Zeals Pushed Him Out of His Comfort Zone—and He’s Glad
Or Perlman shares how Zeals’s focus on end users transformed his career and led to business success.
Or Perlman, Senior Engineering Manager at Zeals, not only never planned to become a manager, but actively resisted that career move for years.
I always was [being asked about] my career, like, ‘You’ll make a good manager.’ Don’t [you] dare say it. I don’t want to be a manager. I don’t want touch management. It’s not for me. I’m an engineer. That’s what I’ve been saying for 10 years now or more. And Zeals was the first time that I said yes.
“During that first year,” Or explained, “I often questioned my decision. I wondered if stepping away from hands-on coding was the right move for my career. But now, I’m confident it was.”
This isn’t the first time Zeals has challenged Or to push beyond his comfort zone. According to Or, that was a pattern from the very beginning, even before the interview stage.
He began developing in 2007, with a focus on full-stack, and moved to Japan in 2019. Japan had been his endgame for some time. “ I always wanted and targeted Japan,” Or said, “but I don’t have an academic background.”
I actually never went to university. I started working right after high school. That brings a very different set of conditions and rules in Japan, as to who is considered eligible [for a work visa]. It’s not well-documented, most recruiters don’t know how to answer, most companies don’t know how to answer. So I had to go through the process myself.
After successfully immigrating to Japan in 2019, Or worked as a backend architect for Rakuten for a year, but it wasn’t the best fit. While searching for a new job, a recruiter persuaded him to apply to Zeals. Since Or had always worked for large enterprises, he was at first reluctant to take a chance working at a startup. It didn’t help that, initially, he wasn’t even entirely sure what the company’s mission was, beyond that they created online commerce chatbots.
“When I came to the first interview with Zeals, I tried to prepare,” Or told us. “They had a YouTube video of a commercial on TV. I watched the commercial. I read the website. And I told the first person who interviewed me, ‘To be honest, I have no idea what you’re doing.’ Like, oops. ‘But can you please explain to me, what is this company about?’”
To me, it’s always about, ‘the why,’ right? Like, if you don’t understand ‘the why,’ where would you get your motivation, or even understand what you’re trying to do?
“The why” his interviewer offered that day floored Or, convincing him that Zeals was different from any company he’d encountered before. “What stood out to me about Zeals’ was their focus on the end user experience. Many organizations, naturally, prioritize company growth and product metrics,” he said. “Everybody has a story and everybody has some sort of identity, but a lot of times you don’t hear the words end user. It’s about, ‘We as a company,’ ‘We as a product.’ . . . [But] this was the first time that I heard end user, end user, end user.”
I felt that passion, that early phase passion, and I told myself, ‘I don’t know if it’s a good fit and it’s a bit scary, but I prefer trying it out, because their commitment [to the user experience] made it a compelling opportunity I wanted to explore.
Now Or has worked at Zeals for four years: he calls himself a “grandpa of the company.” And while Zeals has moved beyond the early startup phase, Or still feels that passion. This becomes obvious whenever he discusses the Zeals product, AI chatbots for online commerce. According to Or, the true mission runs much deeper than that.
“I like to use the pharmacy example,” he said. “You’re going to a pharmacy looking for a new shampoo and you’re completely lost, right? Not only are there so many brands, but also variations of the same product within a brand. . . . So a lot of times, you either pick something random and you go to the cashier, or in some cases you’re just lost.
“And there’s someone to come in and ask you, ‘Hey, what can I help you with?’ That may lead you to find the product that you wanted. Maybe from [the clerk’s] perspective, he helped sell something, but I think when you have that critical [paradigm of] win-win. Even if the company sees that [sale] as a target, the end user also sees it as something that they wanted.”
“That’s the mission of doing these [chatbot] conversations,” Or went on. “And when you get to an online space, the number of people that you are reaching is much, much higher.”
