YouSaid · the spoken record

Eilon Reshef

lines on the record: 62
first: 2025-01-02
most recent: 2025-01-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm really available on LinkedIn. It's probably the best way. I tend to kind of read my inbox on LinkedIn and respond when I can. And then useful to me. I mean, if you want to come work for Kong, check out our careers page, of course. The product team is mostly based in Tel Aviv and Dublin, Ireland. So maybe a little bit remote for most people, but there's sometimes folks in the US and sometimes non-product, of course, ROGs. We're hiring quite a few people these days. So we'd love to at least give us a chance”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a thing called Sabik, for example. Nobody knows of it. People claim it came from the people who came from Iraq, but my wife's father came from Iraq. He's like, we've never seen this before. It's sort of Peter Bretfield with Humus and eggplant and eggs. Maybe something else I have no idea. Tahini, maybe, I don't know. It tastes good, but it's such a weird combination and it's become a bit of a thing. And nobody knows what the origin is. I think somebody made a mistake and gave it a name and now it's like ubiquitous.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Israeli foot has become a little bit to be in fashion lately. So people coming from the US to visit us in the office are like, oh, Israeli food is so good. And I'm like, what do you mean? It's the same food we've had for like 20 or 30 years. I think the taste changed because you kind of eat more healthy and less oily these days. Most of these Israeli food is sort of Arabic in nature or Turkey. So there's great falafel, great humus, pita bread, Turkish delights of sort. So a lot of those. And some very, very obscure. And if you come to Israel and I'll show you around, some very less known food that only kind of special guests get to taste.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's so many razors, and there's one that I think came in in Sam Murphy book or whatnot. So it obviously sounds funny and it's trying to be funny, but it's so helpful because so often do we attribute people's behavior, you know, thinking a company, a customer, I don't know if personal life sometimes to malice, like, oh, this person's not returning my calls because X or this person hasn't given me feedback or has given me feedback because of X. And it's sort of like we all, I think there's a saying, it's like always assume well or good intent or whatever. And this is sort of the more funny way to sort of say that yes, the person is, and again, stupidity is obviously a funny way to do it, maybe inappropriate, but it's basically, yes, they just didn't know, they didn't care, they didn't think about it, they weren't trained, whatever the thing is. And if you take this model on your day-to-day life, at least I find that it's so true and so often true that it is funny but inspiring.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did I use it's going to sound funny, but it's actually real, and I use it and actually believe in it. I'm not sure if you know for philosophy, there's like razors, like Occam's Razor, which is basically”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is my latest invention. If you have two of those baskets, you can put one of them in the sink and you can just like continuously load your cutlery or silverware while the thing is working or you haven't vacated it. So it kind of changed how we organize our kitchen with something that probably cost 10 bucks. No product managers ever thought about offering two of those with your dishwasher. I don't think they even tried to upset anything of any of that. And I told you some people next ended up buying a second one and that it was successful, which is the most ridiculous thing. It's like spend 10, 15 bucks, get something organized in a completely obscure and unintentional way.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cutlery. So that's my favorite product as a flagely. And I'll tell you why. It's a funny story. I lost mine and you can ask yourself, how can you freaking lose one of those baskets? And it was in the dishwasher, of course, and for some reason I couldn't find it. That's like you have to be really kind of out of your mind to not find it. Anyway, so I go to some Amazon or eBay or whatever. I just buy a new one. And then, of course, a day later, I find it's like a fence somewhere within the dishwasher. Now I have two.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't have TV, like broadcast TV for many, many years. So nowadays there's Netflix so you can find stuff, but my taste in sort of TV and movie tend to be pretty esoteric fringe. So I've recently watched this British TV series called Slow Horses with Gary Aldman. And it's a really kind of fun, you know, sort of funny spy thing, which I found amusing and intelligent at the same time. So some kind of comedies tend to be pretty kind of lowest common denominator. That one seems still fun and witty at the same time. So that's my latest that I kind of really kind of enjoyed watching even the third season.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one's going to probably. I like first of the conversation that's going to, in the beaten path, it's like how to conduct conversations with people in your organization. I think it's never bad to sort of immerse yourself into how to speak properly with other people.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key characteristics, and you can select a different framework, helps you a lot with creating high velocity discussions with others, because I can talk with somebody, say, hey, you're a P. Well, I'm not a P, I'm an I, whatever the thing is, and that makes a discussion that is like much, much faster and more comprehensive than just trying to explain this from scratch. Like, hey, you tend to do this, and you might want to do this, and you might want to strengthen that. I'd recommend starting from this, but there's probably other methodologies you can pick and maybe kind of some of the listeners here have already had one, but that's one I like because I kind of found it useful.