Trust & Safety
Senior Product Designer
Role
Product design, Product strategy, Roadmap prioritization
Team
Product Manager, UX Copywriter, Engineers (x7)
Timeline
October-November 2023
Background
Platform circumvention has been estimated to cost Upwork between $325 million and $333 million in GSV annually. Annual revenue upside for the complete elimination of circumvention based on these estimates, is approximately $50M (assuming 15% take rate and 100% retention). Since 2021, the rate of circumvention among talents has declined due to anti-circumvention and anti-scam investments, though the estimated cost remain approximately the same, due to increased value per contract.
Opportunity
In order to begin to break down the Enterprise Growth space into bite-size actionable pieces, we would need to begin to reduce friction within our sales funnel.
With very little information available to educate prospective users on the benefits of Enterprise, how could we begin to increase awareness of the Enterprise platform from a product-led initiative?
Challenge
How could we begin to tackle growth on the Enterprise platform through a product-led initiative?
Business Goal
Increase user base within
the Enterprise platform.
User Goal
Educate prospective users on the benefits of the Enterprise platform so that they may make their jobs simpler.
Defining the opportunity area
In around mid-2023, I began to map out the points of friction that exist within the Enterprise cycle from initial landing page through to registration. This would be a starting point for what would help pave the way for the Enterprise service blueprint-an artifact I created with the help of my stakeholders that would be crucial towards understanding the E2E Enterprise user journey.
Generative research
Over the course of a couple of months, I met with several teams, including Enterprise Success, Business Development Representatives, Account Executives, Solutions Architects, Subject Matter Experts, Product Marketing, etc. to begin to understand the fundamentals of each domain throughout the user journey experience. Not only would this allow for insight into areas our team had never seen prior, but also allow us to build relationships across the organization to enable us to partner with our stakeholders moving forward.
We uncovered crucial data that would set the stage for the Enterprise Growth roadmap.
What I Found
One of our biggest
problems is that we are losing prospective Enterprise clients to our Marketplace platform
Little to no insight into
how Enterprise differs
from Marketplace
There is little to no clarity around whether or not a prospective clients qualifies as a potential Enterprise user
Following these sessions, I was able to create a validated service blueprint, portraying the existing end-to-end Enterprise journey, documenting common decision points, information captured, existing gaps/paint points, and idea for what we could enhance on Upwork Enterprise or build from scratch.
Phase 1 Strategy
During the process of refining the service blueprint to identify both back-of-house painpoints as well as user painpoints, my product manager and I began to craft a roadmap for our vision moving forward. This roadmap would set the precedent for the next 1+ years of Enterprise growth and it therefore became increasingly important to be strategic in our execution. Yes, we would need to be results driven, however we would also need to go back to the drawing board and keep our prior learnings in mind.
With the limited date we had from Enterprise's short-lived life thus far, we honed in on some very important date we did have…
Our sales team had reported our prospective customer's lacked awareness into the Enterprise product itself & want to see the product (how it works, what it is, its features)
The Product team captured data that the original Enterprise site (launched Aug 2022) traffic supports this story.
We currently had a "how it works" anchor link on the Enterprise landing page had the highest click rate (1,109 clicks) suggesting that many prospective users would like to learn more about how our product works.
It therefore became evident that we needed to walk before we ran….
With the creation of a Features page, prospective customers would realize our values of transparency publicly while encouraging a “show vs. tell” approach. It will additionally lay the groundwork for future initiatives we may work on (demos, case studies, etc.) while leveraging new and existing imagery and text content to tell a more compelling story
Hypothesis
We hypothesized that a Features page will enable prospective customers to learn more about our platform, how it works, and what problem-solving solutions we offer. Additionally we could potentially drive SEO & marketing traffic to the following pages:
…/enterprise/features (L2)
…/enterprise/features/category-x (L3)
…enterprise/features/category-x/feature-x (L4)
Phase 1
Performance + Impact
Following the release of our Enterprise L2 and L3 pages, we saw a 17% increase in traffic within the first two months of launch, avg. 47% engagement, & 7.55% conversation rate.
Phase 2
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