“For a very long time,” Or added, “we were about building those conversations, and building those manually takes a huge amount of time. . . . But when we spend all this time in terms of building those conversations, we’re only building one person in the store. Where is the pharmacist? Where is the cashier? Where are all those people that help you in the day-to-day experience? You can’t really build and cater for everyone.”
With AI agents, the idea is that we still have the ability for our members on the business side and our general product to represent that experience. It gives us the ability to scale, to reach out to more people, to be able to actually share that kind of hospitality everywhere, and not be limited to how many conversations we can build in a day or in a week.
Of course, creating all this comes with challenges. “One of the challenges, first of all,” Or explained, “is how do you build a conversation? Our goal was to build a very flexible system for our business counterparts who can build the conversation manually. They can decide, ‘How? What? [Or] where is it pivotal to ask a certain question or offer a certain suggestion?’ That’s one part.
“The other part comes in when you talk to so many people, especially when we’re working for social media. We work with channels like Instagram and Facebook. There’s a lot of traffic. How do you handle that traffic? That’s very much something that even though you’re not the platform, in a way you are managing the same volume of messages as a platform.
“And finally that integration part, like how do you keep up with those channels, those social platforms, because they have constantly new APIs, new challenges. How do you make that sustainable? So when we take all of that, from the initial conversation all the way [to when it] lands on the end user device, that was my role for the past year leading the product group.”
The product group is a group of four Scrum teams, each led by an engineering manager, with Or as Senior Manager. Until recently, their focus was on expanding Zeals to the US market.
“Our CEO came in and said, “Look, we want to spread to the US. We only have a very short timeline, a small window of opportunity. And we need to figure out if our current product that we built for the last seven years is a good fit, or if we have to start from scratch.
After an intensive three week discussion, the team decided to redesign the product to better align with the US market. Or said, “As you can imagine, it’s a huge undertaking, and a lot of people found themselves demotivated, not invested, and questioning the decision.”
From personal experience, Or knew that motivation comes from clear understanding and connection with “the why” behind a task. “So I worked my hardest to keep on explaining that connection to others. And you see, when you have that connection, people get it, and they’re motivated. Spreading that motivation across helped us eventually meet the targets that we’d set ourselves, which were very, very difficult.”
“Seeing people get excited and inspired along the way, for me, that was a high [point],” Or said. “That was the first time I realized that I’m a bit interested in management, because I felt that it’s not only about what I can deliver by myself. It’s what I can deliver with the help of others.”
“I think that was the pivotal point,” Or continued, “where I felt for the first time that I’m comfortable taking a step in the [management] direction.
Not that I’m not interested in doing coding, I will always be interested, but I feel I can find good people that are better [at it] than me, and can do more than me. I want to work with those people, and I want to see how far we can go.”
Or’s team certainly has come quite far already, from their initial three weeks of confusion to a highly successful product launch. “We launched our product [Omakase AI] around one month ago in the US,” Or told us. “And we got to number four in the top ten products on product hunt.”
Now Or is focused on expanding and retooling the product to accommodate small and medium-sized businesses, not just enterprise clients such as Amazon and Nike.
A lot of small businesses struggle. They struggle to support their customers. They struggle with offering the same kind of hospitality that I mentioned, with those agents or the conversations we build, and what we want to start bringing [them] is the community. . . . I’m shifting to try and build this initiative from the ground up, building the functionality, the mission statement, the team around it, the culture. That’s where I’m going.
With Zeals’ success has come considerable expansion.
When I joined four years ago, there were 15–20 engineers. . . . The business side was around, I would say, probably 80 or 100 [people]. We then scaled to around 100 people on the tech side.
“At the [start] QA was one person, and there weren’t any product managers at all. Now we have product managers, engineering managers, QA, Scrum masters [etc.]. So these 100 people are very much what the industry likes to call a cross functional unit. . . . On the business side, I think we scaled to around 300 people.”
