How Gong is scaling Research and talking to more users with Rally

User Research plays an important role at Gong. “We meet frequently with customers to ensure we’re building the most valuable product that meets their needs,” said Liron. But Liron and her Product team were facing numerous challenges that were creating confusion, duplicative and time-consuming work.

Let’s explore these challenges Liron and her team faced and how Rally solved them.

Before Rally

Liron joined the team as the first Product Coordinator. During the process of building out her role, Liron was exposed to the world of Research Ops. “I didn’t know the term,” she said. “But I realized that I was doing everything that’s related to Research Ops.”

And there is a lot that goes into “everything.”

Gong has more than 26 Product Managers and 20 Designers, and Liron manages most of their research requests. “Just think about how many projects we have going on at the same time,” she said.

This alone is a lot to manage (and Liron does a stellar job), but there were multiple challenges she was facing that were making these processes time-consuming and confusing.

Liron manages all the research project backlog in Airtable base, which serves as a portal that centralizes all the requests that come from the Product Managers and Designers through Airtable form.

She still lacked one place to store relevant information for each project, which also included sending emails and surveys, creating events in the calendars of other team members, and receiving automatic updates about the status of meetings with participants in one place.

Without a main source of truth, Liron was struggling to:

• create one place that gathers all relevant information items for a research project (including email template, list of participants and their status, screener questions and their results, etc.)
• build a list of users to utilize for research that syncs with all other research
• reduce over-contacting or double-booking participants
• track participants across the journey
• determine the conversion rate according to the number of scheduled meetings 
• manage dozens of User Research projects at once
• allow users to independently register for research without sending them an email (via network, community, etc.)

Liron was juggling multiple tools and bouncing back and forth between various lists, trying to keep track of what emails and participants go with what research projects. “I wanted to put everything in one place, and I didn’t have a tool for that.” After searching for a solution for a while, she found Rally.

After Rally

“At first, I was skeptical that there was a tool that could actually do everything I was looking for, but as the months have gone by, Rally fits more and more to our needs, which makes Research Ops significantly easier.”

{{quote-liron-blum="/cms"}}

Instead of information and data scattered across multiple platforms and tools, she now has one source of truth for User Research. “With Rally, I can now be more focused on the optimization of our process and less on the small technical details.”

“Rally has changed a lot in the world of Research Ops for us,” said Liron. Research is now more optimized, more automated, more collaborative, and is becoming more self-serve. “We can focus on the quality of the project, make sure that we answer our research questions, and address the needs of our users.”

Liron has been able to collaborate more strategically with the Product team, “They can go into Rally, access their own projects, and view who has signed up.” There is now more confidence and trust in Research and Product Coordination processes since Product Managers and Designers have clear visibility into how their studies are progressing.

This visibility has also greatly improved tracking for Liron. “It’s life-changing to be able to view things like the number of scheduled meetings and contact history with participants,” she said. Important data is now synchronized and data collection is much smoother.

Liron can also now measure the success of decisions she and the team are making, whether it’s choosing a specific email template or a persona to address. Since Rally has made it more convenient and easy to collect and track this data, Liron can be more confident in the methods the team is using and more able to iterate and make valuable and meaningful changes. “Rally’s tracking capabilities will change lives in the world of Research Ops,” she said.

What’s next for Gong?

Liron is excited to integrate Gong’s 26+ Product Managers onto Rally and allow them to follow their own research. “I want to give them the value of tracking their conversations with users.” As she continues to utilize Rally, she looks forward to being able to manage all types of research projects in a way that is most convenient for the Product team. “I want to make it so they are not reliant upon one person and they can take ownership of their research.”

Already, a product manager at Gong, has been able to use Rally to find a very specific user persona to interview. “By sending email invites to around 100 users, we were able to set up four interviews.” They said Rally will help them streamline communication with users, set up more interviews, and increase responses to surveys. 

Here are some of the Rally features Liron will continue to use to accomplish this:

🔌 Salesforce Integration

• ensure live syncing of Customer Success/Sales data with the Research CRM
• bridge the gap between CS and Product teams

🧑⚖Governance

• audit and track user contact status and history
• blocklist to enforce a “do not contact” list
• syncing opt outs across their customer data sources
• securely store and manage sensitive participant data/PII
• set up user permissions to have oversight over new researchers and non-researchers

🔂  Recruitment Automation

• automate outreach, scheduling, incentives, and consent forms
• schedule calls with multiple team members where availability dynamically updates
• send screeners with skip logic and auto-qualification

📝  Templates

• create reusable study, screener, landing page, consent forms, and email templates to make it easier to get started