How to streamline your user interview process — a Gong.io use-case

Interviewing users has gained widespread popularity as a method for gathering user feedback due to its quick and uncomplicated nature. However, it is essential to utilize these interviews intelligently and efficiently to obtain the right insights. That challenge was the primary one I faced when starting my new position as a Product Coordinator in the Product Operations Group at Gong.io a year ago (time flies!).

In this article, I will share the processes that we developed over the past year in this unique position. I will provide some insights along my journey and share how I adjusted to the market motion that affected the processes and tools. The entire time, I was guided by the Gong culture and operating principles. Hope it will give you some food for thought or some direction as you tackle this challenge in your organization.

Short background about Gong and its product department:

Gong.io is a software product company. The Gong product captures and analyzes customer interactions and alerts its customers to risks and opportunities across their business. In Gong’s Product department, there are 25+ Product Managers (PM), 20+ Product Designers (PD), 5 Content Leaders (CL), and 5 Product Analysts (PA), which are divided into product pillars (domains), with a cross-pillar Product Ops group.

To build the product that best meets our customer’s needs, we (as the product group) meet regularly with design partners throughout the product development process.

When I first arrived, the initial goal was clear: To help the Product Managers (PM), Product Designers (PD), and sometimes Product Content Leads in everything related to the relationship with our design partners.

Interviewing users and recruiting design partners:

To recruit Design Partners, each PM or PD used to create their process by understanding the need and persona, locating users through the Go-to-Market (GTM) teams and data tools, and sending individual emails to them. However, each of these steps was a small process in itself, and Gong identified the need for a dedicated function to streamline the overall process.

This is what I found when I arrived: I was very impressed by this amazing “customer empathy” factory, however — I got the frictions and challenges quite fast. I started to dig in, mapped the challenges, cracked some of them, and adopted work methods along the way.

Understanding Product’s pains and needs

Product Managers (PM) and Product Designers (PD) are used to manage their relationships with users on an individual basis. Each team member maintained a table or document containing details of the users they interacted with, notes from conversations, and other relevant information. They often had to rely on feature requests or creative ways to engage users to have a conversation.

Reaching out to users and scheduling interviews also became a significant pain point for PMs and PDs. With most of the market located in the US, managing different time zones made it even more difficult to set up interviews. Moreover, booking interview slots were often short and had to be managed wisely. Setting up a single interview became a time-consuming process that involved conducting data research to find potential users, creating accurate cold calls, and applying marketing skills to secure the right interviews. For just a 30-minute interview, it would take up to a day to set up.

As the company grew, our product liaison in Go-To-Market (GTM) became incredibly occupied and there was a need for one coordinator that would assist in managing the process with the users.

I approached this project as a type of product/service that came to answer the product people’s needs (as my customers), therefore I started user research to understand the current state precisely and interviewed all personas: PM, PD, Content Writers, and Product Analysts (PA).

I divided my next steps into 3 main levels:

1. Streamlining the process: Targeting the right audience, sending the accurate email that will result in high conversion rates, setting methods & tools for a large audience, etc.
2. Optimizations to the process: Avoiding recruiting mistakes such as duplications when reaching out to the same users, reaching out to users whose CSM filtered out for some reasons, etc.
3. Control, Measure, and Improve: Tracking the users we are already in contact with — how do we track it, document it, and gain the most value out of it.

Step 1: Streamlining the process

After defining the challenges, I started to crack them step by step. Following the research, I mapped the process for the following parameters that will impact my approach:

• Who is the interviewer (PM/PD/ Product Content Lead)
• Interviewer intent (ideation/validation of concept)
• What is the meeting’s purpose (the main reason, what decision should be made based on these meetings)
• Feature / concept phase (discovery / definition / implementation / feedback)

The result — coordination needed:

• Type of meeting (one-time interviews/design partners / usability test / survey)
• Target audience (Persona required, Marketing segment, etc.)

Managing tool: Airtable

In an effort to enhance coordination within the product group, I created a request form and distributed it among the team members, requesting them to provide as much information as possible. After several revisions of the form, we were able to pinpoint the most significant fields, which facilitated a more efficient classification of coordination needs.

