- Gong explored new verticals using its existing platform.
- A small 'two-pizza' team operated with strict feature development constraints.
- Leveraged internal customer base for stealth market validation.
- Discovered unexpected value and transferable capabilities.
In an insightful discussion at PM Live, Ram Paar, Group Product Manager at Gong, shared a compelling story of how the company embarked on an ambitious journey to expand its market without rebuilding its core product. This strategic exploration aimed to transform Gong from a focused sales solution into a versatile platform applicable across various organizational functions.
The core challenge for Gong was to identify new market opportunities beyond its highly successful sales vertical. The initial approach involved abstracting the fundamental problem Gong solves: analyzing semi-structured processes involving numerous conversations and decision points. Unlike rigid ticketing or manufacturing processes, sales cycles are fluid, requiring dynamic insights that traditional CRM updates often miss or distort. Gong's platform, with its ability to record, analyze, and connect conversations to specific processes, offered a unique solution to this data gap.
To test this hypothesis, Gong adopted a lean, constrained approach. A small 'two-pizza' team was formed, with a strict mandate: no new features were to be developed from scratch. The goal was to prove that the existing platform, designed for sales, could be adapted with minimal changes to serve other domains. This required a deep understanding of the new market's language and processes, mapping them back to Gong's existing capabilities. The team focused on leveraging Gong's strong brand and established customer base, conducting a stealth go-to-market strategy by identifying champions within existing client organizations to explore new use cases like recruitment.
While the market exploration revealed significant potential and unexpected benefits – such as applying sales coaching methodologies to interviewer training – the journey was not without its challenges. The team faced competition from established niche products in the new verticals, which offered highly specialized features. However, Gong's ability to solve problems that competitors hadn't even considered, by re-contextualizing its existing AI-powered insights, proved to be a powerful differentiator. Ultimately, despite proving the platform's adaptability and securing initial traction, a broader market slowdown in 2023 led Gong's leadership to refocus all efforts on its core sales market, a decision Ram Paar acknowledges as painful but strategically sound for long-term growth.
This experiment, though paused, yielded invaluable lessons. It validated Gong's platform as capable of supporting multiple business lines with minimal investment, demonstrating a clear path for future expansion. The key takeaway for product managers is the importance of identifying 'transferable skills' within their solutions and applying them to new domains. This not only uncovers new market opportunities but can also reveal unexpected benefits and insights that can be brought back to enhance the original product.
“You always need to understand the company's advantage in this story. Our advantage was having 4,000 customers, that's a huge market, and we worked by word of mouth within our customers.”
- Ram Paar, Group Product Manager
