I was born and raised in NYC to Israeli parents, and I spent a lot of time in Israel and travelling abroad as a child. I grew up understanding that there is more than one valid perspective and approach to most things in life. This sparked an enduring curiosity in me to experience different cultures, languages, and ways of life and to have opportunities to challenge my assumptions and subconscious biases. I chose to do my undergraduate studies in the UK, and to live in Argentina for a while after I graduated. It’s this same curiosity that informs many of the thematic threads that I’ve chosen to focus on in my career: What are our commonly shared human behaviors that drive us toward specific choices? How can a team of colleagues—diverse in background, professional expertise, cultural touchstones—work together to develop products and systems that serve the needs and interests of an ever-growing diverse marketplace? In my current work, I believe that my global and multicultural perspective helps me look at problems from multiple angles and always question whether there is an alternative approach to a solution.

The academic areas I studied at Oxford helped shape the cultural and historical frameworks that inform the way I engage with the world. I had studied a lot of Middle Eastern politics and wrote a thesis on a particular aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which later helped me found an NGO to bridge the divide between young Israelis and youth of other nationalities. Through my work, I met many entrepreneurs, international philanthropists, and inspiring change agents that furthered my interest in work that can have social impact.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how my path would have been different had a followed my high school interest in Physics, and I often think I might want to further study behavioral science. However, I think the key thing one learns at university are the skills to learn about any new subject—gaining the tools to research effectively, explore different points of view, ask questions, etc. It is those skills that have most contributed to the work I do today.

My first full-time job was at KIND. We were only around 10 people or so when I joined, and we grew rapidly, so I got to wear many hats. The reason I was brought on was to revamp the social mission. At the time when I joined, KIND donated 5 percent of its profits to peace in the Middle East and they wanted to change their mission to one of fostering kindness. I spent most of my time developing a social and tech platform to further the social mission and brand. It was there that I got my first exposure to product management (even though I wouldn’t have known to call it that then). I also started the company’s field marketing program, hiring a team of 14 brand ambassadors around the US to do demos of the product at stores and promote our brand by doing kind acts. When I was first asked to do this, I was 21 and felt totally unqualified to hire and manage a national team. My father reminded me that the CEO wasn’t under any illusions about my qualifications, and if he was willing to give me the chance, I should take it. I learned so much so quickly from that experience—things I could neither have learned in school, nor by observing someone else. That job encouraged me to take risks and helped me not be afraid to fail.

There are about 30,000 young Israelis who travel abroad each year and who tend to stay in very insular groups. In meeting and speaking with many of them when I was traveling in South America, I found that they were often quite interested in meeting local peers and travelers of other nationalities, despite gravitating to other Israelis. I became interested in seeing how I could help them break the barriers that stood in their way of reaching out to others during their formative trips because I believed that if they did, they might seed a significantly less insular generation with meaningful macro-political ideas and perspectives. The idea began to get a lot of traction among young Israelis. I was able to raise nearly $100k to develop the program, and so I decided to move to Israel and pursue it.

I learned so many things from that experience that still apply to my career today. One important lesson is just how powerful a motivator a sense of purpose is. The amazing people who donated significant time and money to build the program with me were motivated by the vision of the impact we could and did have together. Also, leading a team of volunteers helped me develop a style of leadership that relies very heavily on figuring out how to motivate individuals rather than using hard authority.

When I first joined Squarespace, we had a very explicit culture to build products that solve our own problems and then scale them to the mass market. A couple of months after I joined, I learned that there was an engineer building an e-commerce feature but no one at Squarespace was actually fulfilling orders and managing inventory so we didn’t have a close understanding what the product needed to solve for. I volunteered to run a beta test to better understand our customers and their needs, determine how to adapt the feature to better solve for them, and develop a go-to-market strategy. E-commerce quickly became a very successful product and business for Squarespace and after about a year of doing the product management work for the product, I became the first Product Manager at Squarespace. Some people were initially concerned that product management might demotivate the engineering teams as they traditionally had complete product ownership over the features they built. However, the engineering team working on e-commerce ended up being one of our most motivated teams because everyone who worked on the product had a very deep understanding of the problems they were solving and a clear sense of success. We developed a very collaborative product development culture across engineering, design, and product management. We proved the model so successful that eventually there was company-wide buy-in to build out a product management function across all of our product areas.

