Season Recap

Rob Goodman:

Hi, everyone. And welcome to Ready for Takeoff, the new micro podcast series from Wix, all about hyper growth. I'm your host, Rob Goodman, Executive Producer for Content at Wix. In each episode, we go deep on one single topic in under 15 minutes, sharing insights and lessons learned from the leaders that built Wix, as we talk about everything it takes to build a world class global organization. On today's episode, to close out this season, we're going all in on the topic of leadership and we're doing it a little differently, taking a look back at some of the boldest insights about leadership that we've collected both from our recent episodes and also in new, never before heard stories we'll share with you today. Leadership at its core is perhaps the single most important factor for companies, teams and product success, especially when it comes to navigating hypergrowth. So we hope you find these lessons useful on your path from startup to global powerhouse or at whatever stage in between you might be. First up, we have Wix Vice President of Engineering, Aviran Mordo. Here's what Aviran had to say about leadership.

Aviran Mordo:

As a manager, working at a fast-pace, hypergrowth company, you are always busy. Your day-to-day is packed with constant context switches and you need to solve a lot of problems and you're afraid to let go of a lot of things. And "If I won't do it, then it will not happen." It really burns you out. And one of the problems is that while you're trying to manage your day-to-day, you don't have time to think about the future. And at some point, you know that there are a lot of things to be fixed, because you are always evolving and growing. And you try to be always reactive to fix those things, to take care of your customers. In my case, it's Wix engineers. They're my users. They're my customers. You try to solve all their problems. And at some point you notice the things that you did until now just don't work.

Aviran Mordo:

And the frustration is growing and growing until it breaks. The thing is because I didn't have the wisdom and the capacity to let go and take some time to actually think, I was always reactive. And once I realized that, and it was almost too late because things actually started to break and not work, I was lucky enough to get some help, to recruit managers to actually help me and take some things away from me. And it freed me to think about other things that otherwise I wouldn't have time to reach and to think strategically instead of always "Okay, what I need to do right now?" This is one of the most important things. And I always tell my teams, my managers, "You need to take some time or free up some time in order for you to have the time to think. Reacting to problems and fixing things is great. This is your job. But your job is also to think ahead."

Rob Goodman:

Aviran's core advice here is to make sure you build out time to think ahead and not just to be in the practice of reacting. And in order to do that, you're going to have to hire great people to help you. And that brings us to our next nugget of wisdom from Michal Bignitz, General Manager and Head of Partners at Wix. Here, Michal discusses the value of hiring to support your goals and counting on your team.

Michal Bignitz:

Great teams are made of the people that are working within them. So hire great professionals that you trust, that you respect, that you will enjoy working with and the rest will follow. I think that when I'm taking on a new group – and I've moved a lot in Wix, so I headed a few companies and a guild, I've managed diverse teams and mission and structure – and I think that the first thing that I'm doing every time that I'm having a new mission is, first of all, to understand what are we trying to achieve? Where are we aiming for? Who are the people that I would need next to me in order to achieve that? What is the structure that will support that? What is the structure that I need to create with the right people that will help me succeed? And I think that bringing super strong talents and let them take it from there, this is something that I truly believe in.

Michal Bignitz:

Of course, you need to create the guidance and the strategy and the clear vision, but eventually when you bring the right and strong people, you should let them do what they know and not less important than that, you should let them feel you count on them to do that.

Rob Goodman:

This idea of hiring great people and then letting them go do their thing also lines up with what our next guest had to say. David Schwartz, Vice President of Product, offers this metaphor. Okay, start your engines.

David Schwartz:

I'm a motorbike rider. And there is something that we call reverse steering when you turn a motorbike. You don't turn it like a car. You don't steer the wheel, because you cannot. So what we basically do, us riders, we call it “look, steering wheel, gas.” So what you basically do, you, first of all, you look where you're going. The motorbike will go where your chin is directed. So you'll see good riders, their heads twisted to the side and they foresee the future and they foresee where the bike is going to turn and that's where they're looking. And then you give a steering command. Now the steering command doesn't have to be strong, but it has to be very, very decisive. You want to turn the bike to the side. It's a frightening thing. So you need to be decisive. You press the handlebar on the reverse side actually.

