In this micro‑podcast episode of Wix’s Ready for Takeoff series, host Rob Goodman interviews Mickey Baram, a General at Wix who leads over 100 people across four product groups. Mickey explains how, as the company scales, she keeps teams focused, aligned, and fast‑moving by organizing them into small, flat, cross‑functional squads that act like mini‑startups. She stresses the importance of communicating a clear, overarching vision so each team member understands how their work contributes to the larger goal, which fuels motivation and ownership. Mickey shares concrete examples of what doesn’t work—such as managers micromanaging tasks and creating bottlenecks—and how she instead encourages autonomy, decision‑making, and confidence in team members. The conversation highlights the balance between maintaining speed and scale while preserving a sense of purpose and empowerment within product teams.
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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 on the podcast we're joined by Mickey Baram, General at Wix. Over her more than 10 years with the company, Mickey's held a lot of different roles. She currently leads over 100 people across four groups at photography Logo Maker, Rich content and Analytics. Here Mickey discusses how to use focus and vision to empower product teams. Now let's hear from Mickey.
Well, I think that a lot of this is around focus because when you grow you have more people you need to manage, you know, people working on their domains and they start also generating work for others. And so the challenge is on the one hand, how do you keep the team focused and aligned with the general focus of the company. Like how every employee understand where we're going and, and also how do you keep the pace? Right, because moving fast is something that I truly believe it's very important to every company in every scale. It helps motivation for example, and it has its own valuable thing that moving fast bring besides winning competition and everything around that. And when you scale, it's something that can get lost on the way. In my teams I'm trying to solve it, for example, in still remaining in small teams, the people who are part of the team are the people that are around the product creation. Right, Right.
Because your teams have a mix of designers, developers is everyone who can kind of make up and create that product on each individual team that you lead.
Exactly. And when we grow as a team because we are responsible to more and more products within our domains. So I still try to divide them into smaller teams so each team will still have the relevant people to create the relevant part of the product. This really helps us move super fast and it helps people feel like they are connected because they actually a part of the creation. So the structure is pretty much flat as far as it can be and it keeps, you know, the paste going on.
So in a way you kind of trick the global giant organization that the company has become into thinking and operating in a way that it's just now, you know, a bunch of mini startups that can still move nimbly and quickly though the vision and the strategy has to ladder up and connect to the whole in order for everyone to move forward in the same way and make progress as a large scale organization is something like that. Kind of.
Exactly.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that as I see my teams, it's one of my main roles is to provide the clear vision to my teams and make sure that everybody knows where we're going. This is super critical to everything that we do. Because if I want every employee to be the owner of their tasks, they really need to know where we're going. And if we're talking about motivation, I think that this is one extremely important key factor of motivation. Right. Because people want to be a part of a greater thing than small tasks. One of my jobs is really to tell them about the big vision, but help them see how their special power actually helped to create this vision. This connection is super important. Then you need to give responsibility in terms of how you give your employees responsibility and ownership of creating this vision. I have two examples. One, when it didn't work and it's reality. Right. We always keep doing improvements on that as well. And I can tell you that when we're talking about delivery and you want to move fast. So sometimes team leads can try to do a lot on their own. For example, stating the smaller tasks for their teams. This is something that I had a week ago with one of my teams. And since they wanted to move fast, the team leader actually sat and wrote each task for everyone for clarity, because he wanted everyone to know what they need to do. And it felt like they will move fast. But I think that it's the other way around. Right. Because if you're doing it like this, then you create bottlenecks and the people are not part of the greater strategy or greater vision because you just told them what to do. This is one of the main important things that I'm doing with my teams, helping them build teams so every team member will feel enough confident to take main task and make decisions on the task themselves. If we're talking about scale, once teams are getting bigger, then the young manager don't want to lose control. So they make them create, you know, a very detailed task, but what they lose, something much greater. Because you lose in time, you lose in growth, you lose in motivation, and you lose in creating not the best product. It can be because the best product is when people are working together and everybody brings their own angle to the game. Clarity should be there, of course, and vision should be there, of course. But they need to feel that they are the creators.
So how are you encouraging your team members to contribute to that larger vision. I think one of my major takeaways from this episode is that if you empower the team to really contribute in unique ways, in ways that they can own, you're going to reach your vision, you're going to reach your goal, but you're going to do it in a way that you as a leader, may have never imagined. And that fresh take, that new perspective that your team brings, that can make a project even stronger than you ever dreamed. 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. Our executive producers from WIX are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. We'll see you next time.