My advice to someone looking to create a new position in an organization is to focus on the gaps you see in process or function, and fill them! Do the work and solve the problem—worry less about getting the position. If you can demonstrate success and add value, people will want you to keep doing it and the position and title will come.

My key responsibilities include growing and developing the product management organization while driving the strategy for the portfolio of products I am responsible for. My typical workday varies widely but will usually include a hiring interview, a meeting with a product manager on my team, and some cross-functional meetings or calls with external product partners. Otherwise, I will focus on current priorities that can vary among strategic planning, helping unblock projects, working on improving our organizational processes, personnel issues, thinking up new product ideas, and more, depending on the day. Whenever possible, I generally try to front-load my meetings in the first half of the week to allow myself some more time for deep thinking in the second half. I spend every Friday morning listening to customers so that I’m never too far away from the problems we can solve for them. My favorite part of my work is helping the product managers on my team grow and develop.

I first discovered Squarespace when I used it to build the website for TrailTalks, the organization I founded. I felt so empowered by the platform, which helped add legitimacy and credibility to our young non-profit. So, when I returned to NY, Squarespace was the first company I thought to reach out to. To this day, I remain deeply motivated to come to work every day because of the impact I believe Squarespace has in creating equal opportunities for all ideas to succeed by making great design accessible. That is a big part of what has kept me here all these years. Additionally, as the company has grown, my role and responsibilities have changed so meaningfully that I have remained continuously challenged. And finally, it always comes back to the people. I so deeply like and respect the people I work with every day. 

I really enjoy solving problems that don’t have obvious answers. Since technology is a field defined by innovation, it is full of those types of problems. Since I joined Squarespace, one of the most meaningful changes has been the rapid shift to mobile and apps. This is changing the way people are consuming web content, and we have been investing heavily in ensuring that Squarespace can enable people to reach their audience wherever they are, whenever they need access, using whatever kind of device they choose.

Squarespace helps people with creative ideas succeed. Over the past few years, we have expanded from being a platform that helps people present their ideas online beautifully to also providing the tools that enable people to achieve their goals, whether it be sales, lead generation, or getting hired. I’m really excited about our growing e-commerce platform that is helping hundreds of thousands of people launch and run businesses, and the deepening of our analytics platform that is helping our customers identify opportunities for growth.

There are so many ways to get into product management, and there isn’t one path. My advice to anyone who doesn’t currently work in the field is to identify a problem you want to solve and start developing a solution. Speak with potential users, validate your approach, iterate on a prototype, etc. You can also try to find opportunities to apply product thinking in your current role. Perhaps there is a productized solution that can help your team improve a particular process. If you can talk about how and why you identified the problem, defined success metrics, considered different solutions, chose the solution you did, validated that solution…that would be pretty compelling.

There’s a very healthy culture of work-life balance at Squarespace. Of course, there are the occasional late nights and working weekends, but it is generally the exception rather than the norm. I am a big believer in turning off fully during vacation in order to fully engage different parts of my brain and come back with a fresh perspective. To that end, my husband and I generally choose to travel to places that expose us to different cultures and allow us to speak different languages. When I go on vacation, I set the expectation that I will not be looking at my work email, and I give my boss and direct reports my personal phone numbers and email for emergencies. I also meditate every morning and practice yoga a few times a week to keep things in perspective, and I like to unwind after work by playing the piano.

Something that can affect women’s experiences in a male-dominated field is the number of other women they work with, especially in leadership positions. Both early on in my career and as I moved into more senior roles, there weren’t many women in leadership positions (and none at all in product or engineering roles). While I had wonderful male mentors, when it came to modeling leadership style, there were occasionally certain aspects of their style that didn’t feel natural for me to adopt as a woman. As such, I had to find a style of leadership that uniquely worked for me. This was a blessing in disguise because it enabled me to be very true to myself and trust my instincts around how I would be most effective at getting buy-in for ideas, balancing authority and warmth, etc. I think an important thing for women in tech to keep in mind is that the challenges we sometimes face as a minority can also help us to develop our strengths.

The first thing I look forward to upon waking up is breakfast with my husband, Aaron. But once I get into the work mindset, I get really excited about the new features and products our team is launching and I look forward to getting to work. In terms of what’s next for my career, I think it’s continuing to focus on the career development of others. I find strengthening the competencies of my team members and helping to optimize the potential of each individual on my team really rewarding.

This interview was sponsored by Squarespace. Don't forget to use the code CONTESSA to receive 10% off a Squarespace account. And thanks for supporting the brands that support Career Contessa.