How we built a feature that connects remote sales teams — in two weeks
Today, we’re launching a new product functionality within Gong — shared sales calendars within remote sales teams so that managers can view their team members’ schedules and help them with their sales calls.
Here’s what it looks like:
Each calendar meeting is associated with account and deal information. Sales managers and team members can easily review past calls, join live ones, and subscribe to upcoming ones.
What’s unique about this feature is that we built it in two weeks, from identifying a need to pushing a live feature for hundreds of customers. Those two weeks included inception, design, development, internal training, and market launch.
This was our timeline:
I thought I’d walk you through the timeline and how we made it happen, and share some of the learnings around what made it possible.
Sun* 3/8: The Genesis — Identifying a Problem
On Sunday, Amit (my partner and Gong CEO) and I met for our weekly meeting at our Israeli R&D center. At that time, our San Francisco office team members were already working remotely due to COVID-19. In Israel, we would move to working remotely the following week.
Amit and I have both been through two downturns — 2001 and 2009 — and we both felt that it would be a while before the market recovers. It was also clear that the situation — people having to work remotely — will last for a while.
Strategically, we felt that Gong is well positioned in this crazy situation: field sales teams started selling remotely, making the Gong solution more useful for them than before. Some of those teams will never go back, making it easier for them to use Gong later on.
Tactically, we know that Gong offers high value for remote teams. In our initial go-to-market efforts in 2017 we learned that Gong’s ability to disseminate information, to enable team selling, and to coach were even more powerful in a distributed environment. We were surprised at the time to hear customers say that one of the benefits of Gong is “asynchronous” collaboration and coaching.
But, Amit posed a bigger question: Is there anything we’re not doing for remote teams that we can do? We made it an action item to find out.
* 3/8 was a Sunday. No, we don’t work on weekends at Gong. In Israel, Sunday is a workday.
Mon 3/9: Acting Fast — Looking for a Solution
One of our Gong operating principles is act now, so the following morning, I met with Ohad, our head of R&D. He had also spent time with Amit and came out of that meeting trying to address the same question: Can we add value to remote teams beyond what we’re already doing?
Like many other companies, we looked at options to help customers around COVID-19. Can we help coach remotely? Can we help schedule meetings? Can we provide analytics on the pandemic?
But another core principle we follow is raving fans, which is all about doing our utmost to create the best possible product and service experience. We weren’t interested in creating a facade of value; we wanted to create real value.
Understanding the Gap
We started analyzing what changed due to coronavirus: What is the fundamental difference between working remotely and working in a co-located environment? What could sales teams do when sharing office space that was now harder to do in a distributed environment?
We came up with several gaps that arise from replacing the physical office with a distributed one. The most evident one was the lack of a swivel chair.
A swivel chair?
Well, in a co-located environment, a sales manager sees the team around them and can always turn around to each of the team members. They can ask how a call was, offer advice, and quickly brainstorm with team members. In a distributed environment, if a sales manager were to call team members multiple times a day, they would be considered a pest.
We did have a full, non-coronavirus workday that day, so we couldn’t come up with an immediate way to address the swivel-chair gap. In the meantime, I looped in Rahm, our product management lead, to share the challenge with him and see if he had ideas for a solution.
Quick Experimentation
At Gong, we use Gong extensively for our sales teams, so we can always prototype with our own users. As a quick evening experiment, I picked one of our sales managers, Matt. What would help Matt to virtually “see” his team in a remote environment?
In a real office, Matt would be able to turn around and see what prospects his team is speaking with. In a remote environment, the closest place might be their calendars. So, I looked up his team’s meetings in their Google calendar and which prospects they were with. I then entered the data into an Outlook.com calendar. It looked like this:
I sent this screenshot via a quick note to Amit, who in addition to being Gong’s CEO is also a visionary in the sales domain. He asked whether managers see this data in Google Calendar. No, they cannot: Google only shows the title of the meeting, and creating this view is impractical. I also sent the screenshot to Eran, our COO, who later responded “Definitely think there’s something there.” So it was worth exploring.
Initial User Feedback
It was time to get feedback from a real user. I started by grabbing Matt’s team meetings for the following day (stored in Gong) into an Excel spreadsheet:
And reformatted this in Excel into the following table, which resembled the Outlook view:
This was Matt’s true data for only 4 of his team members, and only until 1pm. It was too laborious to build completely. But it did seem to have some merit.
Once I finished, I dropped Matt an email with the above screenshot and a quick note:
If we had a page like this somewhere in Gong — would it help you manage the day and team, now that we’re remote?
This is your team’s schedule for tomorrow — picked four people (didn’t have time to do the rest), all scheduled calls.
We can make each of the calls say “Done” when ready and clickable to the right call page.
Would this be of help in managing the day?
I then forwarded this email to Amit and Ohad with a quick note: “Let’s see…”.
And since I’m based in our R&D center in Tel Aviv, which was 9 hours ahead of Matt and our sales team in San Francisco… it was time to go to sleep.
Tue 3/10: Prototyping and Scaling Feedback
In the morning, I checked my inbox and saw a note from Ohad saying he liked it, along with the following note from Matt:
This actually is pretty awesome! The only thing I worry about is any calendar outside of Google. I never used Salesforce’s calendar because it wasn’t part of Google’s and I feel like a lot of our customers would say the same, so I’m unsure if I’d go in here a lot unless it was potentially something easy to access as part of the Home page.
Positive, but inconclusive. It was time for more user feedback.
Off to my weekly meeting with Rahm… Rahm came up with several ideas, some overlapping with the approach I had taken. So rather than reinvent the wheel, we used that spreadsheet of Matt’s meetings as a starting point.
We quickly realized a nicer prototype could do this idea justice, so we grabbed Eli H., our lead designer, quickly showed him the spreadsheet, and then set up a longer meeting for after lunch. Eli was now on it. He quickly came back with some rough design ideas, which days later morphed into this sketch:
Scaling Feedback
Well, if one manager thought that it was “pretty awesome,” but was “unsure if I’d go there a lot,” what would other managers think?
I have my weekly meetings with Damian, our veteran product management director based out of San Francisco, on Tuesdays. We quickly reviewed the motivation and proposed solution and he offered to gather some additional feedback.
By the end of the business day, Damian had conducted an interview with Chris, who manages our growth team, about the general pain of working remotely. Here’s what Chris said:
The first pain that comes to mind when you ask me about managing remote salespeople is: What the hell is going on going forward from here? [I’m] trying to keep up to date… Like, what kind of customer calls do we have on the calendar?
You know, I can dive into every single opportunity and figure out what’s next with the opportunity in Gong, but I’m more interested in looking at that from a people perspective.
Like I can go, see that [Account] has a next step. What about Meridith, you know, what are, or what… what about Mike or Jefferson? What do they have coming up on their calendars as far as sales opportunity movement goes?
When Damian showed Chris the quick prototype and asked “What do you think you’re looking at?” Chris said:
I think I am looking at… pretty much what I want [laughter]
We use Gong extensively, so this call was naturally recorded and transcribed — you can listen to the call snippet here:
The call was waiting in our inboxes when we woke up the following day. It looked like we were onto something.
Wed 3/11: Collaboration and Alignment
Both Ohad and Rahm thought it would be worthwhile to explore this further and potentially create a live prototype.
Ohad nominated an engineering squad that happened to be more available than the other, which coincided nicely with the fact that the product manager who works with this squad handles our people intelligence pillar, which is the closest one to this new capability.
Now that we knew which team could work on this, we set up a 30-minute sync for the following day.
Creating a Product Brief
One of the trade-offs of running fast is the risk that some relevant people won’t be in the loop. To promote wider collaboration, it is our practice to put together short product briefs, or short descriptions of the business problem, use cases, and the proposed solution. We manage them in Confluence and tag everyone who may be impacted by a new feature.
This was the Business Problems section we had:
Each product brief also has a RASCI matrix to help us identify relevant people. In this case, being an impactful new feature, we tagged numerous people at Gong.
We also shared the document with the entire senior management team for feedback and review.
People seemed to like it:
More Feedback
While we worked on internal communication and coordination, Damian interviewed Ron, another Gong sales manager, and two of our account executives, Jordan and Nate, to get the individual contributor’s perspective. The feedback was slightly different, but aligned with the overall picture.
Thu 3/12: Deciding and Starting Execution
On Thursday, we met as a larger team. We included two more product managers (Shefa, who would be driving this, and Yoni, who leads our Deal Intelligence pillar), two of the squad leads (Gilad, who would be driving this and Yossi), and Uri, the product designer who works with Shefa.
In the meeting, Gilad suggested we’d develop this in Hackathon mode, quick and focused. We decided the following:
- A team in Gilad’s squad will develop it, starting the following business day (i.e., the following week). Gilad suggested a small multidisciplinary team within his squad (Eli K. and Noa), and we all agreed that their current project could be pushed out. Shefa and Uri will PM/UX this, with other people’s help.
- We’ll err on the side of speed versus process. We’ll start a dedicated Slack channel and attempt to create a limited working version by mid-week.
Little did we know that over the weekend, Israel would also move to shelter-in-place guidance, and the work would have to be done remotely.
Even More Feedback
Getting feedback from people at Gong is great, but nothing beats real customers. As we were progressing with customers, Damian carried out another interview, this time with an external customer. We started collecting detailed feedback and specific use cases.
Shefa, now officially the product manager, spoke with another customer, showed her the prototype, and asked her what she was seeing. The response was:
Sure, it’s everybody’s calls.
Oh, my God! Can I join the on-air ones from here? Holy moly. It even has the amount. This is so amazing. So you can keep accountability of people working from home, and even have the emails.
Oh, this is FIRE! This is FIRE, I LOVE this. This is so amazing!
We were now pretty certain that even if this new capability didn’t fit everyone, and even if we didn’t hit the perfect solution in the initial launch, we were heading in the right direction.
Over the following days, Shefa and Damian will be interviewing additional customers to better understand the pain and to fine-tune the solution.
Fri 3/13: Planning, A Weekend Side Project, Preparing for Launch
Planning
In preparation for the work in the following week, Shefa took a few hours off her weekend to listen to review the documents, listen to the user interviews in Gong, and put together a straw-man product specification. This would let the development work commence work early in the week.
A Weekend Side Project
Later on Friday (weekend in Israel) I received a Slack message from Nir, one of our senior mobile developers:
I shared with Nir the Feature Brief, and within a few hours he came back with a suggestion for a mobile-version wireframe:
Tali, our mobile product manager, chimed in and helped with some PowerPoint mockups. By the end of the weekend, Nir was able to create a demo within our mobile application. Can we launch this feature in our mobile app as well? We certainly did not expect this.
Preparing for Launch
At Gong, we push code to production continuously, but roll out new major features monthly. This is so we can train our go-to-market teams and create the supporting marketing materials. It will obviously be different in this case. So, Damian created a Slack channel to prepare for launch.
Over the coming days, we would coordinate launch activities, including scope, naming, messaging and sales, and customer success enablement.
Brandy, our sales enablement manager, would join the team to prepare sales and customer success training.
Sumeru and Trish, our customer education and customer marketing leads, would join to coordinate training and early references.
Sun 3/15: Development Starts
A week has passed since the initial problem identification, and development started with Eli K. and Noa at the helm, and Shefa and Uri providing product support. We created two additional Slack groups: one for the project team and another that included the broader product team.
Eli K. started adapting some third-party calendar components to our needs and defined the client-server API. Noa started looking at the back-end services.
Given that everyone at Gong was working from home, development progressed remotely. The team set up daily stand-ups in Zoom. Because of the remote work, you could often see kids in the background.
Sun 3/16: Development Continues, Public Disclosure
Development Continues
Eli K. continued customizing the new page with mock data. Noa continued fetching the data for the front-end.
Public Disclosure
In the meanwhile, it was the second day of development and time to announce the feature publicly. Right?
It so happened that Jonathan, our content marketing writer, published a blog post titled Strategies For Managing Remote Sales Teams (By Choice Or By Necessity) (here). Knowing we’ll have the product soon, he included a section with a screenshot of the new feature. Game on!
Tue 3/17: Broader Check-in, Internal Announcement
On Tuesday, we were planning on a broader check-in. Eli K. completed the integration with the server and started working on drill-in functionality. Noa found out she had to rewrite portions of existing back-end services and got to it. Things were progressing.
In the meanwhile, the team pulled in Gabbi, from another team, to help with permissions. Every area in Gong is controlled by a permission system, and Gabbi was the domain expert in that area.
In the broader check-in, we looked at a very rough version and collected feedback. We already had the basic skeleton of the page and some data in it. The development team decided not to spend time on launching this to our production environment and instead proceed with development locally.
Unfortunately, we realized that launching this capability on mobile in the same timeframe would impede other priorities. So Tali decided to launch it later. We figured that when people work from home, they have nearby access to a computer.
Internal Announcement
With people working remotely due to COVID-19, we now have a weekly company video call with Amit. On Tuesday, Amit presented the concept to the entire company. People were excited to see how Gong was quickly responding to market events. In the following days, go-to-market teams would be presenting the prototype to customers and receiving positive feedback.
Wed 3/18: Finding a Name
On the development front, things were progressing. Eli K. continued working on the drill-in functionality. Noa got pulled to assist another developer, but then returned to complete the CRM integration. Permissions were also moving along, with people juggling code and kids.
With the feature coming, it needed a name. Shefa worked with Naomi, our writer, and Elvis, our product marketing manager. Multiple names were considered — from situation-driven names such as WFH to conceptual names such as Huddle. Eventually, they decided on an Activity tab and an Activity Calendar name for the feature.
Thu 3/19: Live Internally and Feedback Gathering
By Thursday, the end of the week in Israel, the feature was ready for internal use.
Eli K. demoed the feature to the broader development and product teams, and later Shefa conducted a training session with the customer success team.
The feature was pushed to our production environment, and Shefa dropped a note in our internal product buzz Slack channel:
Collecting Feedback
With such a short development cycle in place, the initial version was expected to have some limitations. Rahm opened a Confluence document to collect feedback ahead of launch.
The document included feedback by priority (0: must have for launch, 1: can launch, but must fix immediately thereafter, 2: should fix soon after launch, 3: nice to have). In the coming days, we would collect feedback from different people.
Fri 3/20: Preparing for Launch
In Israel, this was a weekend day. In the US, Damian prepared the product walkthrough. Elvis prepared the customer announcement.
Sun 3/22: Final Touches
On Sunday, Shefa reviewed the feedback collected so far and adjusted the priorities. The development team was on top of critical issues, to allow launch on Tuesday. Shefa and Rahm added some definitions of “empty states” and provided feedback on the launch materials. Naomi wrote a help page.
Mon 3/23: Cleaning the Issues, Training
We kept collecting feedback from users. All P0 and some of the P1 bugs were fixed, but new ones were found. We also started to see a pattern of questions and decided to add more support text around the page to help out.
Training
In preparation for launch, Elvis held a training session with sales. The bigger team held meeting with Tier 1 and Tier 2 Support to ensure they’re ready for the launch.
We all felt were are almost ready, just need to see that all issues are being resolved.
Tue 3/24: Live for Everyone
Eli K and Noa fixed most of the P1 issues. They added basic analytics events, so we can track usage. In the afternoon, we held a last review meeting. We decided to add a couple of more last-minute fixes, and launch later in the day.
Naturally, a last-minute bug — discovered on a call with a design partner — made us question whether we can get it out in time. After the fix, Shefa showed it to one more design partner. It seemed to be working, so it was time to go.
We turned the feature on in production for everyone
Now, it was time for announcement. Damian turned on the walkthrough tours. Shefa sent out an announcement on our internal product buzz Slack channel. I hit “publish” on this this blog post. Elvis sent out the customer announcement email.
Now it’s in customers’ hands.
Finally, at Gong we have a separate environment we use for demo purposes, with anonymized data. After turning on the feature in our production environment, we pushed the feature to our demo environment so it could be presented to customers by our go-to-market teams. We’re good.
Final Thoughts: What made it happen?
It’s very rare to see so many people push hard to create a significant feature in such a short time.
Multiple factors contributed to our ability to make it happen. Some are captured in our operating principles, while others are specific to our product and engineering culture.
Our Team Culture and Can-Do Attitude
One of our operating principles — Win as a Team — states: “Gongsters optimize for the team win, and we strive to hire people who prioritize team wins above their own. We’re here to win as a team.”
By far, this was the most dominant factor in this effort. It took an open “internal customer” team, an aggressive engineering team, an excited product team, and a proficient go-to-market team to all push this in such a short timeframe. It’s very likely that if one of the teams had not participated in the effort and stuck to their original priorities, we would have had to slow down this initiative or bring it to a stop.
Another operating principle we live by — Act Now — states: “Instead of spending too much time discussing how we’re going to act, we simply act. We keep ‘work about work’ and ‘plans for having plans’ to the necessary minimum.”
This initiative shows that we’re true to our word.
Finally, an operating principle we take seriously — Enjoy the Ride — states: “While we’re very serious about our work, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Have fun and enjoy the ride!”
I believe every single person in this extended team had fun pushing the envelope and seeing how much we can deliver in such a short time. I certainly did!
Our Focus on Bringing Value to Customers
Perhaps our most important operating principle — Raving Fans — states: “We do our utmost to create the best possible product and service experience. You cannot go wrong by making a customer happy.”
We resisted the temptation to create a facade. By focusing on real customer needs and on people’s true use case, we came up with a feature that we believe will help them work in the current environment.
Another key operating principle — Want More — states: “We are never completely satisfied with our accomplishments. When we achieve new records, we celebrate, and then imagine new ones.”
Gong helps remote sales teams even with our standard offering. But we wanted to provide more.
Finally, one of our operating principles — Favor the Long Term — states: “Our vision will take a while to fulfill; when conflicted with taking a shortcut now vs. doing the right thing for the long term, we favor the long term.”
As fast as we wanted to deliver this new feature, the lighthouse we were looking at was the long-term vision: People will be moving more to remote selling and need tools to do this effectively. It’s not about the current pandemic, but about the future of sales.
Our Product and Engineering Practices
As important as speed is, it’s also about bringing the right features to market. Several product and engineering practices helped us here:
- We love real data. By us using Gong for our own teams, real data is easier to obtain. But regardless, we believe that prototyping with real data is paramount. Had we not taken real data and shown it to customers, it would have been hard to understand whether the feature is valuable.
- We love agile. We love to push code to production and get feedback. We do it continuously. Had we not been used to pushing code live consistently, it would have been impractical to plan such a short project.
- We love our customers and push for their feedback in our design process. Had we not talked to our design partners regularly, it would have been impossible to get feedback and direction so quickly.
- We love to experiment and are not afraid to fail. We are not yet convinced that this project will be a success, but are willing to invest in it nonetheless.
And, no less important:
- We love hiring great people. As much as culture can enable success, it’s all about having people who can take a feature off the ground in a successful way, and quickly.
Final Words
I’d like to thank everyone who was involved in this crazy project. In these crazy times, with all of us sheltering in place and working with our kids around, it’s heartwarming to be part of a company that makes the impossible happen!
