Secrets to a Successful App Redesign with Alexis Baird, Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack

This week's episode of Masters of MAX features Tom Butta interviewing Alexis Baird, the Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack. Alexis shares her journey from linguistics and computer science to product management roles at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Lyft. At Thumbtack, she leads innovations that connect homeowners with home service professionals.

Today’s focus is all about redesigns. Alexis and the team at Thumbtack recently launched an extensive redesign to expand their offerings beyond hiring professionals to provide their users a single app for all of their home needs. 

Alexis underscores the critical need for a personalized, user-centric approach, explaining how Thumbtack tailored their app to meet individual homeowner goals and house-specific needs, integrating tools like personalized guides and educational tidbits to boost user engagement. She discusses how the dev team was given a sandbox environment with a small percentage of customers and without traditional revenue targets, allowing for bold experimentation and significant advancements in user experience without the pressure of immediate financial returns.

The overarching theme of the episode revolves around executing a successful redesign. Alexis advises maintaining flexibility, refining hypotheses with careful analysis, and creating a cross-functional team encompassing design, engineering, marketing and more. By aligning a long-term vision with short-term iterative goals, and ensuring continuous feedback loops, Thumbtack was able to deliver a significantly enhanced product that better serves their customers' evolving needs.

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Guest Bio

Alexis has been working on products for the past 13 years, looking at the world through her customer's eyes, to build features that make a real impact for them. She is currently leading the customer experience and growth product teams as Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack.

Before her current role, she spent almost three years at Lyft, first as a Product Manager before she was promoted to Head of Product. In this role, she first focused on rider experience and later, Lyft Healthcare which included their concierge products.

She has also worked as a Senior and Group Product Manager at LinkedIn. She worked on the Talent Solutions, Content, Slideshare as well as LinkedIn Profiles teams. Her first product position was as a Product Manager for the Captions Metrics team at Microsoft Bing.

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Guest Quote

"One of the big misconceptions is that you do a big launch and you just kind of disappear. I've been part of redesigns in other lives, and you almost never get it right the first time or the second time or the third time. It takes a lot of iteration to get to that bar that you want for a broader launch."

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Time Stamps 

*(01:18) Alexis' background

*(03:12) What is Thumbtack?

*(04:29) Why the team decided to redesign their entire offering

*(08:41) Drilling down on personalization

*(11:30) The importance of collecting user feedback

*(14:24) The results of Thumbtack's redesign

*(17:17) Lessons for others looking to make significant change 

*(21:37) How to prove your hypotheses with your users

*(23:17) When is the time to put your pencils down? 

*(26:15) Do you go broad? Do you go deep?

*(27:19) Rapid Fire Questions

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Links

• Connect with Alexis Baird on LinkedIn
• Check out Thumbtack
• Connect with Tom Butta on LinkedIn
• Check out the Airship Website