The Great Resignation. The Big Quit. The Great Reshuffle. Whatever you’d like to call it, one thing is for certain—the world of work is changing in profound ways.
People are seeking financial opportunities that don’t compromise on the flexibility and independence many were able to experience during the pandemic. In Upwork’s Future Workforce Report 2021, we found that 40.7 million American professionals expect to be fully remote in the next five years.
At the same time, businesses are similarly starting to embrace the advantages of a hybrid workforce. Companies that support remote work report a 25% lower employee turnover rate. Remote workers are less stressed, more focused, and, as a result, more productive.
Given this context, it’s not surprising that TIME named Upwork one of the 100 most influential companies of 2022. As the world’s work marketplace, Upwork has stayed influential at the forefront of this massive change by launching a suite of innovative products and features that help our customers pursue flexibility and work and career innovation.
The secret to our ability to innovate? Our customers.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways our customers have driven product innovation at Upwork.
At Upwork we believe that a great product is defined by the customer. The customer is our collective “boss” who decides whether our product is a success.
With this philosophy in mind, our product experience (PEX) team uses the following four principles to guide our processes:
The customer shouldn’t feel like they just bought another service; they should feel like they’ve hit the jackpot (i.e. won big). With that first principle of winning big as a cornerstone, we build quality solutions that scale well and allow us to go further together with all of our partner teams.
Our team structure binds together product innovation and customer experience, allowing us to tighten customer feedback loops and innovate with every product iteration. We have dedicated teams focused on incubating product ideas and figuring out how to scale them.
For example, our Upwork community team (previously a part of customer support), has the job to take the community channel beyond its traditional roles in marketing, PR, and customer support. At Upwork, our customer community not only functions in traditional roles but is also viewed cumulatively as a feature & amplifier of the product experience itself.
And our customer experience and trust team merges customer support, product, policy, and operations into the same team with trust and safety. Having these functions tied more closely together leads to better policy development, product experimentation, and better customer outcomes.
As we’ve learned at Upwork, adopting a customer-first culture across a company tightens customer feedback loops and improves the organization’s agility, giving it the ability to adapt and innovate with the market.
As the world’s work marketplace, we serve everyone from one-person startups to 30% of the Fortune 100. With a customer base as diverse as ours, extracting actionable insights from customer feedback is no small feat.
So how do we do it? We listen directly to the customer.
We rely on multiple signals—including community posts, user research, testing, and customer support—to get an idea of what our customers really think about our products and services.
Voice of the customer (VoC) emails sharing learnings from our customers are among my favorite reads; and we share and digest these insights across the organization. Separately, I meet with at least one customer each week to better understand their pain points, their wish lists, and their needs. I take notes and share key takeaways in a team-wide Slack channel so we can iterate & address them as a team.
We start every PEX All Hands meeting with a recording of a customer call. Where are the customers encountering friction and how can we build solutions to meet their needs? What’s the pain that customers don’t have the vocabulary to articulate? Hearing directly from the customers and following up with how the team is planning to address those pain points helps keep us grounded in what matters >> the customer’s POV and satisfaction with our product.
Internally, we have multiple forums for people to bring ideas that have crossed their minds and share feedback such as in our internal Slack channels or in our weekly all hands call.
Externally, we understand that we don’t have a monopoly on all the great ideas. Our teams look for inspiration by keeping track of what’s going on in the market—not seeking fully transferable ideas, but gathering tidbits from hearing how others are solving customer problems. These valuable bits of benchmarking can also get the juices flowing.
Of course when it comes to listening to the customer, collecting feedback is only one part of the equation. Defining product needs is one of those things that has a low entry barrier—for opinions. Everyone has a perspective on what is most important to build, from numerous perspectives:
The list goes on. Add to that the fact that customer feedback is often raw and based on feelings that users cannot fully articulate or express.
That’s why it’s critically important to prioritize the feedback that will have the largest impact on solving our customers’ pain points. We don’t just look at existing customer feedback; we read between the lines. What are the patterns, the underlying reasons behind customer concerns? How do those pain points align with our company’s overall strategy?
By getting intentional when we follow up on customer feedback, we’re able to sort through the noise and find and address the root causes behind customer concerns. Our user research team is great at running studies, identifying themes, and kicking off more dedicated lines of inquiry.
We also utilize informal customer advisory boards that help us go really deep and personal with our customers.
These tactics allow us to ensure our solutions solve the real problems underlying customer concerns.
Virtually all of our products and services today would not exist in their current forms without customer feedback. I want to highlight a couple case studies of how customer feedback directly led to new products and services:
Multi approver workflows is perhaps the textbook example of how customer feedback shared in our community channel can directly influence future product updates.
Through our voice of the customer and community programs, we noticed that Enterprise Suite clients were requesting more governance and controls during the hiring process. They wanted a way to import their existing internal approval processes into the platform where freelancers were actually receiving their contract offers.
As of March 21, 2022, Enterprise clients can now opt in to multi-approver workflow features such as the ability to require hiring managers to submit requests for approval before contract offers are sent to freelancers. Clients who have questions on how to get started can work with their Upwork account managers and support team to get this up and running.
Enabling multiple approvers streamlines an Enterprise team’s ability to adhere to their internal company policies while using our platform to manage talent. You can read more about this update in our community channel.
A common theme we noticed from our customer feedback was a natural synergy between the long-term desires of both clients’ businesses and independent talent.
Specifically, independent talent wanted to build long-lasting work relationships with clients, and clients wanted an easy way to work, time and time again, with the talent they love.
We listened to our customers about ways to better nurture existing relationships. Clients even came to us showing how they organized their talent in spreadsheets.
Relationship building is central to the customer experience at Upwork. It’s the core differentiator that distinguishes our platform from our competitors. We leaned into that edge, using it to refine our search for customer feedback. Virtual Talent Bench was the result.
Really great products see customer pain points and address them before customers are even aware of them. One of the best ways to do that is to actually use what you build.
We drive innovation internally by using the Upwork platform ourselves to manage a hybrid workforce that spans the globe. Popular features such as Enterprise Suite and Workday time tracking integration were tested internally before deploying them publicly in our product lines.
We know firsthand what it means to successfully manage and lead remote teams. With approximately 1,700+ global independent professionals and 600+ full-time employees, every team within our organization leverages remote talent and distributed team structures.
To recap, innovation at Upwork is fundamentally driven by the customers we serve. But our ability to listen effectively to those customers and understand their pain points starts from within, with our strong bias for action:
Upwork is not alone in being able to benefit from this customer-driven approach. Whether you’re a small startup, a non-profit organization, or a huge multinational corporation, if you do this effectively, you’ll be well on your way toward delivering innovative products that wow your customers.
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