Orly Stern Izhaki is Vice President of Product Management & Strategy at Payoneer, a financial platform and solution for cross-border payments for SMBs. She began her career at Bank Leumi, one of the largest corporations in the Middle East, where she worked for 14 years. Orly then became one of the founders of Pepper, Israel’s first digital bank, where she directed the product management function, and served as Chief Digital Officer at Menora Mivtachim Insurance LTD. Before her current role at Payoneer, Orly held two leadership roles at Wix: General Manager and VP Products, Premium Services and Head of Company, Wix Restaurants.
In our conversation, Orly talks about how expanding products to global markets requires adjusting components of the user journey — even for things as small as an address field — based on the market, region, or culture. She discusses the differences between being a PM for B2B versus B2C products, including the importance of B2C product teams talking extensively with customers. Orly also shares examples from the globalization strategies from her previous roles, including an instance where she redesigned the entire pricing page for different markets.
I would start by saying that I believe that the essence of product management is the same in any industry. It always relies on the same skills — product sense, product execution, and product leadership. However, there’s no doubt that moving between industries sharpened my skills as a product leader and proved to me that although the essence of product management is the same, there are nuances.
For example, in fintech, everything revolves around people’s money. It’s more delicate and sensitive, and you should take this into account when you build products. You need to pay lots of attention to trust. Trust is especially important when it comes to money. Fintech is heavily regulated, therefore you have to constantly balance customer and business needs with the regulation and compliance requirements. In SaaS, on the other hand, it’s all about scale, self-service, and the ability to monetize in different markets for a wide range of customers.
There are many differences between working as a PM for B2C compared to B2B, such as the relationship with customers. In B2C, the scale is huge, so you have lots of data, but it’s much more difficult to interact with customers and create relationships. Again, the essence of product management is to always understand customer needs, behavior, and intent of using your products. You still want to work very closely with them to understand these components and make the right decisions.
With B2B, it’s easier to create this relationship because the scale is smaller. In most cases, you interact with the customers more frequently. You have less data to learn from, though, so it’s more difficult to see the impact of what you’re doing. In B2C, you see it much more quickly.
I also think that the commitment to delivering features and products is different when it comes to consumers or businesses. With businesses, the ETA is very strict. If you commit to something, you should meet the deadline. Because of the scale and the low engagement and interaction with B2C customers, it’s less strict. You want to add more value for your customers, but if you are not meeting the specific deadline, nothing urgent will happen.
It’s really easy to fall into the trap of not talking enough with customers when you work in B2C. I would ask my product managers to have a discussion or interview with a user at least once a week. You need a mindset of striving to be in touch with customers all the time.
One way to do this is to focus on usability testing. If you’ve already developed a product or a prototype, you can ask customers to interact with the product before beginning the development phase. This way, you’ll get their feedback and see how they react. Another way is when you build your roadmap, work to understand the next piece of value you can deliver. Have open interviews and talks with users to get a sense of how they use the product, what is missing, how they use competitors’ solutions, and so on.
In other cases, we would physically meet customers and map the way that they work by visiting their offices or co-working spaces. Seeing how they work helped us identify additional opportunities to add value and adjust our product for them.
In one of my previous roles, we identified a particular journey as a main paint point for customers. This journey was related to connecting a domain. It also created a huge load on support, reflecting the fact that it was very difficult for users to understand..
We tried various changes and improvements in the product, but when we started doing user calls and interviews, we realized that the content we used was not good enough. It was so easy to solve, and it created a huge impact. The A/B test showed great results. It was so simple, but no one saw it. It was like we were blind to it. The content was not accurate enough and was somewhat misleading. In just one day, we were able to change it, ease the experience of the customers, and also reduce operational costs.
I’ve been lucky to work in so many different regions and countries. Local markets are always easier, whereas going global creates dimensions of complexity. With that, scaling globally also creates more opportunities to improve and develop the company and your personal skill set. Going global also implies caring for different experiences based on the market, region, or culture. That can mean different communication channels or content because certain things can be acceptable in one culture but not in another.
The concept of localization extends so much further than just translation. It even starts from the way that an address is shown on the screen. Different regions will use different fields and write them differently. In a previous role, we had Japanese users and had to support vertical writing. People from western cultures might miss that.
You really have to get into the mindset of the specific region, and culture, and you want to build a product like it was built for that area. That sometimes means creating a different customer journey altogether.
In a previous role, I was in charge of monetization and the pricing page of the company. We catered to 260 million users across the globe in 190 countries. At some point, we had to change the strategy of the pricing page itself — the plans, pricing, and journey of the purchase. We worked on every aspect of this journey to support the specific market that we wanted to get traffic from.
We started with the look and feel of the page. We did a test in one country and then changed the roadmap to do this more frequently because we saw great results. When a user got to the checkout page, we wanted to add more alternative payment methods that are supported in each specific market. Our focus was on customer obsession and creating the best customer experience that we could. We measure this by tracking conversions and support tickets.
For purchasing the payment plan or other products we sold, yes — it’s about conversion rate. But you also want to check which plans you specifically sold, as well as the billing cycle. If the customer is more engaged, they’ll probably go with a longer billing cycle, such as yearly or every two years instead of month-to-month. Bounce rate is also important for measuring drop-offs, and when I worked on our integration with restaurants, we measured customer usage rates.
Aside from job-related skills, personal skills are very important, if not more important. There are many job skills that you can teach and train, but personality isn’t like that. I go for candidates with high energy and those who I want to work with. During the interview, it’s easy to gauge if a person is positive and whether or not I believe that they will add to the atmosphere and environment in the office.
Another important component is motivation for the role. Especially, in product, you have to be excited about what you work on. Additionally, it’s all about relationships and who you work with, so I want to make sure that a candidate can put ego aside and collaborate. A can-do approach is really valuable. Everything is so dynamic nowadays and organizations change all the time, so I also want to make sure that I work with people who can deal with changes and have flexibility and mobility.
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