Nitzan Shaer Podcast Transcript
Nitzan Shaer joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Nitzan Shaer. Nitzan Shaer is an accomplished entrepreneur and the CEO of WEVO, a pioneering user research platform that leverages human augmented AI to deliver reliable insights in a fraction of the time traditional tools require. As the fourth startup that Shaer has been a part of, either as a Co- Founder or as an early team member, WEVO represents his continuous fascination with what drives people to make decisions.
Before embarking on his journey with WEVO, Shaer served at Skype, where he gained experience working with a diverse range of customers from around 150 countries. This experience highlighted the challenge of understanding user experiences across different cultures and markets. Ultimately inspiring him to build a platform that would provide user experience professionals with actionable insights into customer preferences.
Well, good afternoon, Nitzan welcome to the show.
[00:01:04] Nitzan Shaer: Brian, it’s great to be with you.
[00:01:06] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you again for making the time. I know traversing the globe. Luckily, we’re here in the U. S., but sometimes I do traverse 40 countries thus far and growing. So again, I appreciate your time. And this is so, so awesome today. Thank you.
[00:01:20] Nitzan Shaer: Fantastic. Excited to be here.
[00:01:22] Brian Thomas: Well, let’s just jump in here Nitzan, and we’ve got a lot of information to get out to our audience with your story. So, let’s talk about your career in product management. You’re a board member, a senior executive. Now you’re the Co-Founder and CEO of WEVO. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:40] Nitzan Shaer: Well, Brian from a young age I was passionate to understand what makes people take action. I’m a child of a psychologist, so we, the topic of what makes people tick. Was often discussed at home. Combining that with the desire to understand how things work and building from the ground up.
I think those are the 2 main elements that drove my career after studying engineering, I joined my startup straight after my military service and never look back. Got the bug, of building with new things with a team of people serving customers, trying to find out what it is they need and how it is that we can delight them.
WEVO is now the 4th startup that I’m either joining early or co-founding and along the way. I was driven startup after startup by that passion to help people communicate better to understand what it is that makes them take action and to build products from scratch. I think along the way, some of the things that were that came in really handy.
Was that desire to be curious? It’s curious about what it is, what problem it is that people are looking to solve in order to get done whatever it is that they want to, whatever it is that brings them meaning, happiness, and a curiosity to understand what the team ideas are, what others think about my opinions, recognizing our biases, recognizing my own biases, and being surrounded by a team of people that I can go back to, bounce ideas off of, build ideas together, and then build products together.
So, it’s really that combination of curiosity, understanding, Trying to understand what makes people tick a desire to build. And at all times, I will say you asked for a secret of success a good dose of luck along the way. Startups is a business that has many ups. It has many downs as well.
And then many challenging moments in which pushing on and having that commitment that tenacity are key specifically in the area of product and strategy. I’ll just say there’s surrounding yourself with a group of people that you trust people around you that you can air your ideas with and build those ideas with was absolutely key along the way.
[00:04:11] Brian Thomas: Thank you, Nitzan. I appreciate the share. Again, that breadth that diverse experience of yours has certainly contributed to your success and I appreciate you breaking that down for us. Nitzan, your platform touts it creates the right customer experiences faster with more accurate user feedback. How do you measure and improve customer experiences with your platform?
[00:04:30] Nitzan Shaer: Well, Brian, too many experiences that we all have online, I would say digital experiences are just not good enough. Too many of us on a regular basis will encounter a. Experience it’s frustrating. We don’t know how to move forward.
We didn’t have the information we needed in order to complete the task or just took way too long. And that’s something that we’re hoping to solve. So, you ask, how do we measure? Improvement and experiences, which is really the core goal of WEVO is to understand what is wrong with an experience.
What are the opportunities to improve that experience? Well, we measure it by 3 key areas. The 1st one is a task completion. 1% of people actually completed the task that they set out to do. The 2nd one is how long it took them to complete it. You’re ordering a hotel room and a destination that you’re not familiar with.
How long did it take you to actually complete that order? And the 3rd is just a straight up. How easy was it? How delightful was it that experience for you? And we all can leave an experience, even if we did it fairly quickly and succeeded and say, was this fun? Was this enjoyable to do?
Yes. Or was it very frustrating along the way? So those are the three key measures we use, but there are a long set of other measures that pour into it from clarity from to what extent did I understand it? To what extent did I perceive value? So, there’s a mix of numbers that go in there, but those are three ways that we measure success in an online experience.
I just say one more area that’s important over here. One of the things that our customers truly value, and I think this is being emerged even more so after covid is the importance of delighting customers and online experiences so much of what we do. Is online. So many of the times that you first touch company, a brand product is online.
Getting that right and delighting the customer from the get-go is key and making sure that the products release the campaigns we release are truly delighting. Customers can make or break company and their success.
[00:06:47] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I think it’s so important. We talked a lot about this on the podcast and I’ve written a lot of articles about the customer experience. So, I appreciate your insights on this, and I love what your platform is doing. Nitzan. Nitzan, we are a tech platform. We are a tech podcast. I’m a technologist by trade. So, we’d like to ask all of our guests here, you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your tech stack, right?
Is there anything you might be able to touch on with us today?
