The Research Coordinator Role
Borrow the recruiting-coordinator role to schedule all customer research, so PMs never lose time to logistics.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 92%
Coordinating 6-12 design partners per pod across ~25-30 pods is enormous scheduling overhead that can consume a PM's time. Gong created a dedicated 'research coordinator' role — modeled on the recruiting coordinator in talent acquisition — whose only job is to source and schedule design-partner meetings, so the PM simply shows up to a calendared conversation with the right customers.
Origin
Eilon Reshef borrowed the pattern from recruiting, where a recruiting coordinator books meetings for the recruiter, who books for the hiring manager. He applied the same specialization to product research at Gong.
Core principles
- 01Specialize the logistics away from the expert so the expert does only expert work
- 02Scheduling and sourcing is a distinct skill that scales across all pods
- 03A lightweight micro-CRM makes the coordinator's targeting repeatable
How to run it
- 1
PM specifies the target segment
The PM tells the coordinator the ICP and what they want to learn — e.g. 'head of revops at midsize companies' or 'IC seller at an enterprise'.
Pro tip Be specific about persona and company size; the coordinator can only slice the base as finely as the brief allows.
- 2
Coordinator sifts the customer base and runs a micro-campaign
The coordinator uses a micro-CRM to slice and dice the customer base, runs a small email campaign to the matching customers, and books those who respond.
Pro tip Reuse your conversation/CRM data to find customers who already expressed the relevant need.
- 3
PM shows up to a pre-booked meeting
The PM finds the design-partner meetings already on their calendar and simply attends, spending their time on the research itself rather than logistics.
In the wild
Gong runs roughly 25-30 pods. Rather than each PM handling their own partner scheduling, one research coordinator handles sourcing and booking across the org, talking to PMs about their targets and setting up the meetings via a shared micro-CRM.
→ PMs are freed from the stress of coordinating a dozen companies each; research happens at scale without draining PM time.
Common mistakes
Making PMs own their own scheduling
Leaving each PM to coordinate a dozen companies and calendars is stressful, complicated, and can 'suck the PM's life up' — the opposite of what you want from your most senior product thinkers.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product orgs running many pods or heavy customer-research cadences where scheduling overhead is scaling faster than headcount
Not ideal for
Small teams with only a handful of customer conversations, where a dedicated coordinator would be idle
From the transcript
“in in Talent acquisition recruiting there's there is a person called recruiting coordinator”
“in our in our product team there's one person who's basically a research coordinator and she's responsible for reaching out”
“we have a micro CRM for that and then sets up the meeting and the PM comes in they have like already like a meeting…”
From the episode
Inside Gong: How teams work with design partners, their pod structure, autonomy, trust, and more
Eilon Reshef (co-founder and CPO)