Elan Reshef
Co-founder & CPO, Gong. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorLinkedIn ↗gong.io ↗
In 2015, he co-founded Gong alongside CEO Amit Bendov, spearheading product strategy and engineering to build its AI revenue intelligence platform. Before Gong, he co-founded Webcollage, an e-commerce content syndication SaaS platform that was acquired by Answers Corporation.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Elan Reshef said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Reshef: Gong organizes its product pods around customer jobs to be done
“We tend to be less metric driven, maybe than the average, especially B to C, but even like other, maybe B to B companies, usually it's more around some sort of a job to be done.”
Reshef: Launching SaaS products without design partners relies too much on luck
“I don't think that's a great idea because that company is successful, bigger than gone, but 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?”
Reshef: Pick fast on 51/49 decisions instead of gathering more data
“Should we develop feature A and feature B and you look at them, they're kind of the same, I don't know, call it same value or same cost or whatever, however, whatever kind of mental framework you have for deciding, you end up being like 51, 40, 49. No decision…”
Reshef: LLMs cannot accurately predict sales deals due to highly specialized requirements
“LLMs cannot predict deals because it's like very, very specialized.”
Reshef: Gong pods collaborate with up to 24 design partners each
“Every pod is working with sometimes a dozen design partners, sometimes two dozen design partners, maybe sometimes five if it's a very niche or fringe capability.”
Reshef: Gong employs a dedicated coordinator to source and schedule design partners
“In our product team, there's one person who's basically a research coordinator. And she's responsible for reaching out, and she basically talks with the PMs, like, what's your target market, ICP, whatever you want to call that? Give me some, what do you want t…”
Reshef: Gong builds single-customer customizations for seven- or eight-figure deals
“So if we have a, I don't know, a seven or eight figure deal that they have like 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.”
Reshef: Customer feedback predictably converges after consulting seven to nine design partners
“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.”
Reshef: Over 95% of Gong's built product capabilities achieve significant user adoption
“Better than that, more than 95% of our, the capabilities we build are being, you know, kind of used in a very kind of significant way.”
Reshef: Gong product teams can ship customer feedback without executive approval
“It means that if you're working with design partners and you get, like an idea from the customer it's your responsibility to decide are you gonna do it or are you gonna talk to your manager or to me? You know, now I have, of course, work managers but it's your…”
Reshef: Gong teams must proactively solicit product reviews instead of mandating them
“We expect you to initiate the review. You have like a, we have like a weekly session where you 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.”
Reshef: Autonomy inherently trades leadership visibility for team velocity and engagement
“Because if you give people more control, by definition, you're gonna have less visibility in what you're doing. So give up a little bit of visibility, Hopefully get the benefit of higher velocity and higher quote-unquote morale or, you know, sort of like engag…”
Reshef: AI product teams cannot progress without disciplined measurement metrics
“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 V-one and then you're going to have V-two, and you have no way to know if you've made a progress.”
Reshef: Domain mastery occurs when expert interviews yield under 5% new information
“At some stage, you're going to feel like, well, new stuff is 10%, or five percent, or zero percent. I call it a spiral, because it's kind of going in circles around the target, and eventually you feel like, well, I'm hearing the same thing again and again, and…”
Reshef: Gong pods include PM, UX, fractional roles, and 5-7 engineers
“So up until now, we have this pod structure, product manager UX, fractional writing, fractional analyst, and then a team leader from an engineering standpoint, following five to, I'd say, seven engineers.”
Gong CPO: Company currently operates between 25 and 30 product pods
“I think we have like 25 pods right now, maybe 30, Depends what you call it, pod”
Reshef: Gong evaluates AI model iteration progress using an Elo rating system
“We use Elo system, which is kind of the one, you know, using chess as well.”
Reshef: His previous startup failed to scale by serving disparate, fragmented industries
“So we had one customer in, I think it was L'Oreal or I don't know, one of the cosmetics companies in American Express and Cisco, like different industries, and there was no way we could scale it because everybody had their own lingo, the way they thought about…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Elan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CPO, Gong | 1 | 18 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |