2019 brings a new beginning for me. After a little over five years at Red Hat, I have decided to move on to my next challenge. This is a big move, and I wanted to take a moment and reflect back on those years.

I joined Red Hat at 2013 as Product Manager for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (which since then was rebranded to Red Hat Virtualization, or RHV). That was my first PM job ever, and really a dream come true. I would always be grateful for my manager at the time, Andy Cathrow, for believing in me and offering me the job although I did not have PM experience before.

When I joined Red Hat we were around 4,500 employees worldwide. We were still primarily known for our enterprise Linux offering, and cloud was not yet a thing. On the personal front I was in a relationship with my soon-to-be my wife, but not married yet.

If I need to sum up my time at Red Hat with just one word, it would be “growth”. I was really fortunate to experience growth in many aspects: the company itself, my career, and my family lives.

Fast forward five years and Red Hat is a major player in hybrid cloud, with an impressive portfolio that goes way beyond Linux and touches application development, virtualization, cloud, storage, networking, management and automation. The company has more than 13,000 (!) employees as of February 2019, and was acquired by IBM in what is expected to be the third-biggest deal in the history of U.S tech. Seeing this growth from the inside was truly amazing. I have had the chance to work on cool projects, and bring new products to market.  

Career wise, I ended up working on three major products: RHV, OpenStack, and OpenShift - and due to the special culture of Red Hat, also working and interacting with many open source communities, including (but not limited to) Kubernetes, oVirt, Open vSwitch, KVM, OpenDaylight, Skydive, Kuryr, OPNFV, DPDK, and Ansible. I had the pleasure to work alongside and learn from the most amazing group of people and shape my product management skills and personality. I have also learned (the hard way) what it’s like to be working from home and in a super distributed team across Israel, Europe, and US East and West Coasts.

On the personal front, I am married with two beautiful children now. Integrating “work” and “life” and building the optimal schedule was also a key lesson learned from my time at Red Hat.

Next I am joining the Facebook Connectivity team to work on a new product. Facebook certainly feels different than what I did previously, although I am still going to be involved with networking. The Connectivity mission to bring more people online to a faster Internet is near and dear to my heart.

Moving on was not an easy decision. That said, I felt like this was the right thing for me and for my career. Among other things, I wanted to experience what it’s like to be a PM in a different company, and explore new markets and people problems.