Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more

I want to start with talking about your pod model, which is a really unique way of building and organizing your product teams.

That was probably 2016. We're trying to figure out how does the 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 frontend engineers. But at some stage, we're starting to scale. We are kind of contemplating, do we go like traditional, the old school of frontend 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 products?

I would say very close to 100% 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 risks. That's a very ambiguous term, but just the risk of building something you're not going to know if it's gonna get used.

So when I asked people at Gong what to ask you, the most often term that came up was autonomy and trust.

It's a very selfish thing. It's a very personal thing. I, I just think... (music)

Today my guest is Alon Reshef. Alon is co-founder and chief product officer at Gong. He was also the longtime chief technology officer at Gong. As I shared 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, Alon shares some of the secrets of what makes Gong so consistently successful, including how their product teams work with six to 12 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. If you're building a B2B SaaS company or product, you will learn a lot from this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alon Reshef. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. Hey, it's Lenny. If you want to boost your clarity and confidence, I want to recommend a podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart. One of the most essential ingredients to success in business and in life is effective communication. Every Tuesday, host and Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Matt Abrahams sits down with experts to discuss the best tips and techniques that enhance your professional development. Hone your small talk, influence, presentation skills, and so much more on Think Fast, Talk Smart. So what are you waiting for? Listen every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts and find additional content to level up your communication at fastersmarter.io. (music) Alon, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.