Read the original at Lenny’s Newsletter ↗lennysnewsletter.com · subscriber post
By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
An interview with Gong's chief product officer on how the company builds product. It covers two-tier annual and quarterly planning, autonomous multi-skill pods organized around problem areas, the decision to skip OKRs and Scrum, engineers owning bug prioritization, design-partner development with limited-availability slices, and a near-real-life hiring assignment.
Subscriber post — summary only01Key takeaways
- Gong organizes multi-skill pods around problem areas and outcomes rather than features, granting teams autonomy over their own design.
- Annual planning runs top-down priorities and bottom-up capacity, then refines each quarter with a shorter bottom-up review.
- Gong dropped OKRs and Scrum, finding them costly to maintain and prone to forcing artificial deadlines over customer value.
- Engineers prioritize bugs, since they often have enough context to triage faster than product can.
- Features are built with design partners and released as limited-availability slices, iterating until impact is proven.
- Hiring uses a realistic, ambiguous assignment based on a real customer pain, judging thought process and collaboration over a right answer.
“Both the engineering leader and I dislike the Scrum methodology.”Eilon Reshef · Lenny’s Newsletter
“Most bugs take less time to fix than to prioritize.”Eilon Reshef · Lenny’s Newsletter
02Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.