From Failed Launch to Flagship

The Challenge

Customer Engagement launched the week I started. It had been built in three months on the belief that "we know our customers" and "this isn't a research project." It reached market on time, and almost nobody used it.

The product had no clear positioning. Nobody could say whether it was standalone or an add-on to the platform. It had no defined users or workflows, and its audience was everyone from small business to enterprise. Sales were minimal, and the people who tried it didn't understand what it was for.

Underneath that was a deeper problem: it was solving the wrong one. We'd built for sending outbound text and email campaigns. What customers actually struggled with was keeping track of fragmented incoming communication across channels.

Mandate: How do we turn a product almost nobody uses into one customers can't do without, and then find the market where it wins first?

My Role

Owned

• The automotive vertical, end to end
• The automotive ecosystem map, initial personas, outcomes, and key metrics, before any designer or researcher was assigned
• Relationships with dealerships already using GoTo products, built from my first weeks through the CSMs

Led

• The research that reframed CE: Insiders discovery, usability, beta cohorts
• Dealership research: my own in Salt Lake City, plus the New York State trips I organized for me, a researcher, and my product partner
• Recruiting dealerships into testing and the Insiders program
• Moving the team from building first to discovery-led

Partnered on

• The business case and the push for approval, with my product partner
• Platform positioning for CX, with Product
• Roadmap and prioritization (UX, Product, and Engineering trio)
• Weekly metrics reviews against outcomes in Mixpanel

Approach

Act 1: Reframe the product (CE → CX)

Find out what customers actually needed. As soon as I had a researcher, we started talking to customers. That work became the Insiders program. It showed we'd been focused on the wrong job: customers needed one place to track every contact coming in, how it was segmented, and who had access to it.

Change the product's shape. We reframed CX around end-to-end customer communication journeys, and repositioned it as a platform with attachable capabilities rather than a standalone product with no clear home.

Narrow the audience. We defined personas, industries, and key workflows, so the product stopped trying to serve everyone from a solo business to an enterprise.

Change how the team worked. We moved from building first to discovery first. Product, UX, and Engineering aligned around customer workflows and measurable outcomes, and every major direction was validated through iterative research, usability testing, and beta cohorts before it scaled.

Act 2: Go vertical (automotive)

Research kept pointing the same way: industry-specific solutions were far more effective than generic features. I'd expected that, and started preparing long before there was approval to act on it.

Groundwork from week one. I knew automotive. I'd spent four years at Cox Automotive on Xtime and Dealertrack DMS, and had been doing automotive work since I was 16. When I started meeting CSMs, I also met the people who ran the dealerships already using GoTo products, and built those relationships because I knew we'd push for this eventually. Before any designer or researcher was assigned to it, I built the first automotive ecosystem map in Miro (how dealerships and dealer groups are structured), the initial personas, the outcomes, and the key metrics myself.

The dealership hierarchy shaped the product itself. Frontline staff used the communications every day. The reporting in the SKU was built for the people above them: owners, GMs, sales managers, and the fixed ops, service, and parts leads who needed to see how calls were routed, how long customers waited, how conversations went, and whether AI Receptionist was deflecting calls and booking appointments.

A partner who knew the territory. My product partner had worked with me at Cox Automotive. Together we built the case and kept pushing until the vertical got traction and approval. Work officially began in Q4 2024.

• Research in the dealerships. I did my own onsite research in Salt Lake City, and organized and scheduled trips to dealerships in New York State for me, a researcher, and my product partner. I recruited every dealership and brought them into testing and the Insiders program.
• Personas across sales, service, and administration, with end-to-end dealership workflows mapped to find friction and opportunity
• A key insight: dealership networks are highly interconnected, and the critical use cases were call deflection and appointment capture
• Validation through Insiders alpha and beta customers, iterating on continuous feedback
• What shipped: a dedicated automotive SKU, sold as its own package rather than an add-on. It launched with the critical reporting first, and grew into out-of-the-box reporting preferences for dealerships, among other things.

Key Artifact

Results & Impact

Business

• CE became the foundation of Connect CX, GoTo's flagship product, about three years after its failed launch.
• CX moved from missing its targets to contributing revenue once it was repositioned as a platform.
• GoTo Connect for Automotive launched in Q3 2025 and beat its revenue goal for the year in its first quarter after launch. Dealerships bought it outright, as its own package.

Strategy

• Automotive's success proved the vertical practice would work, and the business expanded it.
• The roadmap shifted from generic features toward industry-focused product strategy.

Organization

• The team moved from building first to discovery-led work, and Insiders became the standing source of validation for every vertical.

Reflection

What I learned

• Speed to market means nothing if you're fast at the wrong thing. CE shipped in three months and took three years to recover.
• A product for everyone is a product for no one. The vertical focus is what finally made CX legible to buyers.
• Domain knowledge lets you start before you're staffed. With no designer or researcher assigned, I could still build the ecosystem map, personas, outcomes, and metrics, so the team started from a foundation when it arrived.

What I'd do differently

On the CE side, the lesson is the one in the Insiders case study: insist on research from day one.

On automotive, I'd have been more aggressive before we had approval. I'd have put together a real plan earlier, covering the market, what would change, and what we could do, and pushed it sooner with my product partner. We worked closely, but we could have moved faster together.