Eilon Reshef | Gong | How Do You Build a Product for Sales Organizations

Description

Gong, founded in 2015 by Amit Bendov and Eilon Reshef, uses AI to analyze all communication between salespeople and customers, and today sells three products: conversation intelligence, forecast and sales engagement. In conversation with Eyal David, Eilon explains why they stopped selling to Revenue Operations (even his brother wouldn't buy) and moved to the CRO, how the company values were written from employees' post-it notes, how as CPO he splits his time between managing 80 product people and high-ambiguity features, and how they compete with Microsoft and Salesforce. He describes a product organization built around a dedicated AI group with a single driver per feature, the GenAI exercise every PM and designer completed, their evaluation method using Elo ratings, the 300-400 betas running in parallel, and candidly admits Gong hasn't yet cracked onboarding junior product managers.

Key moments

1. 0:50 · What Gong does and how the product evolved
2. 2:19 · Selling to the CRO: first customers and fast value
3. 4:31 · Company values written bottom-up: no sugar
4. 6:16 · Gong today, and from CTO to CPO
5. 7:32 · A CPO's day-to-day: managing 80 product people and ambiguous features
6. 10:22 · The products, the competitors, and Microsoft and Salesforce
7. 13:55 · Product-led and the pod model
8. 15:02 · Challenges at scale and the AI revolution
9. 18:34 · Product skills: understanding what the customer really needs
10. 22:13 · Shipping the org chart, and the Engage product
11. 25:17 · The future of AI in sales: upgrade, not replacement
12. 27:22 · An AI-first product org: the AI group and a single driver
13. 33:12 · Evaluating GenAI and Elo ratings
14. 37:19 · Showing customers early: feature flags and betas
15. 40:40 · How to start bringing AI into an organization
16. 44:04 · The challenge of onboarding juniors