Dhwani Soni

Dhwani Soni

GVP, Product Management, Design & Operations

8x8

Dhwani Soni

What has been your business/work highlight of 2024 so far?

Launching our new 8×8 Engage product. A differentiated and one of its kind to drive cross-org customer engagement outside the Contact Center.

Who is your business hero and why?

Liz Theophille- I admire Liz for her servant leadership approach. Her collaborative and results-oriented style drives value creation through innovation and effective business partnering, building trusted relationships with leaders at all levels.
Her background in 7 different industries brings value and perspective to how she approaches business transformation.
I admire how approachable and personable she is and how she invests in building the next generation of leaders.

What’s the biggest business mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?

With a customer empathy-driven product design and development approach, I like to believe I take customer feedback (good and bad) pretty well. In my past work life, in an approach of transparency, I once pulled together some slides, videos, and comments from our customers to share with our broader org. Things went south fairly quickly!
Lesson learned- Customer empathy as a company value is a business-driven cultural change and needs to be cultivated and nurtured with the right tools and mindset…

What’s the most inspirational book you’ve ever read and why?

“Turn the Ship around” by David Marquet. It showcases the power of cultivating ownership and leaders with a leader- leader approach than a leader-follower approach.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role in 2024?

Building products is one-half of the problem. Taking products to success is the crucial second half. This year my focus is to make sure I take my stakeholders as partners outside of Product to walk that second half walk with me. We have many new products at 8×8 that close the CX gaps and bring cross-org cross-engagement to our customers and I would like to see them be well-adopted and loved by our customers!

What technology will have the greatest impact on your business this year and why?

Bringing together the three portfolios of UC, CC & CPaaS has been fundamental in delivering a product like Engage. This has been a heavy lift and a multi-year journey of building shared backend and front-end platform-wide services.
This year has been particularly pivot as we have accelerated our CX-centric innovations to market that help drive proactive customer engagement across the entire organisation.