David Schwartz:

And the bike turns and then comes the hardest thing. Because if you keep on holding the handlebars and the steering wheel, the bike will not turn. That's the way motorbikes work. You need to let go of the steering wheel, really release the handle bars. The hardest thing in motorbike riding. So you release the handle bars and then you open the gas. I think leading talent is just like that. We need to have a bike that is a good bike and the tires have to be with the right air pressure. So that's the equivalent of hiring good people and paying them well and making them a real nice environment to work in and so on and so forth. I think there is something that you still have to do yourself as a leader of leaders.

David Schwartz:

You need to know where you're going. Just like you look to the turn in a motorbike. You need to look at the turn in business. You need to know where you're going. You need to communicate this very well to tell the story of the strategy very clearly to your leaders, actually, to all your people you manage. I sometimes sit with groups of hundreds of people and just tell the story of the strategy. So understand why I'm doing things. So you tell the story of the strategy, which is the equivalent of giving a steering command in reverse steering. And then you let go, because if you won't let go, the talent will be really miserable. Because talent doesn't like to be micromanaged. Doesn't like to be managed at all. Explain to them where they need to go. Let them fly.

Rob Goodman:

Letting go is sometimes easier said than done. Miki Baram, General Manager at Wix, talked about how to let go. It's all about building the vision, making sure everyone knows their role in bringing it to life and then letting the team fly. Here's Miki.

Miki Baram:

Super challenging, letting go. You want the product to be your own and the way that you vision it. And there are a lot of small decisions to take every day. And you're not necessarily there if you're managing a lot of things. So how do you let go? Because it's super important that you will do it. And I found that also here, the greater vision is the key for me, super helpful, because if I understand the vision, the greater thing that we're going towards, then I understand my role in the ecosystem of creating the product. And I understand that suddenly the day-to-day decisions are supportive, but it gets into proportion. If we go that way or if we go this way, in product, there are a lot of ways to implement something and it will get the same result. Or not the same result, but it will get your main intent.

Miki Baram:

You want people to feel a certain way. You can do it one hand and you can do it the other. So if you want to give your people the sense of ownership and freedom, sometimes you need to go with something that you haven't imagined, as long as it's aligned with the vision and the way that you think that the product end goal should go. So every time when I'm struggling with the notion of letting go, I think about what's above the decision or the thing that I need to let go. This actually helps me a lot.

Rob Goodman:

You may have picked up on a theme here. At Wix, we're big on ownership and autonomy. And we see that quality as pivotal to thriving in hypergrowth mode for startups and teams building out global organizations. But that ownership and autonomy doesn't just happen on its own. Vice President of People in the U.S., Idit Carmon, shares what goes into creating the culture where people have agency, they feel connected and supported and, ultimately, they like what they're doing and who they're doing it with.

Idit Carmon:

So I think, for me, this is trust. I trust the leadership. I trust this company. And how do you gain that when you have so many people joining the company during the past two years that have never met each other? And what we saw, specifically in the U.S., is that we've hired so many people, we also hired their team leaders, and their team leaders' managers, and their group managers and site managers. And so we have a chain full of people that are completely new to the company, new to this culture, new to the Wix way of managing, which is sometimes maybe not typical or not similar to what they knew and how do you create that connection? And I believe that with the connection you can also create trust, you can nurture this trust. And I feel like at the beginning of this journey, we were very reliant on the fact that we will go back to the office and things will just go back to how they were.

Idit Carmon:

And once we realized that it's not happening and it will change probably for the long term, we started to make things differently in the way we onboard and the way we train and maybe the support we give managers in that sense. So people really feel that they're still connected. And I have to say, it's very hard to measure it. How do you measure trust? How do you measure connection? It's hard. You learn a lot from conversation with people. You learn a lot from people that are leaving, unfortunately. So you know what worked for them, what did not work and you're trying to improve in that sense, but you really need to put that on the top of your priority. And this is definitely for us top of priority to see how we're able to help people get connected. I want everybody at Wix to feel happy waking up in the morning and trusting their team and trusting their managers and trusting the company on a daily basis. Otherwise, why would they?

