Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO)

I wanna start with talking about your pod model. Which is a really unique way of building and organizing your product teams. We're trying to figure out how does the uh operating model look like for our product and engineering. The first bunch of people we had was essentially a pod. It was one product manager, a user experience designer, backend engineers, couple of front end engineers, but at some stage we're starting to scale. We were kind of contemplating do we go like the traditional the old school of front end engineers, backend engineers, and then we said let's try to replicate what we have. Let's talk about how these pods work with design partners. From what I've heard, it's very unlike how any other company works. We just took the pod concept to an extreme where every pod is working with sometimes a dozen design partners, sometimes two dozen design partners. This feels like a cheat code of how to build New product lines. What are the like the percentage of success rate you have with new product? I would say very close to a hundred percent of the features we build end up being used by a significant number of people. Does it feel crazy for companies not to operate this way? I I wouldn't go back. I I hate terms such as risk because that's a very ambiguous term, but

Just the risk of building something you're not gonna know if it's gonna get used. So when I ask people like Gong what to ask you, the most often term that came up is autonomy and trust. It's a very selfish thing, it's a very personal thing. I I just think Today my guest is Ailon Reshef. A Lon is co-founder and chief product officer at Gong. He was also the longtime chief technology officer of Gong. As I share at the top of our conversation, it feels like basically every company that has a sales team uses Gong.

And it's really rare to build a product that is so ubiquitous and so loved across the tech ecosystem. In our conversation, Elon shares some of the secrets of what makes Gong so consistently successful. including how their product teams work with six to twelve design partners on every new product and feature that they invest in. How he creates a culture of autonomy and trust. Why and also how he optimizes for making decisions quickly, even large one-way door decisions, what he and his team have learned about building AI-based products, since they've been building AI-based products longer than most other companies, and so much more.

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