We’re back with another round of ‘Ask Aspect’, a series where we sit down with our workforce industry experts. In our last installment, we had a talk with Shawn McCormick about the evolution of AI in workforce management.
This time, we’re chatting with Tina Ghanem, Director of Product. Tina came onboard at Aspect in September 2024, spearheading product strategy and the development of our newest next-gen employee application, Workforce Experience (WFX). With more than a decade of experience leading product management efforts across B2B and SaaS spaces, Tina brought a wealth of knowledge to shape Aspect’s product strategy.
Let’s chat about Aspect, our product vision, and what being a product-led company really means.
Q: What does it mean to be a product-led company?
A: Being a product-led company means that the product itself drives growth and user engagement. It’s a mindset that spreads across every team—product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success—all working together to ensure the product is central to the customer journey. Leadership sets the vision, but it’s the entire organization that aligns around delivering and continuously improving the product experience.
In traditional companies, you might see a strong focus on sales-driven strategies, with business development reps cold-calling and pushing the product. In contrast, a product-led company shifts that dynamic. The product is the main driver—users can discover, try, and purchase the product independently, with minimal friction. The key is ensuring the product speaks for itself—delivering value from the moment users engage with it.
This approach allows for diverse user experiences: enterprise customers might prefer a guided onboarding experience with sales support, while mid-market businesses may choose to self-serve entirely through the product. Regardless of the approach, the goal is to make the product the primary point of engagement, allowing users to explore, experience, and ultimately adopt the product on their own terms.
Q: How is Aspect shifting efforts to become more product led?
A: We are very customer focused. We are focused on building products with user needs in mind. Historically, there may have been a focus on the needs of customers rather then actual users. Now, we’re looking at collective user needs, especially those of agent in modern contact centers.
We are conducting extensive user research to understand diverse user needs. Before development begins, we define, design, and validate our with users. This feedback-driven approach provides valuable insights into user needs—a crucial step in our transformation into a product-led company.
Q: Are user needs becoming the center of Aspect’s vision?
A: Last year, Aspect began prioritizing user needs and incorporating user research throughout the product development process. We recognized that products shouldn't be developed in isolation.
Imagine spending months—or even years—building a product, only to discover at launch that it doesn't meet market needs. That's why we've adopted an iterative approach paired with ongoing research to truly understand what users want.
Our new WFX product journey lets customers move directly from our homepage to create a trial account where they can test the product for free—a first in Aspect's history.
Q: How are we differentiating our product strategy from other workforce companies?
A: What sets us apart from other workforce companies is our commitment to user-centric design principles and intelligent automation technologies. We take pride in our approach to simplifying complex workforce management processes, carefully maintaining full functionality while reducing cognitive load. Through extensive user research and iterative development, we've created interfaces that makes workforce management tools accessible and intuitive.
Q: What makes Aspect’s products unique?
A: Our uniqueness is simplicity in design. While simplicity might suggest a basic or unsophisticated product, what we really mean is a product that delivers powerful results through minimal effort. Behind our intuitive interface is significant engineering, which allows users to achieve their goals with fewer steps and less friction.
It’s like the difference between a car that stops automatically before a red light and one where you need to press the brake yourself. Both get you to the same result, but one requires far less work from the driver. Similarly, we focus on making the experience as seamless as possible for both agents and supervisors, which is our unique differentiator in the market.
Q: How will Aspect continue to innovate its product offering?
A: We continue to innovate by leveraging AI and automation to create products that help workforce leaders make better decisions.
For Workforce Experience, we are developing intelligent forecasting and scheduling tools that suggest optimized decisions, allowing supervisors to focus on coaching agents and supporting customers rather than manual workforce planning. We plan to enhance the supervisor experience by offering insights they can quickly act on.
We are continuously iterating, constantly refining our product based on user feedback. Our goal is to evolve alongside our users, creating products for modern workforce management.
Learn more about Workforce Experience during our February 27th webinar at 12:00PM ET. Register now to revolutionize workforce management in your business.
