Product Builder

"Success may not happen on my watch." That's what Shay Cohen — Chief Innovation Officer at Tnuva, Israel's 100-year-old food giant — told me on the podcast this week. It's not a confession of failure. It's his actual operating model. Here's what I learned about how a company that produces 4.5 million food items every day actually innovates: → Real food innovation runs in 15–25 year cycles, not 18-month sprints. Tnuva entered alternative proteins 25 years ago. Only now is it a real category. → Their playbook is a triangle: massive internal R&D + a corporate venture fund + the patience to let categories mature. Take away any leg and the model collapses. → Writing the check is the easy part. The hard part is rallying hundreds of people inside the organization to actually adopt what the startup is selling. → The Israeli market is their secret weapon — small enough to test, sophisticated enough to validate, with a corporate partner that removes most of the friction to scale. If you're trying to innovate inside a big company, or just curious how a 100-year-old org stays at the edge — this one's worth your time. 🎧 Listen (Hebrew): All links in the first comment. #CorporateInnovation #FoodTech #VentureCapital #ProductBuilder #startups

Lior Frenkel breaks down what's really happening inside companies right now — leadership teams promising 10x productivity and measuring success by token count, while employees feel stuck between unrealistic expectations and a world they're still trying to understand. Lior explains why right now is the time to stop waiting and start treating your career like a product you're building. We covered a lot: side projects, on-the-job learning, networking, and more. An unusual and genuinely fascinating conversation with an unusual guest. The most useful episode I've made this year. 🎧 Full episode available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. #ProductBuilder #AI #Career #Tech

"You're not allowed to write a single line of code without AI anymore." That's the order one 51-year-old developer at IBM got from leadership last month. Plus a follow-up: at the end of every month, every dev gets ranked by token usage. That's not the future of work. It's the industrial revolution in a fresh coat of paint, measuring output instead of measuring judgment. I just sat down with Lior Frenkel (founder of Adaptation, author of "The Little Book for New Managers", 30K+ readers) to talk about what to actually do with this moment. He's been preaching one frame for a decade, and it finally has its AI test: → Stop thinking like an employee. Start thinking like a startup. Your career has features, bugs, KPIs, and a product-market fit that needs to be re-earned every five years. → The middle is disappearing. Both 50+ professionals coasting on experience and juniors leaning on the old learning paths are getting squeezed. The squeeze is real and it's fast. → The cheapest signal for what skill to learn next: what frustrated you this week? That's not noise — that's your compass. The skills people actually stick with are the ones connected to a desire, not a market gap. → The most underrated career move right now: side projects built INSIDE your day job, in the gaps where your company has real problems nobody is solving. Lior calls it the Value Gap Framework. If you've been quietly anxious about where this is all heading — this one's worth an hour. 🎧 Listen (Hebrew) Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dW3F4gDr Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dd2UjZSn Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dSF-4VbF #AI #Career #ProductManagement #Leadership #FutureOfWork

"I was afraid AI would take my role. Instead, it sharpened it." That's what Shira Moyal, Product Lead at Imagen, told me on the new Product Builder episode. imagen builds a personalized AI model that edits photos for professional photographers — so wedding and event photographers can focus on shooting while the AI handles post-production in their exact style. But this conversation wasn't really about imagen. It was about what AI does to a PM's identity. Shira walked Eyal David through the existential moment most PMs are quietly having: The "what am I worth?" doubt. The FOMO of every new tool. The exhausting race to "try whatever came out today." Here's what she found on the other side: → Execution isn't your value anymore. It's been shrinking for years. AI just accelerated the collapse. → The middle disappears. AI amplifies PMs who already know what they want, and weakens those who don't. Average is now a much harder place to be. → Your value sits on sense — asking the right questions, knowing which 4 of 5 ideas to kill, deciding fast in a world where the choice used to be A vs B and is now A vs H. → The new trap: "gilded balconies." Features that keep getting polished but never ship. AI makes it so easy to build that the bottleneck shifts to knowing what NOT to build. What stuck with me most: Shira told me PMs have to stop outsourcing their thinking. AI can hand you 5 brilliant solutions in seconds. Your job is to pick the one that actually moves the needle. That part AI won't do for you. Find this episode (Hebrew): Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dWmZz5un Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dkgiGZNR Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/d735ssMr #ProductManagement #AI #ProductBuilder

