Nobody Climbs the Career Ladder Now | Innovantage Podcast #51 | Powered by BMI Executive Institute

Why, hello there and welcome to another episode of the InnoVantage podcast. As always, I'm your host Max and it is my ongoing job and duty to explore that edge between business and tech and to find something interesting for you to listen to and for me to listen to and for everybody else to talk about. Today's episode is a very special one and a very interesting one. We are going to be talking about global transformations. We're going to be talking about cutting-edge We're going to be talking about the role of AI in all of that, and we are going to be looking at it through the lens of a very multicultural multinational company that is very recognizable on the market that you probably have already heard of somewhere, someplace. To help me on that journey is the Senior Operations and Site Leadership Executive at Wix, Monica Loucaite. Monica. Hello. Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. So before the cameras started rolling, you told me that your title is only basically a formality and your actual job entails so many things that just by listing them, we can probably fill this episode if you want to go really, really detailed. But even so, can you try and explain to our audience what is it that you do? How long have you been with Wix and what have your career looked like so far? So if we're talking about Wix, currently I'm managing European sites from operation perspective. So it's Lithuania, it's purely R&D engineer site, 250 people. I'm managing Berlin, Amsterdam, London. What else we have? You mentioned Dublin. Dublin, Dublin, there's a huge 400 people plus. There, so I can't forget about Dublin. Don't leave Dublin out. They will be angry. Yeah, and besides that, managing Guild of Cytopsys about operational excellence is adding AI things into operations. And there are lots of other outside activities as Wix Ventures fund helping to enter to local market and to, we are looking for startups to invest and to do due diligence of them and so on and so on. So like these are the main and then the rest you're building around. Well, it sounds like a very fun, but at the same time, very busy experience, honestly. Can you tell me more about like what's Wix's current position on the market is? Even though most people probably recognize the brand, they probably are not that aware of where the brand is in terms of its business position? So Wix is, we are having, I might lie, more than 200 million or 270, I think, million users who are website building. And Wix last year acquire Base44, that is app, apps building on AI. So in general, Wix is strong growing company. Entering, not entering, already entered, and lots of transformation with AI happening. And inside the teams, especially in Vilnius, as it's R&D team, and I'm facing it daily that we are merging some positions, we are blurring line between front-end, back-end developers, mobile developers. Even there is some connection for product UX people. The idea behind that, we call it X-Engineers, for example, and we are expecting developers with the AI tools to do the things faster, to own full process of the development. And in general, it's happening. I feel like a little bit frankly that we are building the plane and flying on the same way because this is how fast it's all the transformation, everything is happening, but this is the beauty. Oh yeah. Well, that's a very interesting point that you bring up. Like, I feel that many companies are striving for that level of transformation of their tech and the idealized version is exactly what you are describing, blurring the lines between specialized development into overall engineering. But at the same time, Even on this show, I've had discussions that are very counter to that. Like, is that even possible to do? Is AI at a place where those lines can be realistically blurred? From your experience, what do you feel? I think we already see that, well, we started this first of all in February, so we are now 3 months, 2 months. So we, like, you need to, in general, first of all, to understand why you're doing, you need commitment of people and understand that. It's okay not to know everything. It's okay to ask agent. Our north star is like we expect that in the future less and less code will be written by developer and more by AI. And we feel like this transformation takes time. It's not happening like this. We need to invest time to do. We did, for example, blurring lines exactly training in October. That, for example, frontend developers were teaching backend developers, UX designers were coaching UX writers, product people, and even developers what AI tools, what it works, how to do which way, how not to lose the authentic language, style, design, and so on. So it's a process you need to learn and as well in every, the dynamic in the market and how many new tools and technology things are happening. It's like crazy. And even ourselves, we do and build, I think better, we need to ask engineering team leads, the tools that automatically inside the company, they build internal agents. We did AI Hub. I remember, I'm not sure how now people are using often, but we did at the beginning AI Hub that you could consult which tool I could use for that and that. So even inside to try to collect as much information and share. And even tomorrow, most of our developers are stepping out of their role and go and we are doing engineering conference only for our engineers. And I saw 5 tracks and most of them is on AI topics from whatever we think to from automations, QAs inside, how to do, how to end. How to be efficient. So all of that naturally comes from the current market of AI. AI is impacting every single business in every single vertical in every single geography. From your standpoint, is it driven by any specific metric or any specific, I don't know, function of the company? Like, do you focus on efficiency or do you want to produce more or do you want to move around faster or do you want to experiment more? What's the, what overall goal of the AI transformation? I think you already listed almost all of them. So it depends from which angle. It's like, it's always easy. It depends. Definitely we are looking to offer our clients easier and better solutions to build a website or to build the app or to run their business more efficient because most of our clients are doing online solutions for them. So definitely this is one of the measures what we can offer them. Another measure is how we are doing it, how