Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO)
Gong's pod model is a unique approach to organizing product teams, consisting of a product manager, UX designer, and engineers. This model emphasizes autonomy and trust, allowing teams to work closely with design partners, sometimes up to two dozen, to develop products that meet real customer needs. This approach has led to a nearly 100% success rate in product adoption. The model also supports rapid decision-making and adaptability, crucial in fast-evolving fields like AI. Gong's success is attributed to this model, which fosters innovation and customer-centric development.
Key Points:
- Gong uses a pod model with cross-functional teams for product development.
- Each pod works with multiple design partners to ensure product-market fit.
- The approach leads to a high success rate in product adoption.
- Autonomy and trust are central to Gong's team culture.
- Rapid decision-making is encouraged to maintain agility.
Details:
1. 🚀 Introducing a Revolutionary Pod Model
- The pod model, introduced in 2016, organizes product teams uniquely by grouping one product manager, a user experience designer, back-end engineers, and front-end engineers, fostering cross-functional collaboration.
- Initially tested with a small, prototype team, this model served as a basis for shaping organizational structure during scaling phases.
- The decision to adopt this model aimed to create replicable, successful team configurations, moving away from traditional separations of front-end and back-end teams.
- Early testing phases focused on assessing the efficiency and collaboration improvements within the pod structure.
2. 🎨 Collaborative Innovation with Design Partners
- Gong's pod model involves each pod working with 12 to 24 design partners, fostering extreme collaboration and innovation in product development.
- The success rate of new product features is nearly 100% due to the collaborative approach with design partners, emphasizing its effectiveness.
- Product teams operate with autonomy and trust, facilitating decision-making and innovative processes.
- The pod model, including roles like product manager, UX designer, and engineers, enables autonomous problem-solving and alignment with customer needs.
- Design partners provide real-time feedback, allowing rapid iteration and refinement of product features based on practical use cases.
- The model's success is illustrated through nearly perfect feature success rates, attributed to the close collaboration and real-time feedback from design partners.
- Challenges such as potential communication hurdles are mitigated by the structured pod system, ensuring seamless integration of partner feedback.
- This approach exemplifies how Gong leverages external insights to enhance product offerings and maintain a competitive edge in the market.
3. 💡 Achieving High Product Success Rates
3.1. Pod Structure and Autonomy
3.2. Product Development and Design Partnerships
3.3. Recruiting and Coordination in Product Management
3.4. Customer Interaction and Feedback
3.5. Design Partner Process and Product Feedback
3.6. Balancing Customization and General Solutions
4. 🤝 Fostering Autonomy and Trust
- A dozen design partners were initially engaged to develop Gong, leading to 11 out of 12 partners committing to purchase the product upon its launch, demonstrating the effectiveness of involving multiple stakeholders early in the product development process.
- Close to 100% of the features developed are used by a significant number of users, highlighting the utility and relevance of the product features developed through this collaborative approach.
- More than 95% of the capabilities built are used in a significant way, which is likely higher than the industry average, indicating a successful alignment with customer needs.
- The approach of directly asking customers what they need and then building it with them has been described as a 'cheat code' for product development and expansion, emphasizing customer-centric innovation.
5. ⏩ Prioritizing Speed in Decision-Making
- Delegating autonomy and trust to teams increases productivity and innovation. This approach allows team members to work in a manner they find most effective, leading to better long-term results.
- A practical example of autonomy was demonstrated through a community picnic where participants were allowed to bring any food item of their choice instead of choosing from a predefined list. This resulted in a diverse and high-quality food selection, showing that autonomy can lead to superior outcomes.
- This method encourages individuals to incorporate their personal preferences and expertise, motivating them to contribute more effectively.
- Incorporating autonomy in personal life too, like allowing children to manage their own digital device usage, can lead to more responsible behavior, as evidenced by a child requesting software to manage screen time after negotiating limits.
- At Gong, product teams are empowered to make decisions based on customer interactions. This autonomy allows for quicker decision-making and enhances team responsibility.