Unsurprisingly, this rapid expansion has come with shifts in mission, culture, and organization. Given his strong interest in “the why” of any situation, Or has devoted considerable thought to this evolution, and on how best to explain it to others.
“Sometimes, when I talk to my employees, I explain the transition. I watched a very interesting interview with the CEO of Waze, and I liked how he framed it . . . that a startup is very much considered a startup as long as you don’t know who you are and what you want to achieve. ‘What is your story?’ And enterprise is all about, ‘I know what my story is, now I just have to scale it. That’s it.’”
But Or believes Zeals falls somewhere in between. “I call [this phase] the intermediate phase. I don’t think it’s an official term in any company, in any business. It’s the transition between what I consider startup and corporate. . . . It’s a very interesting phase because you get to invent who you are as a company and as a product, and how you want to deliver value.”
In some ways we’re very much still a startup—in the way that we innovate ourselves, in the way we think about product, in the way that we are capable of changing ourselves with what the market shows, and also how we bring our own identity. But in some ways we’re already starting to go more corporate, because we’ve started to have a solid structure: project management, identifying roles, things that bring more structure to people’s day-to-day.
Despite “starting to go more corporate,” Or says there are no plans to mandate a return to the office, despite the trend among larger tech enterprises. “Our company is committed to fully remote and flex [work].”
“Our employees generally have a core time of 1 to 3 p.m., where we usually have key meetings,” Or explained further. But as far as actually coming to the office, “come when you want, or don’t come at all.”
Now with my role, for key meetings I’ve started going more to the office. But [flex work] still helps me decide strategically when I want to go and when I want to spend critical time with my family at home, instead of rushing to the office during rush hour.
Or feels that other businesses overlook the drawbacks of in-office work. “In one way, I think remote is closer. You get a lot of quality [time]. I mean, even right now [in this interview] we are remote, but it’s just us in this entire room. Also I don’t have to rush through a couple of floors asking, ‘Where is he?’ ‘No, he went out.’ ‘When will he come back?’ ‘Can you send me a message?’”
“Recently,” Or added, “some hires have been asking me this question: ‘At my company, I come every day, I’m really baffled. How do you work in a remote environment? Isn’t it scary? Like, how will I fit in?’ But I find that, organically, Zeals’s people are very welcoming. For example, at 5 p.m. I know one of the teams has a trivia game. They just jump online and do it. People feel more comfortable creating those social connections because you’re one message away.”
There is a downside to remote work, Or pointed out, and that’s the friction sometimes created by text-based communication. “The challenge is, how do you make people understand that what they’re seeing is not the person in front of them, but what they made up in their head? Compared to in the office, where I think that happens less, because the person is there and you speak to them.”
Still, the commitment to remote work helped Zeals during its expansion, and provided the basis for the company’s multinational team. Since much of their hiring happened during the pandemic, Or said, “We committed to understanding that, first of all, talent exists all around us, and if we’re already in a situation where we have to be at home, why not use it?”
So a lot of our hires actually didn’t start in Japan. . . . When COVID [abated], the rules relaxed, and we started bringing people in. These days we only have about two employees left from the people that started with us remotely—not in the sense that people left us, but in the sense that everybody immigrated to Japan and are [now] with us. A lot of people from the UK, Europe, India, and Asia that I would meet online are now here in Tokyo.
As Zeals continues to grow, Or knows what he’s looking for in future teammates. “It sounds weird, and maybe even a bit egocentric, but I say that I look for people. I like to see candidates that are excited about something. It doesn’t have to be about the mission statement of the company—I think it’s very unrealistic to expect people from day one to be excited about this statement. Like I said before, [regarding] myself, you come in here and you don’t even know what the company is about. How do you expect people to be excited about it?
“It’s more about seeing the excitement of what they’ve done with their time up until now. What makes them excited, what makes them interested in challenges, what do they want for themselves?”
“I think,” Or continued, “when you have people who are interested in something, and you put all of those connections together, something wonderful can happen.”