. We believe that this represents a tremendous opportunity to build better products and, in turn, increase the total value of our community.
Aleph has been bullish about knowledge-sharing and strengthening the local ecosystem by connecting experienced entrepreneurs with young founders. They also stress the need for the Israeli ecosystem to start thinking long term and transition from Startup Nation to Scaleup Nation. That approach is aligned with our goals. In order to build world class companies you have to build world class products because, unfortunately, great technology will not achieve it alone.
In light of that, Gil (FB), Meeka (Behalf), Boaz (Bizzabo), Uri (Meerkat/Houseparty) and I decided to run an Aleph.bet workshop together, to share some of our experiences in building and operating products at a significant scale. With Avigail and Maria from Aleph, we brought together a short list of successful teams, who are battling growth challenges. Our aspiration is to provide frameworks and tools which have been successful in our companies. However, we are not stopping here, as we would like to assist the companies in implementing the tools and ideas that we shared. We will follow up on implementation with each of the participating teams. We hope this commitment from ourselves will improve the teams’ outcome and establish momentum for building world-class product execution competence, across the Israeli startup arena. If proven successful, we will enhance the circle and coach additional teams.
I believe it is the beginning of a meaningful effort to improve the collective value of the startups in our community. I hope that additional product leaders will be inspired to contribute to our effort and that more teams will get the appetite to become world-class at product execution! If you want to join our collective effort, send me a note to yuval.samet(at)gmail.com.
