4 Products Into One Voice AI Platform

The Challenge: The Chaos of Four

Starting in 2020, Plivo began building products for non-developer teams on top of its existing API infrastructure: a Sales Management Platform, a messaging and marketing platform, and a contact center for inbound support. By 2023, these sat alongside the traditional voice and messaging APIs, giving Plivo four products total. Each was built by a different team with its own interface, navigation, and design patterns. Customers buying multiple products got four disconnected experiences from one company.

As the market shifted toward voice AI, this fragmentation became a strategic blocker. There was no unified surface for building workflows that spanned voice, messaging, and agent management. More fundamentally, we had to decide which products deserved continued investment and which needed to be shut down. Four products needed to become one platform, and not all of them would survive.

Sellular Sales Management Platform

Contacto Contact Center

Engage Messaging & Marketing

API Communications Infrastructure

My Role

I started this project as Associate Director of Design and expanded into managing the entire product ecosystem over five years. My scope was strategic, not executional: I determined which products would live or die, defined the platform architecture that would replace them, and set the product direction for the voice AI pivot. A team of designers, which I grew from one to seven, executed the interfaces and interaction patterns under my direction.

Day to day, I owned sprint planning for the unification pod, held decision rights on what to build, sunset, or merge, and reported directly to executive leadership on consolidation progress. I sat in architecture reviews with engineering to shape technical decisions that had UX consequences, particularly around LLM context handling and workflow generation. I also ran weekly cross-team design reviews to catch diverging patterns early and maintain consistency across the platform.

The Strategic Decisions

What to keep, what to kill

Not every product deserved to survive. The messaging and marketing product had entered the market too late. Existing competitors were solving most use cases at effective cost, and we were not seeing product-market fit. I drove the decision to shut it down rather than chase perceived market share. In hindsight, we should not have been blinded by the opportunity without validating demand.

The Sales Management Platform was a much harder conversation. It had evolved from a simple dialer into a full-scale management tool, and it was generating revenue. However, the market was shifting toward AI agents, not outbound automation. As part of the executive leadership team, I co-sponsored the difficult decision to sunset it. We did not want to be a brand that contributed to outbound spam. To execute this safely, I defined a six-month transition framework: in-product notifications with a clear timeline, direct connections to account managers, and a maintenance-only policy with no new features during the wind-down. No enterprise-scale customers were lost in the migration.

The contact center's inbound support function is what transitioned into today's voice AI platform. Customer support represented the clearest use case for voice AI, and enterprise customers were actively seeking this. That became our focus. The traditional API product carried forward as the infrastructure layer.