“We wanted to build Rally, not a context engine.”

Rally is a user research platform used by some of the largest research teams in the world, Google, Figma, Ramp, and Perplexity among them, to run their research operations end to end: scheduling, participant communication, incentives, and all the automation around it. What makes Rally powerful is also what makes it hard to explain. It supports complex research, from multi-day diary studies and longitudinal studies to branching logic, screening, and consent, across populations in different countries and age groups that each need the correct communication, consent form, and incentive. The product keeps all of that simple to use. Under the hood is a full user-research CRM, and after years of development the product's surface area has grown large.

That complexity is exactly why "how does Rally do X?" became an expensive question to answer. And the team that most needed the answer wasn't engineering. It was go-to-market.

The challenge: when every product question ran through engineering#

Rally has a strong help center and good internal docs. But at the pace the product moves, there's always a gap between what shipped and what sales and CS have been trained on. And much of what the go-to-market team needs to know was never in the help center to begin with.

"A lot of that information doesn't live in help center articles. It's in our Linear, in our Slack channels, in our codebase," says Alec Robins, Rally's CTO and co-founder. "Unblocked is one of the best tools that's enabled our go-to-market team to quickly get answers to any customer or prospect asking how to do something in Rally."

Before Unblocked, that knowledge came out of people. Alec was, in effect, the search engine for the company's product-questions channel. Support faced the real complexity of configuring a study, and leaned on product and engineering on-call to tell whether something was a bug, working as intended, or solvable a different way. "It's sometimes unclear if something is working as expected, if it's a bug, or if there's a creative solution," Alec said. Support was a hair-on-fire problem, and the cost landed on the people building Rally. One support team member later told him they'd be "extremely disappointed," and that losing Unblocked would hurt their entire day-to-day workflow.

Build vs. buy: "we wanted to build Rally, not a context engine"#

At Rally's size, the decision was build versus buy. "Something we were looking for was a really strong context engine. We have all the context, and we just needed a system to help us effectively search it, using Slack and Claude," Alec said. "It wasn't worth our time to cobble that together internally. And going to market, the enterprise solutions didn't make sense for our size of company. For what we needed, there really wasn't anything that solved this except for Unblocked."

The part he was least willing to build himself was freshness. "A lot of our context and knowledge is in Slack. Unblocked doesn't just backfill all of our past conversations. It continuously updates and keeps that context fresh," Alec said. "It weights recent information higher than old information, and for a product moving as fast as ours, that's so important. I wouldn't have been confident building that internally, and it's not one of our core competencies to build a context solution like that. What makes Unblocked smart is that context management. It's not just putting everything into Claude and having it respond."

The solution: safe codebase access for the whole go-to-market team#

The capability no other tool offered was giving non-engineers a safe window into the code. "The biggest thing was democratizing access to our GitHub repo without giving every one of our go-to-market users a GitHub Enterprise account," Alec said. "It wasn't even the cost, it was the management and the risk. Giving a safe way to access the codebase was the biggest thing I didn't see any other tool support."

Safe access changed how the non-engineers behaved. "Giving non-engineers access to the codebase lets them ask way more technical questions in a safe way," Alec said. "Questions they might've been afraid to ask because they didn't want to waste an engineer's time, they now feel a lot more free to really explore ideas." It cut the other way for engineering, too: when a follow-up did reach an engineer, the context Unblocked had already surfaced meant a quick answer instead of a full catch-up.

Most of that happens in Slack. "The majority of our usage today is in Slack. We have a product-questions channel, and the team uses it to ask questions and collaborate," Alec said. The high visibility was also how Alec built trust in the answers before rolling it wider. The team has started reaching for it elsewhere too, using the MCP to bulk-answer the large question sets customers submit during the sales process.

The results: a product expert on call for every customer question#

Internally, the tool got a name. "I've named the Unblocked data source 'product expert,'" Alec said. "The go-to-market team pretty much gets access to a product expert at all times."

For support and CS, that meant answering customers faster without pulling in engineers, and working through complex use cases on their own. And it gave Alec his time back. "Unblocked has saved me at least five to ten hours a week in the worst weeks," he said. "I used to be the equivalent of Unblocked in our product-questions channel. I've reduced the time I spend in there by about 90%. I'm only in there to confirm responses now. As I've gained trust, I know the answers are going to be directionally correct, answered in a really similar way to how I would."

The value reaches into the sales motion on both sides of a deal. "Pre-sales, it's been very helpful preparing for demos and discovery calls, and answering the follow-up questions that come after," Alec said. "There really are no dumb questions when you're talking with an AI. It lowers the floor of what you feel comfortable asking." Rally has even pointed it at inbound security questionnaires, connecting Unblocked to its policies so it can surface past answers to questions like how Rally handles GDPR, ones Alec has personally answered hundreds of times over four or five years.

The bottom line for founders and CTOs#

What surprised Alec most was how fast it paid off. "We got value within the first day. It indexed all our Slack channels, and if you already have well-structured data, a help center, a codebase, Slack channels, it was immediately impactful," he said. "It was very simple to set up. I don't need to think about complex data flows. It's point and click, and it worked great for us."

The deeper return is focus. "Any time I'm not repeating myself, answering the same question a thousand times, or the engineers aren't, that's time back to focus on building Rally," Alec said. "That's what matters. It's been a huge time savings for us to focus on making Rally the best product possible, and not on building a context engine to answer questions for our internal team."

Rally bought Unblocked for its go-to-market team, but the pull hasn't stayed on one side. As the team leans on it more, engineers have started reaching the other direction, using Unblocked to pick up go-to-market context and product history they'd otherwise chase down. It's become, in Alec's words, the bedrock of Rally's enablement motion, and one he'd find very hard to give up.

Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can be the context engine for your go-to-market team and your engineers.