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Define people by four characteristics. I think misnamed, but like are you an administrator? Can you, he calls it a producer, basically get the job done, integrate it, which kind of brings people together. And the fourth one, it's basically kind of changed agent, kind of do a lot of mess and change stuff. Usually entrepreneurs kind of include that part, of course. And basically his claim is like nobody does the whole four. Maybe you're good at one, maybe OK at the other. Personally, I'm horrible in administration. So I obviously acknowledge that and I try to sort of compliment myself. So I think there's two things in it. Firstly, just those, I thought there was like the four good ways of looking at people as a manager, as a leader, of course. That's one. But I think even if you disagree with those four, just like understanding that you want to look at the people in the organization yourself included, and it's through the prism of”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a set of books I think one that is sort of the starter one is, I think it's called right now the ideal executive. People don't really know itself, a management book, how to run a team and whatnot. I think the original version, funnily enough, I think it was called mismanagement. But nobody wanted to buy a book called Mismanagement. You'd much rather buy a book that's called Ideal Executive because you, of course, are not mismanaging. You're the ideal executive altogether. So you just reinforcing yourself. But jokes aside is basically kind of gives you the, it tried to sort of...”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ridiculously not smart. And the other thing we did together was like that was, the previous company started year 2000. So that was like the bubble, one of those very, very nice bubbles. So we're like, you know what? We actually got three customers. Admittedly, in totally three different segments. Now let's go and scale. Now we only knew we need one salesperson, one SE and C kind of do what's now called product market fit. I don't know that the term even existed there. And we're like, nah, you know what? Investors told us you got to hire more people. So we hired, I don't know, 20 salespeople, all of them failing miserably because, A, we didn't have a true product market feat, but even what's worse, we didn't have a true focused ICP with like a very, very petable product market face. So if you sort of hear me talk about sort of how we started gong, Amit kind of the CEO and he kind of drove it out of that business strategy. But sort of me being sort of a co-pilot there, it definitely bringing the same, I'm not going to make.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always kind of joke that in my previous company we had done so many mistakes that if life limited you to a certain number of mistakes I wouldn't have any left I think I still do mistakes but just so many so every one of them probably done twice or and then it's like some stages like you know third times a charm so the one I just gave you is like probably the worst is you know crossing the chasm you start a company you have this like technology I was thinking let's go horizontal and that technology was whatever web integration something eventually ended up being an e-commerce content syndication or content management SaaS software, which is the”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“going to work for companies that use GONC and that's the sort of the power of a small pond with like you know companies that are like each other because you get this viral effect that is not commonly B2B but it's as close as you can because of those conversations that other customer became a gong customer literally because they interviewed a person who told them he's not going to come unless they bought gone you can't do this if you have a wide market where people don't even talk to each other and there is an assumption that you're not like burying yourself in this market”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's sort of the traditional So if I call it the bowling alley or ever you want to kind of form Yeah, of course, in the Chasm kind of methodology, which you want to start narrow. You want to create this kind of smart pond where people talk about each other and you can kind of light the fire in there. In my previous company, by the way, I did read crossing the chasm. And I told myself, nah, I can do way better than that. So we had one customer in, I think it was L'Oreal or, I don't know, one of the cosmetics companies, an American Express in Cisco, like different industries and there was no way we could scale it because everybody had their own lingo, the way they thought about the technology and whatnot. So by having a smaller set of kind of customers or IC definition of customers, you can develop much more focus. And then it's easier to light the fire because people move, right? At some stage, I think it was year one into the business. We heard from a company that they interviewed a salesperson. And the salesperson asked, are you using Gong? And they said, we are thinking about using Gong, but we're not. Like, well, I'm on.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually, I kind of do this for kind of use cases within our customer base. For example, if I wanted to sort of, if you wanted to go after a certain persona or a certain use case for the product, so we had this notion of can we do a better job for a specific persona within sales, people who are account managers. So I would use a similar method. Like, hey, talk to one account manager I took to an analyst or whatever the thing is. And eventually when you start hearing the same things, like, what do they care about that's different than salespeople selling new business or different than contact center sellers, when you start hearing the same thing, you're like, okay, I kind of got to where I need to be. Now I can make decisions. I can always do another spiral and get one level deeper, which is, I don't know, do some user research, go all in, but at least at the sort of the conversation level, I've got where I need.