Furthermore, we needed to establish a centralized base for collecting all requests related to user conversations, enabling us to perform measurements. To this end, I have managed all the requests, including those submitted through the form. The priority of the backlog was determined based on the product organization’s priorities and relevant timing parameters, ensuring that the most crucial requests were given the appropriate attention.

Step 2 — Optimizing the process

We started implementing the process and gained experience in writing effective recruitment emails, locating accurate users using data tools, etc.

There was a feeling that many customers wanted to talk to us, and we felt more comfortable sending cold emails with light and direct writing. There were also requests from product managers directly to users as well as using existing relationships which is ALWAYS the best way.

We started building our internal interfaces:

1. User research — to support the right process operationally
   We have User Researchers in the US. We better defined our domains since there is an overlap between them, and started syncing on a bi-weekly basis to align processes and tools and learn together.
2. Customer Success Managers (CSM) and Sales
   We started to cooperate with CSM and Sales to define “opt-out” customers and create a method that would filter them when searching in the databases.
3. Marketing
   We realized there is too much outreach to Gong customers (marketing, interviews etc.). The need arose to tighten the process of sending surveys so that customers would not be targeted too much. So we built a mechanism of surveys sent only by marketing with common coordination and it works well.

The main challenge to the next level: I had to look for a way/tool to track, reflect statuses and measure this new service: Does it help? I couldn’t know when a meeting was booked with the PMs/designers unless they told me. We wanted to assess whether we’re giving the team a good solution that helps us answer our research questions and is not just convenient.

Step 3 — Adjusting to the market trend

During this time, the market changed and brought different aspects that drove and increased the need for tighter monitoring and focus on each and every outreach we trigger at Gong to the target users. We preferred to lean more on existing relationships and avoid cold calls:

We would like to use more and more existing relationships, and we want to set interviews that also directly answer customers’ needs and be as delicate as possible.

One of the methods was using our warm relationship with our loyal community members. We started publishing posts there. One of them, for instance, resulted in the joining of 9 new design partners!

By working more closely with GTM, I was able to develop more structured methods for engaging with particular customers, leading to increased clarity and efficiency in our communication. This, in turn, helped me build stronger relationships of trust with Customer Success Managers (CSMs). As a result of these efforts, I gained more recognition from CSMs and gained a deeper understanding of our relationship with our users.

With this efficiency, I could provide more services to the product — consent from customers to join beta programs, surveys, and updating customers with significant settings changes.

By using existing and new tools, we solved the tracking & measuring challenge:

Mastering our calendar booking tool helped me track more meetings scheduled through me. However, to streamline the collaboration with user research in such a large team, we started to use Rally UXR — a tool that allows tracking of all stages of recruitment for effective work in a large team. They reached out to me and I became their design partner…So I had the opportunity to feel what great collaboration with a design partner looks like. We started as beta and we became fond of them quite quickly.

Summarizing the main takeaways so far:

• Searching for warm contacts and fewer cold emails by understanding and synchronizing with GTM (which customers we don’t want to target and set opt-out)
• Address more precisely, reach the right people, and avoid excesses that may confuse
• Purchase a tool that will allow full transparency in all studies (using Rally)
• Timing of contacting customers, taking into account all kinds of variables related to customers when you want to contact them
• Understand our research ops better and define coordination methods that would suit our relationships with customers and users
• A special relationship with Rally gave me the perspective about this great relationship as a design partner and what it gives to the customer. In that case, Rally is a small startup in the early stages so I felt like part of their product team :-)

Coordination methods — When do we prefer to use cold and warm calls?

For every request I receive, I understand what the coordination type, research goal, feature phase, request persona, and request goal are and according to all these parameters, I adjust the coordination method. It is important for me to understand what they want to learn or what they want to validate to formulate the best recruitment email and locate the users most accurately.

Finally, attaching here an example of a PM request to me including the leading parameters:

(From that kind of request, I could learn and gradually create a “bank” of methods that are suitable to different goals)

After almost a year into the Product Coordination position, I believe that the process, accompanied by many cross-functional thinking and technological challenges, is much more mature and assists our team in obtaining the right insights and developing products that align with our customers’ needs.