Managed by Q

Adapting our marketplace experience to become a fully self-service feature within a SaaS tool

desigN Lead | March 2019 - January 2020

Managed by Q is the first all-in-one tool for office managers. The company began as a tech-enabled cleaning provider for offices and evolved into a marketplace business where customers could book office services with external vendors.

After acquiring a small startup and being acquired by WeWork, our marketplace transitioned into being part of a larger SaaS tool, with a variety of product offerings specifically for office managers.

The team

I led design independently for our marketplace projects, while working with a PM, engineering lead, and two engineering squads. There was close partnership with product marketing managers, marketing, product leadership, and pairing with other designers for feedback as needed. At Managed by Q, our design critiques were weekly and made up of 5 product designers.

Problems to solve

Our services marketplace, previously our core product experience, needed to adapt quickly as we built out other parts of the product and pivoted business models.

• For our customers, the process of booking services with vendors took too long. Additionally, it wasn’t clear to customers how Managed by Q as a company was involved in the process of connecting office managers with external vendors.

• For our business, the marketplace features were sprawling, both from a technical standpoint and for our operations internally. We needed to reprioritize what we could keep and maintain with a smaller team.

Solution

We worked towards creating a fully self-service experience, positioning the marketplace as the obvious choice for office managers to find new vendors to work with.

Giving the customer control of the experience made it feel cohesive with our other SaaS offerings, and was a faster experience.

In customer interviews and through competitive analysis of the space, we found that in order to make our marketplace the obvious choice for finding a new vendor we needed to:

A deeper look at updating our core booking experience

Our booking experiences relied on a manual process that took a long time — hours at minimum, and days on average. And rather than having a single booking experience, we had multiple user flows to maintain.

The types varied based on service types and entry points: Instant booking for light maintenance services, re-ordering services for working with past vendors again, and direct messaging with past vendors which resulted in a vendor generated work order. The primary booking flow used for the majority of services is shown below:

Original core booking experience

In order to expose our vendor network and let customers choose who to work with themselves, a few things had to happen — these changes were released iteratively, to gage learnings and adjust course as we went.

Vendor profiles

We enabled editable vendor profiles for vendors to merchandize themselves, and added standardized vendor attributes so that vendors could be compared more easily.

We also added Google and Yelp review data to level the playing field for newly added vendors, and to save customers the Google search that we learned they were doing anyway to confirm vendors were reputable.

Social proof

We surfaced vendor reviews earlier in the booking experience, and prioritized collecting more vendor reviews from customers.

Why? A huge theme in research was:
Office managers look to and trust other office managers.

Focus on messaging

We wanted to enable customers to have conversations with vendors sooner, and make messaging the core part of the matching experience.

Project pages were centered on messaging — a lightweight way to get us to parity with our mobile app and to encourage conversations with vendor to reach a service agreement.

Language updates

We audited the language used, especially in reference to customer support’s role in the experience and in UI action labels.

These shifts helped to position Managed by Q as a product and tool rather than a concierge-like matchmaker service. 

Outcome

The percentage of projects created where customers chose their own vendor without assistance from our support team went from 11% to 83% as we iteratively released the updates outlined above. This steady uptick in adoption gave us the confidence to fully turn off the option to rely on Managed by Q support, making 100% of created projects self-service.

Up next

Further evolving the marketplace vision means looking for new ways to better connect customers with vendors of all types.

We explored and tested concepts with customers around our mobile app experience, and looked for ways to better connect the marketplace features with other parts of the app — feedback we heard from users and our sales team as a request from inbound leads.

As this experience was built, we began validating ways to connect a part of the product called the Vendor Directory to the marketplace experience.