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ideally at some stage you feel like first person, you have no idea what they're talking about. You probably didn't even understand what they're saying. The fifth person you might understand 50% or 50% is like new. At some stage, you're going to feel like, well, new stuff is 10% or 5% or 0%. I call it a spiral because it's going to go in circles around the target and eventually you feel like, well, I'm hearing the same thing again and again. And you're like, what if I heard it from three people? I didn't learn anything new. I'm sort of at the bullseye. Of course at the level I am. So I'm never going to be like a deep learning specialist in the same way that, you know, true data scientists are but as a product manager, I know it probably as well as I can given that everybody I'd spoken with at the time was not giving me anything new at the level of I had desired at the time.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's even beyond just the speed, but also like, how do you even know that you learn that you actually learned it? So it's kind of there is a mathematical kind of, or physical concept called annealing, which is how certain kind of material kind of becomes the way it is. And it sort of the temperature goes slightly down and eventually become a crystal or whatnot. There is an element to this, I think, in learning as well, which is you want to know what deep learning is. Like, you know nothing. You go find the person next to you. And you're like, what is deep learning? They tell you something. Of course, you don't know anything because you just heard it from one person. And the next question you'd ask, like, who else should they be speaking with? They give you three other names. I think in tech, we all tend to be to have like this very, very kind of cool ecosystem of people who are willing to help as long as you don't ask too much of them. So they spoke with three other people and then they give you like other names and you sort of go around.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The data scientist is not going to know if that brief or this brief is the right one, but they can kind of guide us through what's the right tool set you need to sort of put it in front of customers and how do you measure this and whatnot. And then I think at the end of the day, you also need this myth, you know, kind of now it's becoming common, so the prompt engineer, the person who's actually working with the NLMs and guiding them, that that is like a, it's a bit of a technical skill, but you got to have it doesn't have to be a full-time person, but needs to be, there needs to be that expertise of somebody who's actually optimizing things. Many, many customers tell us that, you know, Gong AI is, well, it's more accurate than others. Yes, there's some combination of models we built from scratch, fine-tuned because we have AI expertise, but some of it is also how we kind of, the prompt we give to the LLMs, how much rigor we put into optimizing them and kind of finding the edge cases and ranking them and improving them over time. If you want to get really good AI, you have”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you still have to have this kind of quote unquote data scientist role and data. It could be advisors as well, right? Not everything has to be a full-time in the company. And the role of a data scientist is help guide the company, right? Deal prediction model. Is this an thing? Do you need to build a model? If you need, what input do you need? How long it's going to take? Also, in our world, at least, data scientists are the people who know how to measure these things. Is this model better or is this model better? Is this prompt better or is this prompt not better? And the judge, they're not going to do the judgment, right? So when Gong creates an account brief,”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a term I like because they kind of realize it's not best, it's not great, but it's a good first draft. So if you know what it is, it's easier not just to name, but how to conceptualize, how to build a workflow around it, what to train users to assume for it. And I think there is an expertise there that comes on top of LLMs, even if you just use LLMs and you can't afford or you don't want to go deeper.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, or even if you end up outsourcing the core work, at least you have to have the expertise to understand what is doable, what is not doable, what's the right way to approach it, what's the input you give to the LLM, is this going to be good quality or bad quality? There's even like, if you just take the product management aspect, if the LLM gives you something that is 90% accurate, or I don't know, people are going to think it's good. The product's going to look different than if it's 50% good. So just the way you even think about it, the way you, I think Figma calls their AI feature like first raft.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can make a very good progress without these, but I think there's a glass ceiling if you don't figure out how to kind of create a more operational rigor around this whole AI thing.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can be built or no, because if you're going to spend many, many hours on asking an NLM to do, I don't know what, like in the case of GONG, for example, tell me what a good sales cycle look like. LLMs don't do that. Just like maybe something else does, but we have a field prediction model. LLMs cannot predict deals because it's like very, very specialized. So I think you still need to have expertise. You still want to have some measurements. So yes, version one, you can just go to an LLM and say, you know, create something, I don't know, whatever. But if you don't have measurements, like in the old machine learning, whatever metrics you use, you're not going to advance. You're going to have v1 and then you're going to have v2 and you have no way to know if you've made a progress. So we kind of paid a lot of attention to, we have people who are going to specialize how you measure. We use LOSY system, which is kind of the one used in chess as well. And we do have experts who kind of help us make the right decisions.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I did send an email saying, hey, this is the next thing. But so we understood it's the next thing. Of course, we didn't know it's going to be LLM and GPT and other acronyms that evolved for the years. And probably now that we're talking at the end of 2024-ish, I think people should not go from one extreme, which is, hey, we need a bunch of data scientists for every small project, which was the case five years ago or three years ago. To the other extreme, which is, hey, LLM is going to solve everything. Because LLMs don't solve everything. They have huge utility. We use LLMs all the place. Most companies that develop AI kind of stuff, they use LLMs. It's a great thing. But at the same time, don't assume it does everything. You still need some of the core competencies of AI. So you do want to have expertise people who actually know they're doing and help guide us PMs around is this”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, funny. You know, when we launched Gome, we didn't use the term AI because people thought it was a bad thing. It makes wrong decisions, or they just thought it's an action item, an acronym. When we founded Gong, I was in Sabbatican and I actually went to this deep learning course because I was bored in unfairness. And after that course, I ended up buying NVIDIA stock, which I wish I had kept up until now.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, you got at some stage note you're doing. Yeah, if I were now to sort of make a decision around, I don't know, entering a different space, there's no way I would be like, yeah, let's flip a coin like the asymmet story and go for it. I go to a conference, learn it, whatever the thing is, and then make that decision. But most of the decisions all of it make on a day-to-day basis is our domain of expertise versus like totally new things.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, like big, big one-door. I mean, this is, of course, you're going to spend more time on, but people tend to overthink, I think, decisions. I also found out personally, the quality of my decisions, if you sort of kind of wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me, you know, what do you think about X? And I'm going to be like, I have no idea. I'm sleeping. And then you're like, you know, you got to force me into a decision. I'm going to make a decision. Now you're going to give me two weeks to ponder over it. I don't think the quality of the decision is going to be much, much higher, which is maybe personal, could be personal, but that's at least what I found out over my too many years of existence.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's like pretty strategic decisions, right? And we're like, we don't know, there's pros and cons. We're like on the fence there. And we end up not buying the company. We can kind of look up Gong and we haven't bought big companies. And I asked him maybe it was a couple of months ago. It's like, what if we had bought that company? Do you think we would have been in a radically different position? He was like, no. So it's like, I mean, it could have been better. It could have been worse, but it would not have like made a huge difference. And the reason is it was a 51.49 decision wasn't a 70-30 decision. So it's hard for humans to make decisions. You probably know there's like experiments that show it's almost like running or jogging or doing something that is a physical requires your physical capacity to make decisions. So just make it, I know it's hard and you want to postpone it, but just do it.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many reasons why not we don't really debate it. But should we develop feature A and feature B? And we look at them, they're kind of the same, I don't know, call it same value or same cost, whatever, however kind of mental framework you have for deciding, you end up being like 51, 40, 49. No decision is going to be like super wrong. So yes, you can try to bring in more data and you can try to sort of like bring more people, but both decisions are okay. Just go ahead with one. Hopefully it's not like a huge mistake. I'll tell you I had this discussion with my co-founder, Amit, who is the CEO. And a few years ago, we were considering buying a company.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe a little bit of a personal thing, but I would encourage people to look up in Google. Maybe I'll do a spoiler for Isaac Asimov, he's a science fiction writer, I think, beginning of last century. And he has this short story that the machine that won the war. So you can look it up. It's a fun story, pretty short. But it's basically the computer, the big computer that time supposedly won the war. But the only reason won the war is because they wanted the people to trust this superhuman machine. But what they realized the machine was just giving crap, just like our LLM destinations. So the head person, president, whatever it is, basically ended up saying, you know, I end up tossing a coin. But people wondered this, like, really believe that this is like a smart machine thing is going to help us win the war. So it's kind of obviously a funny kind of story, but I think there is truth to it. So many, many decisions, when it's not a close call, it's like should go should Gong open an office in China right now. Well, probably no.