I’d advise anyone who wants to become a product manager to choose a product and a field that they’re really passionate about — to the point that they wake up at night thinking about it.
Oded’s impact:
Oded is responsible for leading Zoom's Product Management. He brings more than 15 years of product experience to Zoom, providing in-depth knowledge in video-centric collaboration and hands-on experience in building large-scale, cloud-based services. Zoom’s product helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.
Zoom hosted over 4.9 billion meeting minutes in January 2019 and people in 94% of the countries and territories on Earth use the technology. It is used by organizations of all sizes and types — the top ten of the Forbes Cloud 100 all have full Zoom deployments; about 80% of the Forbes 2018 Top Remote-Friendly Companies use Zoom.
Oded and his team partner with engineering to solidify and drive Zoom’s product roadmap. They had to overcome the perception that Zoom Rooms — a signature product they developed — were only for small conference rooms, rather than for robust use cases, including world-class board and training rooms. His team helped eliminate that perception by building an ecosystem and additional functionality to support all the high-end equipment needed for even the largest conference room settings. They worked with different partners to co-develop devices featuring deep Zoom Rooms integrations with embedded Zoom software, making it easier for customers to deploy and manage their Zoom Rooms hardware by reducing the components needed.
Why he’s an Up-and-Comer:
Oded employs a number of best practices to ensure his team’s success. Moving fast, while maintaining superior product reliability is a challenge, but he ensures that Zoom’s offerings are built on a strong infrastructure and are bug free. Oded also empowers his team by making each product manager responsible for an entire product, instead of a portion of a product, allowing them to make decisions quickly and focus on solving a problem.
Oded has also always been laser-focused on customer success. He ensures that his team has the buffer room to quickly respond to incoming requests, one of the reasons that Zoom was able to bring 218 features — most of which were requested by customers — to market last year.
What’s your number one piece of advice for people just starting their tech careers?
I’d advise anyone who wants to become a product manager to choose a product and a field that they’re really passionate about — to the point that they wake up at night thinking about it. Product management is hard work, especially at a startup; the work is broad and the product cycle is ongoing, so you have to be a fast learner and very disciplined.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
In ten years, I hope to still be innovating great products and features for Zoom customers around the world. I truly believe in Zoom’s mission of frictionless video communications, and I plan to stick around for the long run to ensure we carry it out.