our job, how a daily job looks like, how many, like we used to have the team of, okay, 4 years, 5 years ago, 12, 20 people to do on one product working. Now the headcount reduced to 5, 4 even can be. And they're doing the same scope of work. So it means that personal efficiency is exactly what's happening and every day happening. So it depends on which angle you're looking. And even myself, I just recently set up Google Studio and I did that all emails I get from wherever exactly, Max, I would get automatically scan my emails and draft my letter back. I would not need to write the email or I already set up for that. I would get on some topic, example, competitors, Gemini screen what is happening globally and send me daily 10-line summary on my email in the morning. So there are lots of tools to make yourself more efficient. So this is like, it's For me, it's like a, if you wanna run and move further together what's happening in the market, you need to use it, not only talk to ChatGPT or ask Gemini where to go for something. You need to implement in your daily task, just you need to try it. That is true, that is true. And the abundance of the tools that are available to everybody right now, especially to software engineers, is so great that the potential for it is very hard to even quantify. Fun anecdotes, in my job, in my work, we had a little experiment between like the founders, like one of our founders who's in charge of all of the delivery has scanned all of the conversations and all of the emails of the other founder who is responsible for finance and he built a bot that basically automates like 95% of their work, like just basically kind of a digital twin, but it's too much of it, not really a digital twin, but basically like a digital twin of their work. And he was like, okay, wow, that's insane. And— But then he can do other things. Yeah. He can look for investors. He can do like, this is exactly the very good example because I feel like before I was spending a lot of my personal time on the things that can be automated in general. And now I can give more attention and you say, oh, your scope of work is big. Yes, it's big. But like if we do some automations, you can now, okay, work on Wix Ventures, look for new startups, you can lead or come to the podcast. Yeah, true. Thanks AI to that. Exactly. Yeah. I would say that a lot of companies then are faced again with the same thing, right? Where the gains are theoretically very, very big and they impact everything from just your overall performance to like cost efficiency to everything else, right? How do you then judge whether or not the transformation was actually successful? What kind of metrics do you prioritize and count? Probably not lines of code that are written, right? But something needs to tell you that things are happening. I think this question I can't answer because I'm not so much into metrics of developers and R&D teams. I'm more like very cross-location, cross-function and so on. And frankly, like, I can guess only, but I would say that for us, the metrics is mostly anyway, we are counting on new features we built that generates income and what is the impact. Of course, there are some features that is you built for internal use and to make us more efficient. So definitely if like the two KPIs the same as you mentioned is, is it bringing more value for the customers or is it making us more efficient? Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense. And on your level, you also mentioned that you are implementing and using AI a lot. Personally, where do you feel is kind of the most impact that you have felt? I feel like we can do much more with less people. And this is the impact. We are like, we can do more from all angles, starting from taking off recruitment to Well-being in the teams, looking for solutions inside how the finance managed, how like, I feel like you can do more with less people. Yeah, sounds almost perfect, but like there must be something that isn't perfect, right? With AI, like what's the main caveat you currently see? So I guess sometimes you feel like, how can I use it? Where? No, I can't. So I guess first thing is this culture change that I need to try it and I can do something and you need to start from small things, see the examples and find this, I'm trying to find the word, innovator. So kind of guy, like not from management, but those who enthusiastic about all all the transformations. Yeah, don't worry about it. So I guess the first is in the culture and mindset that it's okay to try new things and then how you work in general. You need to switch. It's most difficult is mostly people psychology, like to change how you're working because come on, I was working on this way 10 years or like 5 years and now I need to do something new or I should trust agent who is reviewing the data. Of course you need to, like, there is this hallucination time to time happening, but more and more, like, moving every day, I think it's less and less. And when you are in the closed data or you are doing these double checks and so on, you can start trusting it. Yeah, trust is a big thing, both between the employees and the employer and between the tools that they are using. AI in this case. What I want to talk about a little bit is, you know, the aspect that many companies are also trying to do this, like I said, right? And many companies are motivated basically only by hype. You know, they don't know why they're doing it, but they're doing it because everybody's doing it. How would you separate the company who does exactly that, the company who follows the hype versus a company who actually does a meaningful transformation? I don't believe in transformation just for the sake of transformation in general. You need to have behind the problem you are solving behind or the repetitive task you want to change. So first, I guess, wherever we are doing this, why in the middle should be stand first. And I saw some stories, not at Wix, that even the manager or founder of the company, they want to do AI because it's trendy word. Everybody does, why not? Sure. And they start even building AI tools inside without buying what is easy to find and just tokens pay and that's it. And they try, they spend a lot of money and then it's, oh, they realize it's not working. Guys, try 10 different what is already in the market. You can pivot it with various tools as well to create your agent or do something, I don't know, clean your data. It's like just, you learn by doing. And I guess for all companies who tries to do, to use