In 2026, I'm hiring more product managers than engineers. That's what Daniel Marcous, Co-Founder of april, told Eyal David on the new Product Builder episode. April just made Calcalist כלכליסט's 50 most promising startups list. They build an AI-powered tax suite for American taxpayers. Here's why he's making the contrarian bet: → Engineering velocity is up 1.3x-1.5x. AI coding agents are real now. His engineers ship dramatically more in less time than they did 12 months ago. → The bottleneck shifts. Engineers start waiting for tickets that aren't sharp enough. They invent work. They tackle technical debt instead of features. Sound familiar? → The fix is more builders - PMs who can reason about systems, designers who ship working prototypes, anyone who can take a problem end-to-end. Customer Success and Finance employees at April have already shipped vibe-coded tools to production. → The wildest part: during the Iran war in February, with much of his Israeli engineering team unavailable and tax season at its peak, Daniel and his VP R&D ran a 1-week blitz. They built a multi-agent system (Architect, Engineer, QA, PM, Designer). The Human-in-the-Loop CPA review became 99% AI in 48 hours. This episode is for anyone trying to figure out what an R&D org looks like in late 2026. Listen to the conversation (Hebrew) Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dD369YkM Youtube: https://lnkd.in/d_vuaxbX Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/d3kJFSre #ProductManagement #AI #VibeCoding #ProductBuilder

There's no such thing as failure. Only growth and learning. That's how Gali Bloch Liran sees it — and after coaching hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors, and executives through the hardest moments of their journeys, she's built a framework around it. I sat down with Gali, Founder & CEO of The Human Founder, lecturer at Reichman University, author of "The Human Entrepreneur," and host of The Human Founder podcast — for one of the deepest conversations we've had on Product Builder. Here's what stood out: → VUCA is everywhere. The term was coined by the US Army after Vietnam to describe volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. Today, it describes every entrepreneur's reality — and frankly, everyone's. → The entrepreneurial mindset is the tool. Not just for startups — for navigating life. Gali sees entrepreneurship as a DNA, a way of thinking that helps you turn threats into opportunities. → Your "Why" is your most valuable asset. When 100 investors say no, when burnout creeps in, when the market shifts — your connection to your inner purpose is what keeps you moving. → Two circles must work together. The business circle (go-to-market, funding, IP) and the mental circle (values, resilience, relationships). Focus on only one and you'll hit a wall. → Reflection is the real superpower. Not in a philosophical sense — Gali shared daily practices: end-of-day time audits, energy checks after meetings, asking "did this fill me or drain me?" → Failure has a matrix. Internal vs. external, one-time vs. recurring. A one-time external failure? Move on. A recurring internal one? That needs deep work. → Build a portfolio, not a side project. Think of your work as an ecosystem where each piece feeds the others. → The loneliness epidemic is real. Even in the age of AI, human connection is irreplaceable. The people around you — co-founders, mentors, peers — are everything. Spotify: https://lnkd.in/di-y6c_X Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dudF4fsA Also on apple podcasts on anywhere you listen to podcasts. New episode of Product Builder is live. #Entrepreneurship #Mindset #ProductManagement #Leadership #Startups #Resilience #ProductBuilder

Your next e-commerce customer might not be a person. It might be an AI agent browsing your site, comparing your prices, reading your product descriptions — and making a purchase. Without ever opening a browser. Eyal David sat down with Itai Horn, Senior PM at Resident (Nectar, DreamCloud — acquired by Ashley Home for $1B+), and what he shared about the future of e-commerce blew my mind. Three levels of agentic commerce are emerging right now: → Semi-Agentic: A user asks ChatGPT "best mattress under $1,500" and gets comparison cards. They click through to your site. You need to be discoverable in LLMs the same way you need to rank on Google. → Full Agentic: A user tells an AI agent "buy me this mattress for $1,000" and the agent does the research, comparison, AND purchase — end to end. Stripe is already building checkout infrastructure for this. → The new SEO: LLM discoverability is becoming a real discipline. There are already tools measuring your ranking inside ChatGPT and Gemini. If you're not thinking about this, you're already behind. But the episode wasn't just about the future. Itay also dropped practical CRO tactics that work today: showing monthly payments under Add to Cart (massive conversion lift), Dual CTAs for different user intents, and how they built an AI-powered CRO agent that took their test velocity from 2 to 8 concurrent tests and their success rate from 10-20% to 35%. New episode of Product Builder is live. Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dhZb9Vnt Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dZxag6mU #Ecommerce #AI #ProductManagement #CRO #AgenticCommerce #LLM #ProductBuilder