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't go back, right? So I think it's just like even like I hate terms such as risk. That's a very like, I don't know, like ambiguous term, but just the risk of building something you're not going to know if it's going to get used. And I was asked by sort of a very senior product manager of a very successful big SaaS company. Like, why do you even do this? I'm like, what do you mean? Like, hey, we launch products and then we see if people like them. It's like, I don't think that's a great idea because that company's successful, bigger than gone. At the same time, I just think it's leaving too much in the hands of, I would even call it luck, right? Because how do you know?”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sales from my perspective are part of the virtual pot, right? So the core pod is, as I mentioned, product engineering, but part of the virtual pod is there's product marketing, customer success, sales. In all fairness, salespeople are usually busy doing their work versus actually sitting with us and helping us kind of, is this going to sell? Did you hear it from customers, the type of questions that product managers usually want to get? But if they're happy to spend time, they would be very involved.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopefully get the benefit of higher velocity and higher quote unquote morale or sort of like engagement from people. And that should result in better products as well.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firstly, you as a leader need to sign up to sort of let go a little bit, not control everything, willing to make some more mistakes than maybe you'd make otherwise. So that's the one thing. I think the harder thing is sort of, at least for me, is you also have to sort of get your peers in the same boat, right? Because the head of sales is going to ask you, hey, what's happening? How do I know what's happening if you don't have a control over every feature? And the CFO is going to ask you, hey, what's the, I don't know what it is, the RRI of this or how do you justify those type of decisions? So there has to be some fundamental trust within you and your team, you and your colleagues to at least experiment that way. And of course, if you do it on an ongoing basis, you lose some visibility. And I think that's maybe one thing you got to acknowledge, right? Because if you give people more control, by definition, you're going to have less visibility in what you're doing. So give up a little bit of visibility.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it goes up to a whole product. It's kind of very hard to, because you got to have resources to build a whole product. But I do think there are substantial features that came out of it. Even sort of the kind of the AI fine-tuning example I gave you before is something came up in a hackathon and people were like, let's start to build it. Let's incubate it. And then they move forward. Of course, we had to give them resources at some stage. But it wasn't like a top-down. Let's do this. It was more like, hey, we're trying it out. Hey, we need a couple of more resources. We're trying more. And at some stage, we realize it's super important. And then we kind of quote funded it completely.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and of course, you know, you are expected to solicit feedback, right? So if you're going to build your own thing for six months and it's going to be, well, we're going to review it along the way, of course. But we expect you to initiate the review. We have a weekly session we can bring up your reviews, but it's not us forcing you to do it. You have to bring it. You have to solicit it, and you have to sort of drive the process.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means that if you're working with design partners and you get an idea from the customer, it's your responsibility to decide are you going to do it or are you going to talk to your manager or to me? Now I have coursework managers. But if your responsibility. So we're not going to quote unquote punish you. If you decided that you kind of took it an opinion from a customer and went ahead and did it, it's your responsibility to decide, you know, do I know enough? Do I need more input? How up do I go? So that requires them to think, you know, how confident am I in my decision?”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's many, many of these education systems or principles that are along those lines. I mean, the person who taught me that I don't assume she's invented it, but we all are on the side of like wanting more control. But I do the same thing with my kids. So I would never install any piece of software on my kids' devices. So not like firewall protection, I don't know, antivirus, air attack, nothing because I'm like, this is your problem. And if you want to protect yourself, it's your responsibility. So this is autonomy. And there was one time where I had negotiated with my daughter. She was like, I told her, I think you're going to using your computer too much. And we negotiated. She said, maybe an hour's enough. I told her maybe more. I think we agreed on a two-hour thing. And then she came to me three days in a row. Could you please install this software on my machine so I can help me like control my limits? And I love it when it's the other way around because now.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They brought it to the table. It's like, I really like Homus. I don't like the whatever the other thing I would have to bring. And we did it every year afterwards because we did this thing at least annually and it worked every single time. So if you take the software that you can't tell everybody, you know, just develop your whole thing. But if you can guide them towards, hey, do the thing give you more autonomy essentially, bring yourself to the game, be yourself, don't try to sort of put yourself in a box. I truly believe you're going to get much better results short and even more importantly long term because it keeps people thinking. It keeps them being motivated and they're like, how do I kind of contribute in the way I think is the right way?”