The Side Door to High-Tech: How Non-Tech Roles Lead to Core Product Careers

Entering Israel's high-tech sector as a junior candidate has become increasingly difficult amid recent layoffs and the rise of artificial intelligence tools capable of handling complex tasks. However, alongside the traditional path, a side door exists: entering an organization through peripheral roles such as customer support, sales, operations, and Customer Success, and later transitioning internally to core professional positions. In most cases, these moves lead to product management, project leadership, and operations rather than R&D teams, which maintain rigid entry barriers.

From Teaching and Transcription to Product and Data

Vita Greenstone, currently a product manager at Verbit, began far away from code and technology. In 2016, she completed a master's degree in forensic linguistics in the United States and made aliyah to Israel, working in teaching and legal transcription. Her first break came via a LinkedIn message from an operations manager seeking freelance transcribers for an ASR system.

Before starting my first task, I bombarded him with questions regarding guidelines for specific cases and jurisdictions, which landed me my first job interview, Greenstone recounts. They eventually hired me as a legal operations manager to help build the department from scratch. It was the greatest blessing of my professional career because Verbit was still a small startup at the time, exposing me to every domain: product, development, sales, customer success, training, and community management.

Over the subsequent eight years, Greenstone held four different roles: operations team manager, data science, customer success for automated solutions, and finally product manager.

My first transition from operations to research was a lesson in humility, and in the best possible sense, a huge relief, she shares. I shifted from being the domain expert putting out fires to gaining breathing room to learn and experiment. I managed to translate my operational mindset into learning programming, building experiments, and creating automations well before the ChatGPT era.

From Client Management to AI Transformation

Jonathan Lapid, in his 40s, joined TIX10AU (Authentix) as a senior customer success manager (Sr. CSM) handling strategic accounts. The turning point arrived following extensive reserve military duty after October 7. I served five months in the reserves, and upon returning, I possessed a completely different perspective on how to approach work, he explains.

Lapid transitioned into a combined role as Sr. CSM and CS Ops Lead, beginning to leverage OpenAI and Google language models to reduce workloads. He started building AI agents to summarize meetings, write team Wiki articles, and assist in negotiations and contracts. This internal initiative evolved into a broader company-wide project after a fraud attack on one of his managed clients.

I brought the idea to an internal hackathon, where we developed an anomaly-based attack detection tool that remains in use today and serves as a foundation for autonomous agent capabilities, Lapid notes. This integration significantly shortened threat detection times, streamlined model training processes, and opened doors to developing further agents.

Professional Courses and Product Transitions

Elad Schindler, in his mid-20s, arrived at Authentix three and a half years ago as a fintech CSM following a bachelor's degree in information systems management. After a year in the role, he requested a move to product management, took a professional course, and stepped into an opening when a team member departed.

The first product he managed was Age Verification, functioning essentially as a startup within the company. Today, he also oversees document and address verification products utilizing large language models (LLMs), serving major clients such as Swissquote and PayPal.

From Sales and QA to Decision-Making

Jonathan Berman's trajectory proves that reaching core professional roles requires patience and multiple station stops within a single organization. Berman, who immigrated to Israel as a lone soldier in the Nahal reconnaissance battalion and previously managed a political campaign in Nevada, entered the cyber firm Semperis in sales without any prior technical background.

He subsequently transitioned to QA, spending four years deepening his knowledge of products and Active Directory. After another four years in technical support, he completed his desired move to product manager roughly two years ago. The role change did not include a salary increase, but the professional challenge and growth proved significantly more valuable.

Leveraging Financial Background for Product Development

Liran Cohen spent roughly a decade in FP&A roles at global firms like Intel and J&J. Seeking a transition into high-tech where his accumulated expertise would serve as a comparative advantage, he joined Datarails in 2021 as a Customer Success Manager.

The company develops products specifically for finance professionals, meaning I arrived essentially from the customer's side, Cohen describes. After less than a year, the company offered him a product manager role. Today, after more than five years at the firm, Cohen leads a product team and spearheads the platform's AI development capabilities, proving that domain expertise remains a powerful catalyst for career mobility.