Leader Spotlight: Solving for everyday moments, with Shira Gershoni

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Shira Gershoni is VP of Product Management at Asurion, a provider of device insurance and warranty and support services for cell phones, consumer electronics, and home appliances. She has over 14 years of experience in creating market-leading ecommerce and SaaS products. Shira started her career in web development and later transitioned to technical product management while at Eternity-IT. Before joining Asurion, she held product management leadership positions at NeoGames and Soluto.

In our conversation, Shira talks about how she comes together with her team to think about the real-life moments or frustrations that impact the customer’s overall experience and the business results. She discusses how omnichannel and UI strategy is critical to modern organizations, and how it’s crucial to build personalized experiences across all platforms. Shira also shares examples of how she gets priceless feedback by being present in physical locations and pretending to be a customer.

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A new emphasis on personalization and UX optimization

Could you start by sharing a bit about Asurion?

Asurion is the biggest player in the tech care industry. Tech-care is a new world that came to life because of all the technological innovations in our society. Our mission is to help people with their tech whenever, however, and wherever. The software, hardware, and safety of using technological devices are all part of what we do.

You might be familiar with our chain of brick-and-mortar stores, uBreakiFix. We’re all about fixing devices and providing tech support whenever needed. You can find one uBreakiFix store in almost every neighborhood.

There’s been so much evolution around the role of the product manager. From your perspective, how have you seen the role evolve over the years?

The role of a product manager has evolved at a similar pace with technology in the last 15 years. I’m very privileged to have witnessed that entire evolution from day one. When I started my career, a product manager was not really a thing. I was able to help shape the profession, alongside a network of product managers worldwide, and make the role what it is today.

The focus of product managers 10 years ago was mainly on execution. The role was mostly requirements gathering and project management. As the industry evolved and the consumer became more central to companies, product management became essential. Today, the focus of product management is on strategic leadership, understanding the market you operate in, and cross-functional collaboration. Just as much as the product manager is a newer role, other new roles sprung from that, such as customer success and some marketing-specific roles.

For me, product leadership is all about empowering my team and letting their personalities shine in their work, while also making sure we demonstrate results. A huge part of my role is finding that sweet spot between running an innovative, cohesive team and delivering objectives.

In your experience, how has the PM role evolved specifically in ecommerce and SaaS?

In ecommerce, the experience is no longer as simple as walking into a store, picking up whatever shirt you like, and checking out. Now, personalization is so important. If you and I both go to Macys.com, we’ll have two different experiences. That’s what makes ecommerce so successful these days.

Knowing your customer and investing in contextual personalization, UX optimization, and integrated omnichannel experiences are critical in ecommerce. In my role today, I think a lot about what happens to a customer who started online but ended up in one of our brick-and-mortar locations. It’s vital to think about each and every moment and understand the complexities within the customer journey. You want to make sure you design your product in a contextual and meaningful way — from digital all the way to in person.

Specifically in SaaS, there’s a different flavor to it. A lot of SaaS businesses are B2B, and sometimes B2B2C. There’s an emphasis there on how to create recurring revenue. So, as a product manager, we think about modular bundles and less about “one size fits all.” If you think about Microsoft now versus 10 years ago, today you can pick and choose the Office Suite elements you need for your organization instead of having to buy the full package.

Omnichannel and thinking about different personas

You mentioned that omnichannel is a huge component of a business’s ability to be successful. Do you have an example of a successful omnichannel strategy that inspires you or your work?

An example I love and really resonate with is the Disney Parks app. It enhances the park visit by providing a digital dimension alongside the physical rides, which offers a unified experience for users across multiple touchpoints. It really highlights the best components of how omnichannel has developed:

• Personalization — The app uses user data to offer unique recommendations and notifications tailored to each person
• Seamless transition between physical and digital — Whether you’re browsing the app at home to prepare for a visit to Disney (e.g., making restaurant reservations or booking rides), using it for navigation in the parks, or accessing your photos afterward, the experience transitions perfectly between the physical and digital realms
• Feedback loop — The app provides a feedback loop where users can offer input, reviews, and ratings in real-time and within specific contexts

Earlier, you mentioned the uBreakiFix network of stores. Like many major brands, some locations are owned outright while others are franchised. How do you create a consistent experience, particularly with the franchised stores?

We want all of our stores to be equally successful no matter the location. From a product manager’s point of view, this creates another persona for us to think about. And I love that. Sometimes, people get confused between a user, a customer, and a client. Those things all come to life when you’re thinking about who you’re solving a problem for and what that problem is.

When I create products, I consider not only the end user (Asurion’s customer), but also the expert (Asurion’s representative) who’s solving the customer’s problem. How can I empower the expert to solve the problem in the best possible way? If we think about a physical store, there are the employees, but there are also the store managers. So how do we develop products that are also essential and beneficial for the managers? We could choose to develop products that help increase the visibility of their business, or create different tools and capabilities to assist with promotion and advertising, etc.

Iterating from an endless feedback loop

What are the biggest challenges that product managers face specifically in SaaS or ecommerce?

When you created a digital product 15 years ago as a product manager, you had to think about the desktop experience. There was no thought about responsiveness or mobile at all — there was only one specific platform to solve for and a very straightforward customer journey. Then along came mobile devices like iPhones, and suddenly, we had to figure out how to deal with more platforms, cater to different types of users, and handle all this new data coming from different directions that we just couldn’t brush off.

Today, the sheer magnitude of how many platforms your product exists and lives on is so different compared to what it used to be. With that comes balancing competing priorities and stakeholder expectations, which has always been part of the PM role. I find that this is a common challenge for every product manager. Also, the feedback loop is endless. You have reviews, social media, influencers, and regular people walking into a store. As a PM, it’s challenging to capture and process all of that and not just default to what you think needs to be done.