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Common denominator because everybody brings the sort of, I don't even miss the cheapest, like the easiest thing that you can bring to such a picnic. And this lady told me, here's a different method. Just tell everybody, bring your own thing. I'm like, are you crazy? You know, people are just going to not bring anything or, I mean, whatever you want, right? Or people are going to read the same thing. Multiple people are going to, I don't know, bake some pie or do something, right? And she's like, no, that's not going to happen. So I trusted her. That's maybe a trustworthy. We tried it out. And what happened was really kind of fascinating. People were going out to the specialty stores and bringing like specialties. I'm based in Israel. So they were going to this homeless place, which is like, you know, Israeli thing. And it's like driving 30 miles to your favorite thing. People like baking and making stuff. So we had like literally a feast. And the funny thing, two things happened. Everybody was much, much happier, right? They were happier because of course they got better food and then you're like, and also most people kind of just their personality.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About her selfish think, it's a very personal thing. So I think even beyond trust, it's just for me it's selfish. I'll tell you why. I just think you get more from everybody if you kind of let them be themselves and do things in the way that they believe is the right way, of course, within limits, right? They're not going to develop, I don't know what it is, software in different business. But the story I always like to tell is when my son was in primary school, which was a while back, one of the parents told me, and we had this picnic where all the parents and the kids were going to meet. And usually there's like a list of ingredients that people need to bring in, you know, to bring on a bottle of water, whatever the thing is. And what's usually happened? There's even like people are joking about it, is people run through the list because it's usually like a physical list and then or make night. Probably now it's already in Google Sheets always. And people run to just like mark the item that is as easy to get as possible, like a battle of order. And then I'm done. And then you always get the low.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, respectfully of yours truly, I do believe customers know much better than what they need and then myself or my colleagues in the executive team, whoever else, you talk to a customer and they kind of describe the pain. They might not know how to build it or what's the right way to implement it, but if the pain should be there.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does increase significantly the We're not building the design partner program to kind of solve for this. Maybe we should, but we are not doing it right now. But generally speaking, I would say more than 95% of the capabilities we build are being kind of used in a very significant way.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. So in a way, it's replicating this, but it was successful at the time. It was like maybe 80% intentional at the time. At some point, you take the stuff that works and you make it 100% intentional.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think at some stage, I guess you get like seven or eight or nine at some stage. Based on my experience, the request starts to converge. There might be one outlier, but generally you're going to hear the same things.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is kind of core skill at XPMs to have around kind of this. This is exactly your kind of job, right? Try to figure out what request is like must have versus not must have. Typically, they ask the customer, you know, what do you have right now? How happy are you between zero and 10 or whatever? So if you're at the six, we want to get you to an eight or a nine. So that's maybe a high level principle. But at the same time, I expected to say, hey, this is a unique, I didn't hear it from anybody else. Maybe I'm going to proactively reach out to more customers, but that might be a one-customer thing. And we still do one customer thing in a different context, right? So if we have, I don't know, a seven or eight-figure deal that they have one customization that they really, really need, and we know that they can't work without it. I mean, like every enterprise facing company, we're going to do that. But from a design partner perspective, it's the opposite. It's more like, let's try to build something that works across our customer base versus for specific customer.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less structures, maybe it's a couple of minutes with each one, and then we move on, you launch the feature, and you move to the next kind of quote unquote project or feature.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the context. So, when you build a new product, it's a more linear path, right? Ideally, you want it to be launched sometime. Ideally, you want to measure some progress. So usually what we've done in this case is like some sort of a weekly meeting where we kind of show them progress. And, you know, sometimes bi-weekly, depending on our own cadence. In some other capabilities that we build might be more, I would say freeform. Maybe it's an enhancement, maybe it's tweak, maybe it's an extension of the, I'll give an example, right? One of the things we do right now is we let customers ask a question about an account. So you come into Gong, like, what's new with Cisco if Cisco is a customer? And at some stage, you do it. We're doing it in all languages, right? So you want to recruit a specific design, a set of design partners who are non-English speakers. So that doesn't have like a strict timeline. You want to get enough of them so you see the thing works, gets your reasonable quality results. You're not going to get to all languages on the one hand, but at the same time, you don't have like just Spanish. So that might be a list.”
2025-01-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more | Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source