AI or try to think how to improve their pain points, they need to understand what is their actual pain points. Because if they— Sounds easy, but— Yeah, but like if they think, oh, I want to reduce headcount, it could be a target as well, but they need to understand, okay, so which headcount I'm reducing, what is repetitive task they're doing. So are we reducing headcount that we are making everyone more efficient or we are reducing headcount by making everyone like some repetitive tasks or not clever work doers to shift to other positions or separate with them and do these automations by AI. So, there are various directions to go. True. True. Then my question would be if you could give some piece of advice of company founders or owners or managers who are in that position where they need to go through an AI transformation for one reason or the other, where should they start? Should they look at the technology and look for problems there? Should they look at people, processes, competition? I don't know. Like we started very simple. We made the hackathon like 2 years ago. First thing was we made the hackathon. No, before hackathon was one action, rollback. It was first of all, we made all AI tools available. We connected them, we called it Wix Hub, like the same I mentioned that to connect even all Claude, Gemini, wherever we have premiums in one place to connect and that every employee could use it, try it. Then we did sessions to explain what can be used for even like Google Studio, how to automate automation to make for your email or to do the summary receiving of the news, for example. So various trainings that is like just to understand what you can do. And later on we step in and we did 2 days of hackathon that wherever position employees from administrative to travel to developer to so on. To think of an offer for 2 days, come on now, is lovable. Okay, I shouldn't mention how lovable, we should mention Base44 as Wix is developing it. But there are plenty of various tools. You can even create demos, CRMs and so on. So you find with AI that demo working, it's very easy. It's few prompts and then connect the data, it comes and you already on hackathon have quite good bunch of ideas from employees that would help them to be more efficient. And after these ideas, definitely you do gamification, you do awards and so on. And we chose several of them to develop and we'll continue our, like, integrating our new projects, new products, or even these ideas was to make some improvements for customers. And that really helped. And then later on, we moved to the next phase, really listed them, dedicated people, found these ambassadors who want to run, and then all the culture to build up. So, and even this AI culture, don't believe it's go one direction. It should be both directions that of course management leadership role should Show by example, show what they're doing, be really curious about it and try to understand. Or even they don't understand, ask for help to understand it. And then as well, you find these ambassadors who are really into that. Together from both directions, you can make a change in the culture and the people mindset. Makes sense. Makes sense. People are still in the center of that transformation. And a lot of people that are trying to do those transformations, I think, want to kind of move away from people just by default. You know, now we'll have AI, we don't need people anymore. But from what you're describing, as I hear it at least, the transformation starts from those people because they understand the problem probably more than anybody else. Sometimes, like, if someone would tell me the problem is something, I don't know. And if you are not directly working, you don't understand. So definitely it comes. And another part that really works is like the AI training should not be after working hours. It should be in your working calendar scheduled at least 1 hour per week for something to learn new because this is the way it's happening and the company should allow that. Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense. But that is a very big investment. And such a big risk. But I don't think that's a big risk because I see that these tools are really making you more efficient. And if I spend 1 day, but later on I save 5 days in my month of calendar of time calculating, I don't agree that it's like a big investment. Yeah, at the same time, I do want to play devil's advocate a little bit because depending on the context of the business, there are many risks that are very hard to foresee when implementing those solutions. And specifically, like Wix is a software-first company, right? You're— the software part is indistinguishable from the business part. But take something a little bit more diversified where a person in your position might not even know about the software that exists. And then the AI starts probably from the software because that's the most places of impact that you could have probably in the place. So then you have those kind of two worlds, you know, people from the business realm coming into the tech realm and trying to force something that they don't really understand. And that in and of itself, while creating initial gains, through efficiency, like, hey, we now are delivering features much more efficiently. I didn't know what features were a month ago, but now I know that we are delivering them much faster. So now we can fire some of those engineers. If you're like, I don't know, like a plant that develops, I don't know, like microphones, right? Like the development part of the microphone is going to be much more focused than a the software. So would you say that the same approach would work for those people as well because kind of the same principles apply or they should be more cautious? I wouldn't say that, like, well, I'm really very many years in software and SaaS industry, so I can guess, but for me it looks like if you can do more, so you can create better microphones, for example, you can offer like maybe those who are better take out of these surrounding sounds and so on. So like as example. I guess it's just ability to give employees more space to show their inventions and to show their potential where they could start and do things that they that even company haven't thought of. And later on they can win from that. True. Even can happen some spin-offs. Yeah, that's also, that's a very good tool for business experimentation. Exactly. By the way, Monday, if you know it, it's Wix spin-off. Oh really? I didn't know that. Okay, that's cool. That's