Most product managers have never waited 2 years to ship a feature. In hardware, that's Tuesday. I sat down with Ori Katz, a product manager at Hailo — an Israeli company building AI accelerator chips for edge devices. Cameras, robots, drones, autonomous vehicles. The stuff that needs to understand the world in real time, without sending data to the cloud. What struck me most about this conversation: → In software, you ship and iterate. In hardware, you get 4 shots over several years. One bad decision in the chip design and you've burned millions. The margin for error is essentially zero. → The AI revolution isn't just about ChatGPT. Edge AI is quietly transforming entire industries — security cameras that understand situations, not just record them. Robots that navigate autonomously. Cars that drive themselves. All running AI locally, on a chip the size of a coin. → Ori visited China multiple times and what he saw there is both inspiring and alarming. Autonomous taxis everywhere. Reverse engineering at a pace that's hard to comprehend. The hardware innovation happening there is something the West needs to take seriously. → Being a PM in hardware means understanding physics, silicon, supply chains, and industrial design — before you even get to talk about features. It's product management with a completely different skill set. If you've only ever built software products, this episode will change how you think about what "building a product" really means. New episode of Product Builder is live. Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dTFY_iPu Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dXwSefab Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dKqCYQvY #ProductManagement #Hardware #AI #EdgeAI #AutonomousVehicles #Semiconductors #ProductBuilder

A product person from Israel walks into a room full of accountants in Kansas. No, it's not a joke — it's what happened to Amit Slutzky when his wife got a military relocation to Washington DC, and he shifted from a classic product role at Trullion to a sales engineer position in the US. What he learned there changed how he builds product: → A customer in San Francisco wants to talk AI strategy. A customer in Kansas wants to know how AI makes their team more efficient — and that it won't replace them. Same product, completely different conversation. → Small talk isn't wasted time. A 30-minute chat about Baltimore football led to an 8-hour deep-dive session that uncovered a critical product gap no one had surfaced in months of Zoom calls. → Trust isn't built in a discovery call. It's built when you understand someone's culture well enough to ask the right questions — and patient enough to wait for real answers. The takeaway that stuck with me: as product people, we optimize for speed, frameworks, and data. But sometimes the most impactful product decision starts with shutting up and listening — in someone else's language. New episode of Product Builder is live. Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dsdwbPQT Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dzSCgnU9 #ProductManagement #Discovery #CustomerResearch #CulturalIntelligence #GoToMarket #ProductBuilder

New episode of Product Builder is live. Eyal David sat down with Galit Galperin, founder of AI MINDSET, to talk about what it actually takes to work well with AI — beyond the tools. Galit has spent the last 3 years collecting real data across the market and built an AI Readiness Index that helps orgs and managers figure out where their people really stand. Not just "do they use ChatGPT" — but do they understand how it works, can they think critically about the output, and are they ready to build with it. A few things that stuck with me: AI Slop is real. When someone on your team ships AI-generated work without reviewing it, you end up doing their job AND yours. It signals low skill and creates friction across the team. A good prompt is basically a good PRD. The same depth of thinking, context-setting, and constraint definition that makes a great product spec is exactly what makes AI output useful. If you wouldn't ship a vague PRD, don't ship a vague prompt. Product managers are natural builders — but it's not automatic. The curiosity, problem-solving instinct, and cross-domain thinking that PMs bring make them first in line for the builder era. But you still need to invest the time. One hour a day. That's the minimum Galit recommends. Like a gym for your brain. And she's right — there are no shortcuts to building real AI fluency. Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dNn4k-XA Youtube: https://lnkd.in/dzJss4Fx #ProductManagement #AI #Builders #ProductBuilder