Rob Goodman:

For our last insight we have Nir Zohar, the President and Chief Operating Officer at Wix. Nir discusses what it takes to approach challenges the likes of which no leader, or really no one, has faced before. We've seen so much of that over the past couple of years. And seeing the opportunities in those most difficult of times is really crucial to great leadership. As a little background of what Nir is about to share, Wix has about a thousand employees in Ukraine and when the conflict started there, Nir and a small but mighty volunteer team made up of folks from across the entire company banded together to help get teammates and their families out of the country and into safety. Here's Nir talking about leadership and facing challenges for the first time in business and in life.

Nir Zohar:

I think when a company grows very fast, there are so many challenges that I haven't done before all the time. So the magic at the end of the day is the team, is the people. If you take the Ukrainian crisis, for example, I gave direction, but nothing was actually done by me, but by a team of Israelis and Lithuanians and Ukrainians and Polish that just jumped in and each took upon himself to do some part of it, with the operational team leading the effort and assigning the roles. So you get very quickly into a cadence of execution. That being said, it's true that these are challenges that we weren't prepared for. But I think that generally we have a culture, we have a DNA of trying not to assume that we know what we are doing based on past experience.

Nir Zohar:

Past experience is extremely important obviously, and it really helps you out. But when things change quickly, you also need to be able to be open enough and honest enough with yourself, to have the integrity to say, "This is something that I haven't done before, so let's not assume that I know how to deal with it. Let's stop, zoom out, get some advice, talk to someone else that has either done this before, or even if not, just rely on someone else's advice or perspective to see that I'm doing the right thing and adapt and keep changing." I think in the past month with Ukraine, we've been changing so many things all the time, because we made an assumption. We tried it out. Sometimes it was right, sometimes it failed or sometimes something just changed in the middle. So even if the original assumption made sense, reality changed fast enough in order to break it apart. And we had to get back to the drawing board.

Nir Zohar:

And I think that if you are always there in trying to not become complacent and assuming what's right and keep on questioning, then you'll end up making mistakes on the way, but also getting it right. And I think that this is something that played a big, big deal for us throughout this whole experience. And the other thing is, and I think it's true for these events. It's true for the business challenges. Any challenge holds some opportunity in it. You need to also zoom out and try to figure out what is the opportunity, what you can achieve out of it. Even in Ukraine, one of the things that is the opportunity, one of the things that happened to us, I think that it injected a lot of sense of what's most important to the company. It gave everyone something to rally around, which was a very strong bonding effect for the Ukrainian team, but also for everyone else.

Nir Zohar:

So there's always an opportunity in each challenge. And this is also part of what we need to do as a business leader or as a leader in general is to also figure out how we can grow stronger from what we have to go through now?

Rob Goodman:

Such great insights from Nir about always finding the opportunity amidst the challenge as a leader. Remember to check out all these full episodes for even more lessons on navigating hypergrowth, from making good mistakes, to transforming culture, vision setting and bringing value. You don't want to miss these episodes and don't worry, they're super short. So it won't take you long to breeze through the whole season and take what you've learned into the workplace with you. Thanks, everyone, for listening to this episode and this season of Ready for Takeoff.

Rob Goodman:

Ready for Takeoff is brought to you by Wix. Now, if you don't know about Wix, we're the all-in-one platform for running your business online, trusted by over 210 million people around the world. With Wix, you get incredible security, reliability, performance and SEO, no matter the kind of business you run or the size. With Wix, anything is possible. So visit wix.com to start building and growing your business today.

Rob Goodman:

Thanks so much for listening. You can find more episodes and information on our website at wix.com/readyfortakeoff. Ready for Takeoff is hosted and produced by me, Rob Goodman, at Wix. With production by Lindsay Jean Thomson at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Our Executive Producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. We'll see you next time.