Vision Setting

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.

Rob Goodman:

Today on the podcast we're joined by Miki Baram, General Manager at Wix. Over her more than 10 years with the company Miki has held a lot of different roles. She currently leads over 100 people across four groups at Wix. Photography, logo maker, rich content and analytics. Here, Miki discusses how to use focus and vision to empower product teams. Now let's hear from Miki.

Miki Baram:

Well, I think that a lot of this is around focus because when you grow, you have more people you need to manage. People work in their domains and they start also generating work for others. And so the challenge is on the one hand, how do you keep the team focused and aligned with the general focus of the company? Like how every employee understands where we are going. And also, how do you keep the pace? Because moving fast is something that I truly believe, it's very important to every company in every scale. It helps motivation, for example, and it has its own valuable thing that moving fast brings, besides winning competition and everything around that. And when you scale, it's something that can get lost on the way. In my teams, I'm trying to solve it, for example, still remaining in small teams. The people who are part of the team are the people that are around the product creation. Right?

Rob Goodman:

Right. Because your teams have a mix of designers, developers. Is everyone who can kind of make up and create that product on each individual team that you lead?

Miki Baram:

Exactly. And when we grow as a team, because we're responsible to more and more products within our domains. So I still try to divide them into smaller teams. So each team will still have the relevant people to create the relevant part of the product. This really helps us move super fast and it helps people feel like they're connected because they actually are part of the creation. So the structure is pretty much flat as far as it can be. And it keeps the pace going on.

Rob Goodman:

So in a way, you kind of trick the global giant organization that the company has become into thinking and operating in a way that it's just now a bunch of mini startups that can still move nimbly and quickly. Though the vision and the strategy has to ladder up and connect to the whole in order for everyone to move forward in the same way and make progress as a large scale organization. Is something like that kind of?

Miki Baram:

Exactly.

Rob Goodman:

Kind of right?

Miki Baram:

Yeah.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah.

Miki Baram:

I think that, as I see my teams, one of my main roles is to provide the clear vision to my teams. And make sure that everybody knows where we're going. This is super critical to everything that we do, because if I want every employee to be the owner of their tasks, they really need to know where we're going. And if we're talking about motivation, I think that this is one extremely important key factor of motivation. Because people want to be a part of a greater thing than small tasks. And so one of my jobs is really to tell them about the big vision, but help them see how their special power actually helped to create this vision.

Miki Baram:

This connection is super important. Then you need to give responsibility in terms of how you give your employees responsibility and ownership of creating this vision. I have two examples. One, when it didn't work and it's reality. We always keep doing improvements on that, as well. And I can tell you that when we're talking about delivery and you want to move fast. So sometimes team leads can try to do a lot on their own. For example, stating the smaller tasks for their teams. This is something that I had a week ago with one of my teams. And since they wanted to move fast, the team leader actually sat and wrote each task for everyone, for clarity. Because he wanted everyone to know what they need to do. And he felt like they will move fast.

Miki Baram:

But I think that it's the other way around. Because if you are doing it like this, then you create bottlenecks. And the people are not part of the greater strategy or greater vision because you just told them what to do. This is one of the main important things that I'm doing with my teams. Helping them build teams so every team member will feel enough confidence to take the main task and make decisions on the task themselves. If we're talking about scale, once teams are getting bigger, then the young manager doesn't want to lose control. So they make them create a very detailed task. But what they lose is something much greater. Because you're losing time, you're losing growth, you're losing motivation and you lose in creating not the best product it can be. Because the best product is when people are working together and everybody brings their own angle to the game. Clarity should be there, of course, and vision should be there, of course. But they need to feel that they are the creators.

Rob Goodman:

So how are you encouraging your team members to contribute to that larger vision? I think one of my major takeaways from this episode is that if you empower the team to really contribute in unique ways, in ways that they can own, you're going to reach your vision, you're going to reach your goal. But you're going to do it in a way that you, as a leader, may have never imagined. And that fresh take, that new perspective that your team brings, that can make a project even stronger than you ever dreamed.

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.