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Have you ever participated in a company meeting that started with the CEO talking about the company values with excitement? While listening to those inspiring words and ideas, have you ever thought that it might rescue you from failure one day?

Sounds crazy, right? Then let me tell you about Fiverr Studios. A story that has all the elements of a good product lesson: data-driven decision, sophisticated product, simple user experience, and above all, a tough schedule but an even tougher team.

Before we dive in, I would like to give you some quick background on our environment. Fiverr is a marketplace for digital services, a place where businesses (buyers) from solo entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 corporates can hire the services of freelancers (sellers) quickly and easily.

Simplicity is a differentiator for Fiverr, we help our customers (buyers and sellers) do business with minimal friction. Maintaining simplicity becomes a greater challenge when we go up-market, with complex products and services at higher price points.

So let’s start our story…

Fiverr Studios

It was back in early 2019 when our product group presented the annual plans to the management with one of our key projects for the year being Fiverr Studios.

The concept was simple. Allowing freelancers on our platform to build virtual studios that could produce complex projects, like producing a video ad, building a website/mobile app, or creating a complete marketing strategy.
I bet you see the potential already, but intuition is not enough, here are some indicators we found:

With strong intuition and supporting data, we put Studios on our roadmap for the second half of 2019.

Planning and re-planning

“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”
Leonard Bernstein

Our initial plan was to develop the heavy lifting of a new entity in Q3 via three dedicated task forces, and then in Q4 five more task forces would implement it in the buying and ordering flows they own.

The plot thickened on May 27th, as the company decided (during a Priorities Review process), that the best time to launch Studios would be on Aug 1st.

At that point, it sounded like a mission impossible to us — let me dive deeper into why:

In a marketplace, a successful launch for a new product requires not only the platform to support it along with all flows, it also requires sufficient supply. We needed to approach sellers who would create studios, join forces with other sellers, and build their studio services as Fiverr Gigs.

Getting sufficient supply would take no less than 4–6 weeks, once we had a platform…

We had to come up with a new plan that would complete the heavy lifting in 4 weeks, instead of 3 months, and complete the integration with other teams within 4 additional weeks as well.

We didn’t have Ethan Hawk or Tom Cruise on our team, but we did have the Fiverr spirit of being doers, and we would face this challenge!

The product management book

You probably also know those well-known tricks listed in every product management book:

We reduced the scope in many ways, including:

• Using pre-selected sellers, rather than a model that allocates them dynamically
• Limiting the communication with the buyer to studio lead only
• Reusing elements we already had, even if not fully matching Studios’ case, like reviews
• Ignoring corner cases, like creating Studios in certain categories

We made some painful decisions, preferring pace while increasing our technical debt — it was unavoidable to meet the deadlines.

We prioritized the features in order of interaction with the marketplace, so we could onboard sellers to create their studios even before we had a complete funnel for them to create inventory.

Finally, we put the whole group in a war room, actually 2 war rooms. While this increased our productivity, it surely boosted the neighborhood’s fast-food restaurants.

The good news: We had a revised plan, by June 30 at midnight sellers would be able to create Studio Gigs — with no room for errors, bugs, production failures, sick days, etc.

The not so good news: This plan assumed no QA resources and no room for product changes. Moreover, we hadn’t communicated anything to our sellers; as a publicly-traded company, we couldn’t talk about such confidential features in the works.

The unwritten chapters

With the challenge given to us by our management, also came a charter — a charter to recruit any help we needed from other parts of the organization. Those other parties, of course, had their own deadlines and commitments.

We needed a strong case.

We realized that our customer-facing departments (Customer Success Managers, Customer Support, and Customer Journey) could help us with key weaknesses in the flow:

• Represent sellers who were about to build Studios on Fiverr, and make sure our flow was clear. In other words, QA our design before code was written
• Test the quality of delivered code, so that we could release it to our sellers as early as possible with minimal risk
• Help us write training materials and other supporting content, to educate our community of buyers and sellers about this new product

Sounds good, right? But how did we make it happen? Those teams had their own objectives, and convincing them to help us with their best resources, at short notice, was a challenge that our charter enabled.

Making them look forward to it and be 120% motivated towards it, was the key success factor.

This is where the best part comes, the unique Fiverr culture, based on common values and mission statement, made it possible.

Vision, values & motivation

One of the most memorable moments of the project occurred to me on Jun 20th, around 20:00. It was just a few moments after we had managed to create the first Studio page on Fiverr.

The war room door opens, and Micha Kaufman, Fiverr’s founder & CEO, steps into the room. His backpack is on his shoulder, checking up what’s going on with Studios just before heading home. “We’ve just managed to create a Studio for the first time!” one of the PMs said with excitement. Micha took a seat at the table, pulled out his laptop, and asked us to add him to the rollout. For an hour and a half, he was testing the new feature with the team.

It wasn’t the fact that we had another pair of eyes and hands working on the project, it was a message to the entire company: “Studios is the most important thing to Fiverr right now”.

We focused on key components to motivate managers and contributors to join this effort:

• Contribute to a high priority project that’s attracting top management’s attention
• Learn new skills and practices taken from different domains
• Take part in the productization process, long before you normally meet a product
• Be the first person in your team to know the new hot product and lead its adoption

It all comes down to the synergy of a well-defined company vision “To change how the world works together”, a product that perfectly fits into that vision, and a team that has common values that enable it.

Here’s the bottom line from our experience with Fiverr Studios:

We created a product that is completely aligned with the company mission statement, so it was easy to get attention and to engage managers.

We asked people from different teams to join the effort, being “Doers” is a key Fiverr culture value. We provided them with an opportunity to make an impact through their close knowledge of our customers. Customer obsession and making an impact are two more key parts of our culture. Our key product challenge was to offer a more complex product (composed of multiple services and contributors) that will be sold in a simple flow, just like a single service product. Thinking simple, as I stated at the beginning, is another key part of our culture.

This worked well because we asked people to act upon values they believe in, towards a task they trusted to be impactful.

If you’ve made it this far, be sure not to skip the next section, your key takeaways…

Three things to remember

#1

In product management we often encounter a situation where feature A is the most important thing to do, feature B is something we cannot afford not to have, and feature C is the one we promised a key stakeholder a quarter ago.

If A is really the most important thing, you should communicate to the stakeholder, who you promised C, that they will need to wait, and you will have to leave another quarter without B, because otherwise, A won’t happen.

Make sure to have your management aligned with that and communicate this strictly and honestly, and be fanatic about your priorities.

#2

When it comes to motivation, the best motivator we found was empowerment: offering people the ability to make an impact leveraging their unique knowledge and experience.

Don’t forget to credit them for that.

#3

Vision is critical when you want to tell people why you do what you do and push them to the limit. It is your duty as a product manager to make sure that:

1. You have a vision, be it a company vision, a group vision, or a product vision.
2. Your product and the vision are aligned.

If you are lucky, like we were, and your top management defined a vision, just make sure your product is aligned. If you do not have that luck, you should define this vision yourself.

Fiverr is hiring, learn more about us here