Meet Maya Hochstadter, Product Manager
In this short interview, learn about Maya’s role at the company, what she does outside the office for fun, and her suggestions for how new employees can hit the ground running.
What do you do at Harmonya?
I am a Product Manager. In my role, I get to work with R&D, the design team, and with clients and some big-name partners. I try to understand the client’s pain point and translate Harmonya’s massive talent and knowledge into useful tools that can help our clients understand and utilize data to make better decisions faster.
In my day-to-day work, I spend most of my time working closely with R&D, especially with Data Scientists. and the Annotation Team to define how our models should interpret the data. I’m also spending time with domain owners to prioritize the scrum tasks, managing POCs closely, and designing new features.
I’m also the Head of Lunch 😉.
Hear Maya’s Answers to the Lightning Round Below
How would you describe the culture at Harmonya?
The culture at Harmonya is super friendly, we love to hang out together and talk about restaurants, our dogs, and vacation destinations. We work hard and love collaborating, and while passionate discussions can get heated or philosophical, we typically get to a consensus.
What is an exciting project you’ve worked on you want to share? What was the impact?
When I just joined Harmonya as a Product analyst, we were working on a huge POC for for a Fortune 500 company. It was a very exciting time, where everyone worked extra hard and we became much more mature as a company as a result.
One of the things I worked on then that’s still a big part of our product is the Tag Types. We had to split the thousands of tags we extracted from product listings into groups, without being sure what groups will be interesting or meaningful to our clients. Solving this issue, alongside actually finding the best way to get through all the tags was a really interesting project, making me very familiar with the company’s smallest building block — the tag.
This knowledge and deep understanding still serves me well as a Product Manager as we’re still working with the same tag types today, making them better, richer, and more accurate, as well as adding new ones. They are a huge part of the value we give to our clients, making it easy for them to get to the most relevant concepts (AKA tags) into their work.
What do you do for fun outside of work?
I am currently raising a dog and about 130 plants. It was a Covid hobby gone out of control, and I now spend my time fertilizing, propagating, and repotting rare plants I ordered from Ecuador. Soon I’ll also be raising a human baby, so we’ll see what happens to all these plants.
I also love exploring Tel Aviv, and mostly all of its culinary institutes, from markets to high-end restaurants.
What’s something on your bucket list?
I’ve been lucky enough to travel to Japan twice, but it still remains in my bucket list, there’s still so much to explore there.
I have a list of concerts that includes, among others, Beyonce, Fiona Apple, James Blake, and Bon Iver.
What advice do you have for someone who is just joining Harmonya?
Don’t be afraid to ask people for help, everyone is very friendly and wants to see you succeed. Also, bring some dog snacks to make sure all the four-legged employees like you as well.
Who do you want to nominate to be interviewed next month?
Nadav Mermer, if you can get into his packed schedule!
Interested in bringing your talents to Harmonya and helping us build the next big commerce startup? Take a look at our open roles!