There are so many more feedback loops nowadays. What is your process for incorporating customer feedback into your products?

Some people think that a VP of product sets the roadmap and then sits back to watch everything unfold. That’s really not the case. I love putting myself in the customer’s shoes, or sometimes in our case with Asurion, the experts’ shoes, to solve both sides of a problem. I make it a habit to go into our stores and be a “fly on the wall” or pretend that I’m a customer.

Sometimes I’m just there to test a specific interaction. Let’s say we’ve launched a product and I want to see how that goes. I listen to the chatter in the store, communication between an expert and a customer, etc. I get so much out of this experience from being present in the physical location where our customers are, where the problem lies. It’s priceless feedback.

There are also digital tools to do this organically. Session replay or other features allow you to see and explore what the customer is doing. We use tools to schedule time with customers to interview them, which we love doing when we have an up-and-coming product release. We want to see people’s initial reactions and evolve the product accordingly.

Re-thinking small moments

How do you balance data-driven decisions and intuition, especially when the data is inconclusive or contradicts what you were expecting?

This is a fundamental part of our profession. As product managers, our intuition is more than just gut feeling; it’s an informed gut feeling. We have to know our business, unique elements, seasonality, trends, etc. Good product managers need to be aware of those things and evaluate them constantly.

For example, we cannot look at one single week and say, “Oh my gosh, our sales are down. I wonder what happened,” and try to analyze within just that one-week view and retrospect on recent changes we’ve made. Instead, we need to think about gut instinct as a way to back up our domain expertise and market insights. A lot of times, we try creative ways to vet those hypotheses, such as A/B testing, analytics tools, user behavior data, interviews, and more. Those often give us indicators and starting points.

Do you have an example of a time when you learned something unexpected from a customer conversation or being onsite at a store?

Sure. As part of the Asurion subscription, we offer customers the ability to repair or replace their phone when they go to one of our stores, but there is a process. They need to file a claim and then we can repair or replace it for them. One of the friction points I’ve noticed is that people walk into our stores to submit a claim for their broken phone, but their phone isn’t working. Now, they’re in a bit of a pickle. What are they supposed to do? Of course, we knew what the process was supposed to be, but seeing the customer’s frustration at that moment made us re-evaluate the solution.

I work closely with our VP of design, Dan Tulloh. We love partnering to think about moments like that. In that situation, there is very little the expert could do to make the customer’s life better without the right tools or products. That led us to think about in-store kiosks or tablets so customers can do those ongoing, routine tasks that we originally thought about as a small element in the process. For the consumer, however, this could be a huge element that they were not able to do in the way that we intended. It makes things smoother, saves time, and affects the bottom line results in various ways.

When you’re designing something, it may initially seem black and white, but sometimes there are many shades of gray to the problem. You need to be on-site and present to be able to observe and pick up on it.

Have you found that sometimes, you’re not necessarily understanding a new problem, but a new lens on a problem’s magnitude?

Yes. In product management, we use the term “happy path” a lot. You design for the happy path, but we all know there’s not one true happy path. Every single customer has their own circumstances, so you need to think about the different variations.

I don’t like to use the term edge cases because when you say that, specifically with your engineering team, they’ll sometimes go, “OK, so it’s not part of the MVP. Let’s not take care of that quite yet.” Instead, I like to think about it as flavors or variations of the happy path we’re trying to create and prioritize them based on potential impact. We want to build quick detours within the happy path without turning them into edge cases that are immediately deprioritized.

Knowing your customers and creating valuable experiences

You mentioned having a passion for identifying business growth opportunities. How do you strike a balance between guiding your team’s vision while still encouraging innovation?

At the end of the day, my job is to be plugged into the company’s mission and business objectives. I hope to set clear objectives for my team while still setting a culture of experimentation. As leaders, we need to be mindful of the important details, and I’m a firm believer in being there during brainstorming sessions and “rolling up your sleeves” to help guide and concentrate our efforts.

I have an incredible team of product managers, and of course they don’t need me in every meeting, but it’s important for me to help shape the way they view a specific problem or poke holes in solutions as needed. Often, we fall in love with the first solution we think about, but there are others we need to explore. My job is to enable that.

It’s also important to be part of my team’s day-to-day and put a spotlight on areas I want them to dive deeper into. I’m also trying to make sure my team is constantly expanding their horizons. It’s easy not to think beyond our own products, but the reality is that our competitors and partners have products too. Every now and then, I ask the team to do a full dive review of a competitor product or think about new user journeys with a partner product.

We’ve been talking a lot about the voice of the customer. Could you talk about how you leverage VOC to create frictionless, memorable customer experiences?

Knowing your customer is the most critical component of creating memorable experiences. You can make your customer really frustrated or extremely happy by doing the most simple things. For example, think about navigation in your product or website in terms of solving for moments instead of just reflecting your website’s tree.

For example, we’re always thinking about when users first visit our website. How do we make sure they will find what they need in that first click? How do we make sure they are able to complete a process within less than 60 seconds? We want our website to easily enable that. Constant product evolution with new AI enhancements are helping us get there.

Another area that’s critical, but that I’ve found companies often underestimate, is how customers find you. How do they know how to use your product? Well, most people go to Google first. As product managers, sometimes we completely forget that often this is the primary path to our product. We think about how to solve the user’s problem after they land on our product, but we don’t consider anything before that.

But if we take two steps back, we notice that users started with Google and wanted to find the result that is the most applicable to their problem right now. They clicked the first appropriate answer they saw. This means that when you’re tailoring your product, you also need to think about what search queries would bring you to a top result for users to find you.

I believe in being precise and intentional when we’re thinking about creating user experiences and finding that sweet spot between cost and convenience from the customer’s standpoint and your company’s results.