Web experience in your pocket without compromise

It’s 2015, why do we still have to limit our work to just the computer screen? We want to do more with our smartphones. We want to browse, manage, and communicate our projects with freelancers around the world, seamlessly transitioning from what we can do on the web to our mobile devices.

Business Goals:

• Allowing our customers to create and manage projects from their mobile will increase our growth metric.
• Making the freelancer profile more visible is going to impact their visibility as well as our membership revenue.
• The mobile initiative will dominate screen time from other competitors. Now our customers can get things done anytime, anywhere (pre-covid).

User Goals:

• Post, bid, and manage projects—anywhere, anytime from their mobile.
• A seamless experience between the web and the app.
• Freelancers are more visible. Employers can find the right freelancers quicker and better.

We typically introduce new features and ideas on the mobile web first due to its speed and ease of implementation. After a few rounds of beta testing, we develop the native app and ask users to post projects through it. We observe their process, identify any pain points, and then iterate and refine the process accordingly.

Impact

• The most anticipated flagship feature that impacts our business valuation (2015-2017).
• The most frequent experimenting, iterating and go-lives product.
• We hit the first million downloads with significant positive reviews.
• All-time high key mobile metrics include user activation, engagement, retention, and revenue.
• From overlooked products to 3 product managers teams that won the Webby awards.

While I had the privilege of working with world-class PMs, engineers, and data scientists, I believe it would have been beneficial to include the customer support team earlier in the design process. I observed that many of the features we developed were directly requested by our customers and often highlighted by our customer support team before.