Thumbtack Approaches Design from a “Pro-centric” Perspective.
Thumbtack, a San Francisco based startup, connects people to professionals that will get the job done. Whitespace Fellows from our SP17 cohort got an inside look at Thumbtack’s new office space and their take on designing for pros.
Jason James, Design Manager at Thumbtack, greeted our design fellows as we stepped out of the elevator. He apologized for the sparse decor and work-in-progress look of the place, having just moved in a couple weeks ago. Still, the office looked great and what immediately stood out was the Wall of Pros.
The wall featured life-sized portraits of professionals available on Thumbtack. Each photo was accompanied by the pros name and a short quote. The placement of the wall, adjacent to the reception desk, set the tone for the company and further reinforced the walls title, “Our pros make it possible.”
At Whitespace, we teach our designers to set a culture of design at their startups. Part of this means instilling user-centric thinking beyond the design team — this is a great example of doing just that.
Lightning Talks on Design
We sat down with a few members of Thumbtack’s design team for a series of lightning talks to learn about how they do design. We learned about discovery research, Thumbtack’s design process, and what it’s like to design for a broad-range of pros from movers to masseuses. Some key insights from the sharing:
- Broad, open-ended questions are best for discovery research. The team likes to ask, “How does Thumbtack fit into your life?”
- Thumbtack designers are seated within their respective product teams, allowing for cross-functional collaboration and faster iteration.
- Design projects are set up for success at the start with a Product Requirement Doc (PRD) covering deliverables, goals, timeline, metrics, and post-mortem.
- Design of a new feature is started with mobile first thinking.
- After hand-off, designers are expected to “design QA” — do a quality assurance check of a feature — before it goes live on production.
- Thumbtack maps the pros journey, with cute illustrations :), from discovery through when a job is complete. This provides insights into a pros interaction in and out of their app and allows the team to improve the holistic experience.
Feeding Us — Mind & Body
We continued our design discussion into lunch where our design fellows got to hang out with the rest of Thumbtacks design team.
On these design field trips, the lunch time have always been great for candid conversations. For example, we learned the Head Chef was one of the first 20 hires on the team. And that product designers should learn to code, change their title to Design Engineer and ask for a 20% pay increase :)
Dream it. Do it.
Thank you to Jason James, Josh Sassoon, Phil, Theo, Prachi, and the rest of the design team for giving us a behind the scenes look on design @ Thumbtack!
— Whitespace Design Fellows SP17