cool. So this is how experimentation happens. Well, yeah, again, Wix is a, as a company, as a case study is a very interesting one, generally speaking, which many other businesses can learn from. And I do want to move on a little bit and talk about your own experiences with Wix so far. So you have mentioned you've been there for 12 years, right? That's a long time, especially in the tech world. That's like. Ages, ages, ages within the tech world. And over your career, I'm sure you've seen those many transformations come and go. What has been like constant from your experience? What things always change and what things rarely ever change? John Wick's quite raw material, I would say. This is like Well, we can maybe roll back to my childhood. That's very, very, like, very, very— That's a big rollback. Rollback, but like, from my childhood, my parents was telling me that if I want to buy something more expensive or go to a more expensive trip, I need to contribute some amount. And I was since 12 was working in father's company, did this stupid job, you can call it, putting invoices to accounting system for half of the summer, getting some money that later on I could spend for family vacation or buying some bicycle or something. But that taught me that if you wanna reach something in your life, you need always to try harder. And then I moved to, like, I worked in some companies. So first, like, it was EY and M&A due diligence in the financial sector, later government, and moved to Wix. And when I joined Wix, it was idea that I met Avishai, Wix founder, in one conference and I pitched Lithuania and it came out that I pitched not only Lithuania as a country to be for R&D center, I pitched myself. And the thing that we, like what I noticed and it really works, how Wix is choosing the right people is they are looking for people who is trying harder. They feel ownership what they do and nonstop learning in general. Because if we look to this, okay, these 12 years and so on, this is why I came at my childhood. I realized that I never had, I guess, the same month doing the same things. Since 12 years that I'm at Wix, every time something new. I joined Wix, I had to set up developer teams. It was totally something new for me, how to recruit developers in Lithuania market. Frankly, it was the time that it was lots of shared service centers. We haven't had many product companies and Wix was one of the first besides there was Winted was 20-ish people and no one talked about NordVPN, no one talked about other companies. I remember Ritesh from Omnisend, he was just starting to do his startup. So when we came, it was, and we tried to look for the developers who own the things, who develop the product, who knows the global markets, how to make the product for 20 countries with different localizations. And we were quite a niche company in general. I felt like we were educating the market what it means to do the product. But it's very fast as a snowball effect rolled out. And the key thing what he told like people, like the key thing is people in your team. With whom you will build the product, reach the peaks, because technologies are changing, products you're building is changing or might change. You test it, it's not working or step out and do something new. Definitely, like we are looking how to build the best product for the clients with the best conditions for employees to choose the tools they need to, and all this, you know, employee-centric logic behind. So I think the only really not changed is how we look to the person and why it's important to have this ownership and all the rest of the things, learning, eager, and so on. Meanwhile, what has changed, this is exactly what I mentioned. Technologies are changing, products you're working on definitely changing. The market itself for SaaS is changing and the interesting part that I see that in Lithuania, especially we have very unique tech industry and I think the unique is because the most biggest companies are not treating each other as competitors but look at them as partners. Because most of them are selling everything, the product one. Tesla, which I mentioned, is really like a partners and trying to make a good impact for Lithuania through Unicorn Association and there are like many other initiatives they're running. And I see them like, because Lithuania, most of them are 2, 3% probably in their portfolio of revenue. And the only they compete is between employees. And, but on the other hand, they know that if the employee goes in one company, other, or third company, they will be better. So I see that how nicely they collab on different initiatives to make Lithuanian market stronger, to be the market who is no more is shared services and the cheap labor, I would say, not nice words, but those who are creating and selling products that are used globally and worldwide and brings money to the country. Yeah, that's a very nice point because this is something that I have talked about as well. As a foreigner living in Lithuania, that is very evident to me. The makeup of the tech scene here is like, you know, when you have that biome in a glass where you have a very closed off, it's very small, but it has all of the layers and everything is inside of there. I see Lithuania basically is the same way because you have the highest of the highs, the unicorns that everybody knows about, you know, like your North Securities, your Vinteds and everything else. And then you have a lot of innovation going up in the startup world and a lot of both innovation that can also become worldwide and very practical and specific. I've talked about this, like, for example, a lot of things are being on, you know, innovated on in the defense sector, for example. Lithuania is very uniquely positioned in that sense where they have both the practical application and the know-how and the knowledge to actually contribute things. And then you have the middle ground where there are a lot of businesses that are just businesses that are, you know, like service-level businesses that just do a service for somebody else somewhere. Both internally and externally. So you have all of the layers that you would expect from a fully developed tech scene. And I've always admired that, that takes a lot of effort and work from everybody involved, especially for a company so small, relatively speaking, of course, as Lithuania. So yeah, kudos. And even like when I see like what, for example, for example, works in Vilnius is AI Hub. Definitely. We are working on developing AI tools that are