WFM Light
A Product-Led Growth initiative designed to boost new customer aquisition and drive penetration metrics.
Role
Product Designer
Company
Zendesk
Timeline
10 weeks

Starting point
Workforce Management (WFM) currently served around 15% of eligible Zendesk customers, leaving a substantial opportunity for expansion.
With the objective to increase WFM penetration among Zendesk Suite customers with subscriptions of 50 or more seats to 23%, we set out to introduce a lightweight time-tracking and performance-insights version of one of our core features.
This initiative aimed to deliver immediate value and encourage a natural upsell path to the full version of the Zendesk Workforce Management add-on.
Journey
The product's strategic vision was to attract a broader audience by embedding a dedicated agent activity-tracking dashboard within Zendesk Analytics.
After mapping user flows and initial designs based on growth goals and legal requirements, discussions with the engineering team have revealed a critical technical hurdle: integrating Looker constraint applicability into Zendesk Analytics. The platform could display only 800 data blocks, whereas our real-time monitoring needs were far greater, with a single agent generating roughly 100 activity blocks per shift. This constraint made it impossible to support enterprise-scale tracking for organizations with up to 3,000 global agents.
Through strategic conversations, I successfully advocated for the development of a simplified version of the Agent Activity page within our product. This approach offered a faster and more cost-effective development process while exposing new users to the same interface they would encounter upon upgrading to the full version. Certain functionalities were marked as "available in full version," creating a tangible upsell incentive.
The solution featured a dedicated landing page for new users, included an onboarding flow to address tracking agreements, and effectively "teased" WFM's comprehensive features through intuitive navigation. Additionally, my work included aligning with PMM on marketing strategy and design, as well as with product and engineering on product analytics to track user conversion and identify potential areas of improvement.

Outcome
Post-launch data confirmed the success of this PLG initiative: the feature drives ~300 new monthly sign-ups, establishing a steady upsell funnel for the full WFM add-on.
This effort demonstrated how resolving technical constraints through strategic design directly impacts core business growth and customer acquisition.



