Upwork Marketplace Expansion

Yeah, so I'd actually love to chat a little bit more about, you know, at Upwork, how you thought about, you know, growth and expansion. So maybe when you kind of first joined, you know, what that was like as far as, you know, thinking about that from like a category or kind of like growth and expansion side, and maybe some kind of insights from that.

Upwork was a, it still is, it's a great core product that had incredible product market fit, and it grew really, this is, you know, I'll convey my personal observations and kind of how, my teams have thought through this, but Upwork had gone— grown through, you know, being a first comer to this incredible market and having amazing product market fit with its initial target market. And what we were seeing was kind of, um, remote work was going mainstream. So what does that mean? You have your early adopters and we all know, you know, building for your early adopters is very different from building for your you know, the potential, the mainstream user, like people like me hiring engineers is very different from my CTO hiring an engineer. So we wanted to have, you know, if our mission was remote workers at the heart of every business, we have to think very differently when it came to new product strategy about, you know, what that strategy was. So it involves a lot of themes around, you know, in the past, in our core, we were focusing on building that core, enabling collaboration tools. We were, you know, doing a lot of things to do things we feared, like, uh, circumvention, which is like the dirty word in the talent marketplaces. But, um, moving from that mentality to going to mainstream requires you to think about like, how do you educate and onboard effectively? Like, this is a new way to work. You're facing behavior change, which is very scary as a product person to do. So we had to think a lot about simplifying our flows, building new products that were a lot approachable than writing a very detailed job description that tells the other side exactly the specs of what you needed, which is not how the world operates. Shortening our time to value. So That was a third big theme, bringing the two sides together faster, alignment. So the big black box in talent marketplaces is the work that gets performed. And it's very disempowering as a company to say like, you do all this stuff, you onboard people, you match people, and then you don't know the core of what goes on. So we try to, you know, facilitate that. Success through better alignment. And then finally, we built some tools of better ways to engage with talent. Like one of them was just recently announced, which was full-time hiring. We built this thing called consultations that talent really wanted. And again, going back to the theme of what is the great— what is great talent doing today? So that became some of our strategy and approach.