really, really complex and difficult and like, frankly, even management and founders are like, yeah, we're one of the stronger developers at Wix we have. It's here. Well, that's great to hear, but you're also responsible for other places besides Lithuania and I'm guessing Lithuania was just a start when you only came into Wix and you've mentioned several of those places. So can you share a little bit of insight as to how that even happens? How do you scale an organization across different cultures, different mindsets, different goals, different tribes effectively enough? So in general, each site opened with a different goal, probably like, not probably, definitely. And it will look For example, I was helping long time ago for Kiev office to open. So we were looking for more developers. It was 2014, '15, no, maybe '16. And later on I worked, for example, we were looking for customer care center where to build in Europe. And we did this market research. Is it Amsterdam? I think even Germany and Poland and don't remember the whole scope. It was 2018 and we decided to do in Dublin because most of tech companies are there. They have very good student pool to get good language support. And even now I think 75% of our Dublin office employees are foreigners, not Irish, Irish. And by the way, Irish language is very, I like them. They are like, English is so soft. And frankly, when you talk to, I know that there is some research made that if it's Irish English, it's much better treated than even British English or definitely Indian English. So that was one of the reasons why we have in Ireland. So in 2018, I was setting up the office. We were building, we have head of that customer care center from US relocated person. We have Sigita, Lithuanian HR, but she was born in Ireland, I think, or at school age, like she was local. Yeah. And she is still with us. So we built the site. So one of example. Meanwhile, there was post-COVID, I think the moment that we realized, so we did first demo in Japan and Wix realized that we need to have localized offices to have better sales. And in that moment, we shortlisted 8 countries. It was India, Japan— Japan was already done— India, Sydney office I was working, Amsterdam office I was opening, UK, like there was Singapore. I was working on like 8 offices and different locations, some like step by step to open. And that was the purpose to find local contractors. For example, if you're like doing a website and you need local, I don't know, post service, payment service, and so on, and to do lots of marketing things. And frankly, not all the sites is now we localized the product there. We found the partners and we realized we don't need actually physical office. In each of these key markets. And for example, in some of them we step back. So we had an, I had another interesting, like, you know, there's a moment opening, open, open, then closing, closing, closing. It's not efficient. It doesn't bring the number of new customers. It doesn't bring the value for the clients. So it's another case, like, so it depends. And how do you face those kinds of challenges? Do you feel personally like maybe you, I don't know, it's just sad, you know, you've created it and now you have to close it? Or is it just part of the job where, you know? No, it's a part of the job and I think it's, uh, with everything you are doing, you become smarter. If someone would ask, is it like, I remember my first, this small site outside, there was Australia, Sydney. It's like, oh my God, how to do this in Sydney? Now if someone would tell me how to find this, how to open the office, I know the list. Find the legal, check this, check this. I have a checklist that already 5 things to do it and you know how to move further. So it depends on you. I feel like it's experience. And then frankly, to close the office is much more hard than to open. Oh really? Because, you know, you have employees. Separations. You are to close the entity. It's not the easy thing in some locations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like even within Europe, the legislation is very different from country to country. And I'm guessing like between, you know, Dublin and like Sydney, it's just— yeah. And you realize, for example, India, there is different based on states, even different taxation, even different— like, oh my God, it was something new for me. So then What do you feel is then the first thing that breaks when scale happens? You know, I have a feeling that when you scale up, you cannot scale up efficiently and fastly at the same time. Like something needs to give in to the stress. What that thing is? Well, even like that project, we called it Global Markets Entering, we realized that, yeah, you're right, you can't scale like this. Yeah. So first thing that really works for me is to find good one, first employee who's senior enough to do spread the knowledge, spread this on. So like, I think the success of this KALE is the local first manager and the first few employees in general that helps to build a culture who understands And so on. Definitely for any scale, we are talking even it can be in the same site, do you want to do new teams, new products, new like success to the scale is knowledge, knowledge sharing. That's why, for example, which I mentioned in R&D, we have these guilds and gangs. For the guilds, function for the scale was very clear to help everyone to be on the same page, to understand the technology, not to invent the bike again, like that if A team is doing that, they would share with B team and to share the best practices and then this the guild time officially, it's a time of learning. So in general, like for any scale is important important knowledge, but I'm talking about the knowledge wider perspective is communication, transparency, being direct on the status. What is your why you are doing? What's your goal? And then knowledge sharing on technology, on the features, on everything. So like it's a full, I would say cloud. Comprehensive approach. That's a good insight. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And then what is the role of leadership in it? Do you see that leadership needs to change as things scale or do they need to remain the same or like how does that look like? I think in general, first of all, there is like, I would say this, how to say this, curve that it depends on, first of all, as a leader, you need to adapt to the situation, to employee and so on. And there are many ways how to do it. If we're looking further, even what type of people you're managing. And if you are leader and in your, maybe this was I had to say, in that curve that you are having lots of juniors, of course you need to lots of step in to mentor and so on. Then if you see this person is growing, so like to give the option, like encouragement. Then you see that you want to give him the ability to grow and initiate things and become a leader. And third is stepping out. In general, I think every leader's goal, if talking to personal level, is to help person to do the things himself and not to be needed besides as a friend or as a personal connection and supporting and so on. So like, if we're talking about personal one-on-one with your team. When you're talking about these new sites and so on, there are one phase and one thing is like when you're doing new products. So it's encouraging thinking together, collecting roadmaps, planning retros and so on. This is one type of leader. And there is another leader when you're going through transformation that encourage to show like example to have to have these uncomfortable talks that, listen, we expect you to do the change. We want you to learn. We want you to be, we want to, with your help, to be competitive in the market and to do more. So I don't, and I think even the leader and the role of the leader can change meeting by meeting. And how have you personally evolved as a leader, would you say? What has changed over the years? Very hard question. I think understanding that you need to admit, for me, I guess the leader and biggest change is admit the mistakes and telling that, listen, I don't know something. It's not a shame. It's a very hard thing to do. It's very hard to tell that and to get this negative feedback from your colleagues, even the people under you and ask the feedback, how to ask them and to ask, "Oh, if you be in my role, what you do differently?" and so on. How to ask and to collect, I guess this is the biggest change for me, asking how we could do better. Learning that leader is just a title, but you like manager probably is the title. But leader, you need to be open and you need to be available to change wherever it's needed and to get the feedback. People sometimes even comes to share how they feel or even I Okay to share that something is not working. And you're right, it's hard to hear, but with the time you learn it. And even now, I would say, when you build the relationship that you know how employee is feeling and like you build the relationship, I have, as I mentioned, the team, for example, in Dublin, and I realized that relationship in Dublin, it's, I have totally different than, for example, in Berlin. And totally different in Vilnius. And they are all different, but it doesn't mean that one of them are worse or better. Just a different way. But this being direct, what is your KPIs and what you want, and to tell that if something is not working, come and tell me. And if it's It can be different. It's okay to have the cultural differences. Yeah. I feel that the opposite is more alarming, right? When everything is the same, when everybody agrees with everything. That's weird. Exactly. That's a symbol of a dictatorship. Everybody agrees with everybody in a dictatorship, but that's not a healthy situation to be in. Exactly. Frankly, I don't even imagine any situation like this. Like that could happen in the company which is growing, moving through transformations. I don't know, like trying to think and I guess non-software SaaS company can allow them to have stubborn dictatorship leaders because everything is so much changing in the market and you need to be at— sometimes like this, another time is another way to do. Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense. Thank you very much for your thoughts. I agree with that. Like, definitely, definitely the kind of the style that you develop over time, it's— the word that comes to my mind is kind of vulnerability. You know, you become more vulnerable in an environment that you are in as a leader, but that only makes you stronger because you are vulnerable in a way that makes you transform more, become better. You know, you are open about your weaknesses so you know them, you understand them., and you can cover them by the help of your team or your tools or anything else. And personally, like talking about myself, when I was starting out and being a manager and a leader and so on and so forth, I was always afraid not to have the answers to everything. Like, you know, people look up to me for the answers and actually I should have them. And I always was hungry for, you know, for finding those answers. I would learn stuff. I would talk with colleagues. Colleagues, I would just go out on myself and try things out. And honestly, it has been many years since I've also been like doing sort of these kinds of things for like 15 years now. And I think the only thing that really changed is I don't have all the answers and I'm probably more comfortable with that than I used to be. Exactly. I know more things, but I know less answers than I used to, paradoxically. And like what you mentioned about the answers, I had one situation, even the being direct and how you communicate, like this direct sounds like, oh my God, we allow conflicts. No, no, no. I'm talking about the sharing the things you see. And one of my colleagues came and said, oh, I'm working with, okay, create the name Tom. He's like, ah, and start like, you know, washing. He's like, I would say like, do you want me to listen? Like, it can be. Or you want to help me to prepare you a feedback for Tom directly? Because I don't want to be the person that you come to me and I go to Tom, like who gives. I prefer that you learn to tell it directly and openly. And this is exactly what you as a team leader can do to help to coordinate the dynamic in the team. Yeah. And then with this dynamic, how to reach the company goals in general. True, true. Well, let's talk a little bit about the general kind of professionalism of it all. You've mentioned how your role at Wix started fairly non-typical way to start. I would say a lot of other people start in the more standard way, right? You find a job, you keep to vacancies or something else, and you kind of develop yourself as a professional in a more streamlined manner. And I feel that that whole system is also being challenged by AI, and I'm definitely not the only one. Everybody feels that, that the whole kind of roadmap of, okay, you, you know, you do well at school, then you go to university, you become an expert in a particular field, and then you go out