[00:07:14] Nitzan Shaer: Yeah, we’ve already filed multiple patents. So, as they become public, I’m happy to share elements of the technology that we’ve built, and. Before I do, I just want to say. We really try to be focused, not building technology for the sake of technology, but rather to solve a real human problem.
And we start with a problem that we’re trying to solve. I think all of us understand that as we’re developing new products, as we’re launching new marketing campaigns. It’s a really smart idea to ask the customer what they think about it. We need to recognize that we all are packed with biases on what we think is good.
What we think is going to be readable. What we think is going to be valuable. So, asking somebody else in this case, the customer that you’re intending the product to go to use. Is really a fundamental step, and I think, marketing 101. We all understand that. So the question is, why aren’t all digital experiences put in front of a customer before they go live?
Why aren’t all marketing campaigns and Super Bowl ads put in front of a group of people to tell us? Wait a second. Is this good? Versus all of us having a good time making fun of Super Bowl ads that really missed the mark. And I think there are 2 reasons for it. one is the amount of effort it takes in order to do proper user research and get that feedback.
It could be 30, 50 or more hours to complete that. And the 2nd, one just being the reliability of those studies. Many times, you’ll talk to 8 customers to 12 customers and you say the reliability is so, so, I’m not sure if I’m even going to trust those results.
So those are the two fundamental reasons why people don’t do more user. Research so now to get to the technology part, we’ve poured our technology into solving those 2 problems the time and the reliability. We use generative AI in four different areas to solve those problems. The 1st area we use it to increase reliability is every participant.
that we engage with. We have a generative AI element watching in real time what those people are answering and ensuring that they’re concentrated, that they’re focused on the task ensuring that the person is who they say they are. So that’s in real time. So, we ensure we have quality people.
Second thing we use generative AI to is out of all those respondents. So, we have 120 respondents to each engagement that we’re evaluating, which is a very, very high number in order to bubble up the quotes and the elements of that response that are most important. We use generative AI. So, our customers don’t have to read through everything.
They just read the most important quotes. The third area is using generative AI in order to cluster all of that feedback into groups of thoughts. And finally, it’s actually to write the key insights that need to be taken away. Now, with all the hype around generative AI and the tremendous benefits that it brings, I also want to say we do have a human in the loop that goes through the insights that the generative AI wrote.
And ensures that they are accurate, that they are complete, that it didn’t miss anything. And our human analysts, our human user researchers do find elements to correct and to advance the accuracy of the generative AI. So, it’s really, we’re strong believers in the combination of the 2 in that partnership of generative AI and human.
[00:10:40] Brian Thomas: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. We talk a lot about generative AI just in the last several months on this podcast, but we absolutely need to take advantage of it. At the end of the day the best team is the machine and human working together, but I do appreciate what you all are doing with your platform.
So, thank you, Nitzan. Nitzan, last question of the day. Could you share something from your career experience with our audience today that would be helpful for those looking to grow their career in either product management strategy, et cetera?
[00:11:08] Nitzan Shaer: Yeah, I do not know all the secrets to success on that front.
But happy to share just a couple of things that were Helpful in my career. I think the 1st one is a concept of the 2-way door popularized in a different way by Amazon founder. And. In the 2-way door versus the 1-way door is the concept of trying to make every product decision that you advance to be reversible.
1 way door would be a decision you’re making in order. For example, making the product free, which is extremely hard to reverse because once you make a product free. Starting to charge for it is challenging for many customers. Rather, a two-way door is a decision that you’re introducing that allows you, if it, the experiment doesn’t work to go back on that.
And by making it a two-way door. You’re really enabling your team to move faster and moving fast is the name of the game, getting that customer feedback early on. So, if you feel, if the team feels that you’re talking about a groundbreaking decision that there’s no turning back from, they’re going to spend days, weeks, sometimes even months debating that, collecting more information.
Versus if it was a 2-way door, let’s just experiment and let’s put it out there and doesn’t work. And Jeff basis really instill that in the organization in Amazon to run A – B test on practically any idea that’s raised second element is listening. I talked about this earlier, but I can’t emphasize it enough surrounding yourself as a product manager with people that you can go to, if it is customers, if it is individuals in the organization, if it’s personal advisory board people outside the organization that you can test ideas with, that you can openly talk to about challenges and ideas and get feedback.
That is so critical. Again, recognizing our own biases. And finally, and this is a challenging one, but it’s straddling the big picture and the small details as a product manager. You have to do both continuously you have to pay attention to the small details because. Something small that will break the user experience or a pixel that’s out of place that just doesn’t make it a delightful experience can really hurt results.
At the same time, you have to know where you’re going strategically and where you want to get to 6 months from now, a year from now so you can, because there’s so many opportunities that come up and infinite number of ideas that come up, you need to know what’s the big picture you’re aiming for.
So, I’d say straddle those both.
[00:13:54] Brian Thomas: Thank you, Nitzan I appreciate you sharing some examples there with us. Again, we’ve got a large global audience, people that are in just about every industry vertical you can think of. But I do appreciate that. And there’s certainly some gems that can be gleaned from this. So, thank you.
Nitzan, it was a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:14:16] Nitzan Shaer: I look forward to it as well. Brian, thank you for the thoughtful question. This has been a true pleasure.
[00:14:20] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Nitzan Shaer Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
