New flagship features that contribute to an all-time high in various metrics

1. The opportunity creation

After a highly successful revamp of Warriorforum.com (Freelancer acquired), the SVP of Growth has asked me to transition to the Freelancer product, the mobile team. At that time, Freelancer was a web-focus company, and mobile was just a tiny team that mimicked some of the web features.

I never work with Freelancer products before. I don’t know what users need or how the app function in the business model. With minimal function in the app, we lack measurable data points, and it’s tough to form any hypothesis around the user needs or our mobile growth metric.

I interview senior leaders, designers, PMs, engineers, customer support and data scientists to fill the knowledge gaps. Then I realised we’re not being asked to improve an existing product; we’re being asked to invent an entirely new product. We’re going to create a new opportunity.

2. Design thinking, learning, and making

Since I started from V2, understanding the current infrastructure helped me quickly release something to learn from. The first feature I designed was the explicit customer feedback embedded in the app V1.

We go from there, we design something, we validate feedback, then release and learn from the customers. We spent a few months on this process to shape our V2 vision and strategy. The more we design, the more data and feedback we collect, and the more confidence we gain as a team.

3. Core features

My vision for my team was end each week by validating our potential solution with real users and customers and with the remarkable observation of the teams, we spotted lots of opportunities and created new features such as:

• Messenger: brings Freelancers and Employers closer and clearer; therefore, the project success rate increases (tracked by the Employer marks the project as finished and reviews the freelancer).
• Multi-Roles: members can switch between employers and freelancers in the same account/screen in one flick—increasing the project creation rate (yes, people subcontracting).
• Multi-Players: Select more than one freelancer to work on the same project. Boost our project commission fee per project.
• Post Project: post or bid projects from the app—increasing the project creation and bid-time rates (the time the freelancers place the bid on the project after the employers post the project). Which later become our A-ha moment experience (Freelancer will bid on your project within a few seconds).
• Milestone Payment: a payment paid in stages of progress throughout a project when agreed.
• Rehire CTA:  the rehiring button helps our users work with someone who clicks again and creates a loop within our business ecosystem.
• And many more:  e.g., freelancer profile page, membership redesign, new onboarding , etc.

4. A new way of describing old reality

While we busy create a positive impact through the new features above, I noticed that people are often confused about what’s next after posting or bidding on a project.

At that time, the V1 app gave people a non-linear experience called a project view page (PVP), but I believe people’s mental model was a linear experience, e.g. the employer must post a project first, then choose the freelancer to work with and so on, not the other way around.

I hypothesise that if we give them a clue of what’s next—with a single explicit action, we will increase our project creation and completion even more. That’s the birth of “Timeline”—a new experimental concept that we haven’t even on the web yet.

Vision: Provide and linear process for our customers to complete their projects.

Strategy: Ship iOS, Android and Mobile web, observe how people interact with it on UserTesting.com—then repeat until success.