and work in that particular field, and then you start as a junior, and then you become a middle, and then you're a senior, and blah blah blah. That kind of no longer works. The whole, the whole ladder has been broken, and that's shocking for many people, of course. But at the same time, that's the reality of the situation that we are all in. I do want to leverage your expertise a little bit as a person who has come a long way in their career and as a person who hires a lot of people in different mindsets and cultures, what would you say is the correct approach to building your career right now in this age of AI? So when I, when I mentoring the young people, I given even myself example that first job or internship and so on, I was looking for the knowledge. It's not the salary, money, it can be free internship. Now some internships are paid. But choose the company you can get the most knowledge. It's better to not to get much money but to get more knowledge that would help you to now with the works with AI tools which are tech savvy. There are, I don't know, whatever industry you are, but look for the first thing is to get the knowledge. Second thing I went to when I changed, it was nearly intention to look for the network. Of course, you can start through meetups. There are many of them. Listen good podcasts to collect the knowledge, but you can go through to try to find the job. Next phase when you have some knowledge background to look for the network, we go to, I don't know, accelerators, even not necessarily related to the work. And I feel like it was the right moment then to find the company you want to grow and you believe in. And I was not like, I was believing in people and the product, but like when I joined Wix, we were before going public, I was 500th employee. It was very cool. Quite small size company generally and person in Vilnius. So like you just need to believe in the, and then hard work. So, and, but when I look with this AI transformation, as you said it and everything, I feel like this blurring line through the positions and the future is those who knows not only one thing. If you are at least you know something from, 2 areas, engineering plus product, I don't know, design plus video making, or like, if we try to think, like, it would be very hard to give from traditional business because I'm out of there. But like, I feel like the future will belong for those who has knowledge of at least 2 areas. Then they can combine, then it It means that you have broader understanding because critical thinking is the future and how you see things because agents will help you to do daily tasks. You need to see the things and analyze and to understand the problem and to try to think of the solution for the problem. Yeah, critical thinking is becoming more and more important. I would say even outside of professional life. Like, again, fun anecdotes. Just today, I have almost been caught in a scam. And me personally, you know, like, I would never have thought of myself as a person who could get scammed. Like, what the hell? I've been in the internet since the inception of the internet. Like, I know it's, and I work with it, and I know everything about it. But this time, this time was a very interesting one because a request came to our website. I was the one to pick it up. I had the time, I wanted to try it out. And I reached out to the person like saying, hey, yeah, thanks for leaving a request at our website. Naturally, I always do my due diligence a little bit. I checked out their website, I checked out the company name, I checked out who reached out to me. All of those things kind of seemed okay initially. And I asked them for more information, like, let's have a call, let's chat, let's see what you want to do, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And a few days go by, and then I get this big email of like, yeah, you're like, your company is great, thank you very much, we want to have a call, click this link and let's have a call. I'm like, okay, every link that I click, I always look at what the hell is it that I'm clicking. I look at the link, and the link is kind of weird, but not super you. It's like, it was like myzoommeeting.com/the name of the person. Like weird, but you know, I Googled the domain, nothing came up. I'm like, okay, let's click it. I click it and a page with, you know, with times for Zoom comes out. It looks exactly like your Zoom, like scheduling stuff. And I'm like, okay, like looks well enough. No alarm bells so far. I choose a time, I click a time, like let's book. And everything goes through and I'm like, okay, like we'll see where this goes. And then the funny part starts. Then a pop-up pops up which says like your Zoom workspace is outdated. We're downloading a new one for you. Here it is. And it's immediately starting downloading. And it's downloaded and of course it's some bullshit. Please excuse my French, which is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Zoom workspace meetings.exe. And I'm like, okay, wow, what the hell? Naturally, I'm not going to click the exe. The whole thing is a sham. Like the website is a sham. The person is a sham. The company is a sham. And the only thing that I needed to do is schedule a call and install the thing that they have automatically downloaded. Oh my God. Like, what the hell? So yeah, critical thinking. Because in the moment, especially when you have a thousand things going on in parallel, you're like, okay, I'll just schedule it. Who cares? Like, whatever. Download. Exactly. But yeah, I'm like, wow. I was actually impressed. Like, that is an impressive level of scamming. Exactly. Like I would, I think I would be hooked as well like this. Yeah. Honestly, the only thing that would definitely have saved me, even if I didn't notice the weirdness of the .exe, is that I have a MacBook and .exe will not work on a MacBook. But, you know, now I am scared. Like, honestly, what the hell? Like, anyway. Anyway. Yeah. This is the critical thinking and the future. And frankly, like as a mom of too. I was like, oh my God, what, how picture is gonna see our kids in the future, how they will treat the social media and all the reality of AI and like. My personal hope is that they take a step back from the digital world and have a clear separation between the two. You know, there's so much fake stuff even now where you can trust videos, you can trust photos, you can trust text, everything is circus, but it's to hell and back, right? But it's still functioning. But if it continues the same trend where we cannot tell the real from the unreal, where everything is oversaturated by fake outrage and fake talks about nothing, then maybe the next generation will just look at it and say like, yeah, well, it's a circus and I will treat it like a circus. And then there's human conversations with real humans about real stuff. And then there's everything else. Because for my generation, for example, the thing is unified. It's just part of the social experience. The digital and the real, they are kind of— So maybe they will separate and be more healthy for it. I hope so. I hope so. But they need to start going out, not sitting on gaming and like, this is another thing and start doing like, if some from young generation is watching this podcast. This thing is like, you need to move your ass from the sofa or wherever, bed and your laptop and like start because most of the business ideas, everything is happening not remotely communicating with people. It's mostly with these one-on-one. Even your example of how you ended up in Wix, like you cannot fabricate that. You cannot do that, like, on purpose. You need to go out there and look for opportunities by talking to people. And then at some point, somewhere, somehow, something may happen. No guarantees. Again, like, this is, this is like advice coming from a place of, you know, try and do stuff, not go out to 10 meetings and you will definitely succeed. That's not how that stuff works. Unfortunately. Yeah. And even 70%, I saw in Harvard Business Review that 70% of jobs are recommendations or through network. So it means that if you are staying by your laptop, it means that you are in this 30% that rejection rate is 3 times more because definitely if you have 2 equal candidates, you will go with those who has recommendation. True. True. That is and always has been true, and it is even more true now. But yeah, to kind of try and wrap our whole discussion, put a bow on it, moving forwards, do you think that, you know, those kinds of transformations, AI transformations and growth transformations and everything that is basically being forced on the market by everybody else, by the market expanding, by competition competing with you and everything else. Do they have a point where you can just say that, okay, we've done it, we've succeeded, or is it an always continuous endless road? And I kind of have a feeling what you will answer. And then my second question would be, then how do you prepare for the endless road if it is an endless one? Yeah, definitely. It is endless road. Currently, I feel like myself, I'm doing MBA, studying on this field. Definitely have blocked calendar for AI training. So they're trying new tools that I haven't tried, even meeting with the colleagues from the office that working on something that you don't understand. And I guess the future belongs for those who are open for learning in general. And because I believe that how we work now, our kids will do more efficient with different technologies and even different way. That's nicely put. Nicely put. I do have one more question though. You mentioned the MBA at BMI here in Vilnius. I'm guessing you had a wealth of choices of which one to pursue and whether or not to even pursue it, because as we've talked about, the whole kind of roadmap of you go to university, you get a degree, and then your career expands is kind of broken nowadays. What made you choose an MBA and specifically like BMI here? At some moment in career, I realized that I have enough of knowledge in managing people, in doing some things, but there was some gap of knowledge that I, if I need to collect from somewhere, you can do it like watching, doing by self, but to do in the group is much more fun. Definitely there were some friends who were studying and I said, okay, why not? It's another opportunity window that you can just expand your network, learn new things that you don't know. And even some topics, frankly, really surprised me from good side that I haven't even thought of that. And I feel like after EMBA, I am more open in this transformation. Because of the things that you have learned or because of the environment or why? Both. Just because like some things, even about ESG, there was a course that is like, oh, come on, Who will ask about this? I'm doing that in Europe. We integrate every, like, what can be learned? Like, hmm. But in the course, when you start and I don't remember the name of the professor, but like she gave examples that what community things are working and examples you go through and case studies, you realize that working on case studies and understanding, see, and seeing other companies' examples. Inside the room who people are from makes your understanding broader, I think. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So education will still have a place in our world. I believe so. It will have a place. Just, I guess, it will be more and more challenging for educational institutions to keep the pace with the transformation happening in the market. True, true. But as we know in business, challenge creates opportunity. Exactly. To bring those people out who are not only singly focused on a particular skill set or a particular profession, to broaden them out to be more efficient in creating those kinds of people. That's the challenge for the educators. That is a fun one. It's fun one and there are lots of good practices in the market that they could do lots of workshops around and create new programs. Yeah, true, true. Well, as I'd much love to continue our conversation, we have to put a stop on it somewhere. Where do people learn more about you, hear you speak, and where can people find you? Well, I guess LinkedIn, as everyone is there. Definitely find me on LinkedIn, Monica Lukajt, and follow me or write message. If you have something to ask, welcome. I'll try to answer. Not immediately, but I try to answer LinkedIn messages at least once in the month, sit down and scroll everything. That's also a rarity. I wouldn't expect. But yeah, thank you, Monica. Thank you very much for for giving us some insights into your career and many other factors that you've been exposed to. And thank you all as well for listening to our episode here today. If you liked it, push the like button, leave a comment. If you didn't like it, there is no dislike button, unfortunately for you. Leave a comment, and fortunately for me, that will still count as positive engagement. Subscribe to the channel, let us know what you want to hear us talk about next. And good luck on your own professional journeys. Bye-bye.