The bundling plan was a marketing answer to a product question.
Cisco was the #1 player in the on-premise contact center market and had recently acquired Broadsoft to enter cloud. The handed-down plan was to bundle the disparate premise products and the newly acquired cloud offering as the "Customer Journey Solution" — get it to market quickly, satisfy the cloud narrative. I made the call to refuse the bundling-as-product framing, run field research across six sites first, and rebuild the strategy around what the research surfaced.
The bet
Refuse the bundling-as-product framing and run real field research before committing to any design direction. Six weeks of structured research before any packaging or roadmap commitments.
The diagnosis
Field research across six sites in five cities — Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Asheville, Pittsburgh. 39 users interviewed. Three PMs and three designers running the research jointly. Contextual inquiry, user interviews, concept prototype reviews — real observational work in real contact centers.
The research surfaced five distinct personas — Customer, Agent, Supervisor, Admin, Cisco Partner — each with needs the bundling approach wasn't going to serve. The bundling plan won't survive contact with the actual users. We need a unified cloud-native experience built around real personas and their needs.
The four bets
One — research before packaging. I bet that six weeks of field research would surface a stronger product strategy than the packaging plan.
Two — vision-as-storyboard, not vision-as-deck. My team built a fictional adoption journey: Air New Zealand buys the solution → admin Trudy sets up the contact center → customer interacts with agents and virtual assistants → agents are onboarded across regions.
Three — push for a modern UI framework using web components. The existing UI tooling couldn't deliver the unified experience. I bet the research evidence plus the storyboard would make the hiring case undeniable.
Four — stand up a Cross-BU Design Guild. Without explicit cross-BU design alignment, the various contact center surfaces would diverge and the unified experience would never land.
What we shipped
Webex Contact Center, replacing the Customer Journey Solution bundling approach with a unified cloud-native product. Four contact center surfaces: Webex Control Hub for admin and partner personas, Admin Portal for contact-center-specific configuration, Agent Desktop as the unified agent experience across omni-channel communications, and Analyzer as the supervisor and reporting surface.
The Flow Designer was the standout shipped artifact. It replaced a limited drag-and-drop tool that previously required customers to pay extra for custom script development. The new Flow Designer was built as a UI framework letting users customize their own building blocks, leveraged UI components from common Collaboration toolkits, and integrated seamlessly into other admin workflows.
The most non-obvious call: designing the experience end-to-end across every persona for the CCaaS market, rather than optimizing point solutions one persona at a time.
How it landed
The work launched at Webex One in December 2020 with strong customer reception. The business reorganized its backlog around the Flow Designer — re-prioritized to rapidly expand the application across additional contact center automation use cases. Cisco subsequently acquired imi-mobile to accelerate parts of the Flow Designer roadmap.
