In this micro‑podcast episode of Wix’s “Ready for Takeoff,” host Rob Goodman interviews Aviron Morda, Wix’s VP of Engineering, about a major production incident that became a learning opportunity. While Aviron was giving a product talk, engineers discovered that a backup‑server installation had mistakenly reverted the live system to a state from six months earlier, erasing recent features. The team spent an all‑night effort rebuilding the platform from source code, proving that their deployment and rollback processes were sound despite the data loss. The incident highlighted Wix’s culture of ownership, where every engineer felt responsible for fixing the problem, and where mistakes are not punished but used as growth moments. The engineer who caused the rollback was promoted, illustrating the company’s “no‑blame” philosophy. Aviron reflects that this experience cemented a culture of accountability, calm crisis response, and rapid, safe delivery, reinforcing the importance of giving teams autonomy and permission to learn from errors.
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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. Today we've got VP of Engineering at Wix, Aviron Morda. With over 25 years of experience in software, he knows a thing or two about building great teams and products. In this episode, you'll hear about learning through mistakes and why giving ownership and autonomy to your team can turn those mistakes into really big wins. Here, Aviron shares a story I think you all are going to learn a lot from. It's about how a massive failure turned into a big win for the team, our product, and our customers. Imagine it. It's a beautiful day. The sun is shining. You're attending a product talk at our office in Tel Aviv. And then
while I was speaking, all of the sudden I see all the phones for the engineers starting to beep. And my phone started to beep and say, okay, what's going on? And I'm giving a talk to like 50 people telling them stuff, and then I see all like a bunch of engineers just running down the stairs panicking, and I'm giving a talk, so I couldn't stop. So I quickly finished my talk and then I took the phone and I looked up and I see, okay, something is really bad happening to the system. So we ran downstairs and started to investigate. What's going on? Customers are calling us, some missing features. Something is wrong. We lost a lot of the features that we had.
Okay, so here's what happened. The team was installing a backup server, and in the process of syncing the files from the original server, one of our engineers accidentally reverted our system to six months in the past and in the process erased all of our latest updates and features for users. Okay, let's get back to Aviron.
And we were panicking.
Did you freak out?
Of course we freaked out. I mean, what's going on? And then we spent the entire night rebuilding all the system from the source code because the source code didn't get turned. It's just the build artifact. So we rebuilt everything from the source code. It took us like the entire night and redeployed six months back to the future.
Oh, my gosh.
It was a bad night, but a very good one, actually, because that was the point that we Actually realized that our methodology actually work. There is no data loss, no one got hurt except for some missing features that we developed during these six months. And we understand, okay, our process actually works and we have all the mitigations, the risk management, the backward compatibility that things actually work. It didn't break, it was just missing. And this was the time that we realized, okay, we got it nailed. We know how to deliver software fast and safely and it actually worked.
We're all human, so inevitably we're going to mess up, but the best teams find something worthy within that. The second thing you need to know, you have to give people permission to, to make mistakes. Here's Aviron on what happened afterwards.
You would thought that this person would get fired, but no, he actually got promoted and this was actually a good thing.
How did that person get promoted?
Because we don't punish people for mistakes. We put some safeguards and we learn from it.
Now, this was a while ago, but looking back, what do you see in your leadership back then that you think may have, like, helped create an environment where, okay, yes, there's panic for good reason, but then there's, you know, calm plan action and resolve and learning.
So it's basically comes to the culture, okay. It's the culture of taking ownership and responsibility and it's okay to make mistakes. You don't pay for your mistakes. Okay. This was actually one of the things that, if you remember the story I told you, once it got beeped, everybody just rushed down. It wasn't their fault, it wasn't their system.
Right?
But everybody in the team felt responsible for making this work. So they all dropped everything that they do. They spent their entire night helping rebuilding the system, even though it wasn't their fault. And we actually learned from that and we celebrated that process.
That's incredible. Yeah, I love that story. And there's nothing like extreme lows followed by extreme highs to like bond a team very early on together too. That's incredible. My main takeaway from this episode is that it's really a tale of accountability and ownership amongst the team and that a support system can really kick in when you're working within a culture that says it's okay to make mistakes and then the entire group can take action, can learn from it, and can ultimately build better products and experiences too. 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. Thanks so much for listening. You can find more episodes and information on our website@wix.com Ready for takeoff ready for Takeoff is hosted and produced by me, Rob Goodman at wix, with production by Lindsay Jean Thompson at wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Paik at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Maraki and our executive producers from WIX are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. We'll see you next time.
