#PRODUCT STRATEGY #PORTFOLIO STRATEGY #AI PORDUCT

Defining where to play in a fragmented contact center offering

Qualtrics was expanding into Contact Center, then acquired Clarabridge — multiple teams ended up building overlapping capabilities with no coherent product story. I was part of the cross-functional group that defined what to build, what to kill, and who owned what.

COMPANY
Qualtrics

ROLE
Senior Manager, Experience & EMEA Lead

TIMELINE
2021–2023

THE SITUATION

Multiple teams building the same thing, with no one able to decide who owned what

Qualtrics was expanding into Contact Center. Early features existed but adoption was low and fragmented across products. Then came the acquisition of Clarabridge — adding AI analytics and conversation data, and a lot more overlap.

Multiple teams were building similar capabilities in parallel. UX was inconsistent across journeys. There was internal confusion about ownership, and decisions were slowing down under the politics of who owned what.

This wasn't a UX problem to fix. It was a strategy and organisational alignment problem that needed a UX lens to solve

WHAT WE DID

I was a core member of the Contact Center Strategy group — PM Director, Eng Director, Marketing, Data Science, and me as UX. The group's job was to define where to play and what to build. My focus within that was experience direction and three specific areas: frontline agent assist and coaching, emerging trends, and ticketing/workflow.

Narrowing the opportunity space

We started broad — generated over 15 concepts based on macro trends in AI automation, tool consolidation, and rising pressure on service efficiency. I led rapid concept testing with customers to narrow that down: 15+ to 7, then 7 to 4 core bets. The two themes that came out clearly: agents needed insight delivered as action, not dashboards, and any new tool had to be embedded in what they already used or it wouldn't get adopted.

"15 concepts narrowed to 4 bets —
to be rapidly validated"

Grounding all concepts in how call center reps actually work

Research was clear on the constraint: call center reps have no time and operate in locked-down systems. They won't navigate a new dashboard. Managers were overwhelmed and needed prioritised actions, not more data. That reframed everything — the product direction shifted from "here is your data" to "here's what matters and here's what to do."

Mapping ownership across teams

Part of resolving the internal confusion was building a contact center journey map that laid out features across the full lifecycle. That gave the group a shared reference for product boundaries and roadmap ownership — reducing the duplicated effort across teams.

Experience Hub — frontline agent coaching

This was the area I owned most directly. Agents got performance insight and bite-sized coaching actions; managers got visibility into team performance and coaching effectiveness. The shift was from reporting to a continuous improvement loop. We scoped a pilot — 1-2 managers, 10-15 agents — to validate value before scaling complexity, with a deliberately lightweight manager experience.

IMPACT

ACV nearly doubled, MAU up 75%, and a clear 2022–2024 line on what not to build

  • ACV growth: $20M → $34M

  • MAU: 26.7k → 46.8k

  • MAB: 364 → 406

  • Shipped: frontline agent assist, real-time agent assist, quality management

  • Defined contact center product strategy for 2022–2024, clarifying where to invest and what not to build

WHAT THIS TAUGHT ME

Strategy without UX is abstract. UX without strategy is fragmented. You need both to get real product direction

The harder lesson: adoption is constrained by environment, not just design. Agents won't adopt a tool that doesn't fit how they already work, no matter how good the tool is.