This week on Product Love I sat down with David Schwartz, the VP of Product at Wix, and an esteemed member of the ProductCraft Debate Club.
David started his entrepreneurial career at an early age selling fireworks with a business partner. Their marketing involved yelling at passersby in order to advertise their inventory, but the venture was sadly short-lived, the casualty of a visit from the police.
Growing up in Israel when it was the country with the most growing startups in the world, David was constantly surrounded by people with entrepreneurial spirits. It was only natural for him to pursue that path.
When he finally joined the tech industry in the ‘90s, he already had a feeling that product managers were going to change the world.
Be the No-Man. Don’t be the Yes-Man.
We started our conversation by discussing how features contributed to the user experience. David is of the “iPhone school,” more features do not equal a better experience. While some product teams believe that adding more features would enrich their product, David believes that sometimes the opposite is true: “Don’t think only what to add or what’s missing, think also what you have in your product that you can take out.”
Product teams tend to focus so hard on innovating new features, but the reality is that these additions could make the user experience more difficult. It’s not worth compromising a new feature that would help a few users but complicate the majority’s experiences.
How Much Do Users Understand About Computers?
We discussed how important it is to have thorough conversations with users frequently to really understand what they know. David actually talks to three Wix users a day. From hearing about their needs, logic, dislikes, likes, and the emotion they emit he learns a great deal. Great product managers should be taking their cues from their users, as they are the ones who are the best teachers in product management. While it’s not important to have a technical background, it is especially crucial to communicate well and be passionate about technology.
David and I also talked about the concept of guilds within Wix, the best ways to interview prospective product managers, and his amazement with Candy Crush.
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