In today’s episode, we explore the significance of customer experience, product, and community with Sam Bright, Chief Product and Experience Officer at Upwork. Sam oversees a global team of over 800 individuals working in product design, user experience, user research, and community management. This incredible individual joins us today to discuss the significance, benefits, and challenges of merging customer experience, product, and community.

[01:07] Sam’s Journey – Sam shares his career journey at several positions related to entrepreneurship and technology and how all that experience has prepared him for his current role at Upwork.

[05:40] Understanding the Customer and the Product – Learnings from Sam’s career that helps him understand and connect with his customers as well as the products and strategies to make the customer win big.

[10:14] Responding to Change – Sam shares with us why our business strategies should be adjusted according to evolving conditions of the market and what we learn through our experiences, and the benefits of adapting to change.

[14:20] Operating Models – Sam explains what an ideal operating model for customer experience looks like and how companies can effectively implement it.

[18:00] Upwork’s Customer-Centric Approach – What drives Upwork’s approach to customer experience and how the process of implementing customer centricity has helped Upwork thrive.

[24:50] Challenges – Upwork has a far wider range of stakeholders than a typical business. We talk about some of the customer experience challenges that emerge with this nature of business and how the Upwork team is working to overcome them.

[29:00] Redefining CX for the Future – Sam shares his perspective on how the customer experience landscape may evolve in the next few years.

Resources:

Connect with Sam:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samuelbright

Twitter: twitter.com/SamuelRBright

Be Customer Led - Sam Bright

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of be customer led. I have a super special guest for us this week. Sam bright is chief product and experience officer at Upwork it's company. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Sam leads a team of over 800 people globally distributed across product design, user experience, user research.

Customer experience, community management, new business, trust safety. It's an incredible team and incredible thing that Sam is building and pulling together. Sam, thanks so much for being on be

[00:01:09] Bill Staikos: same here. I start off every show, Sam asking guests about, their journey, how they got that customer bug and how that kind of led them into the role they are today.

Can you share with our listeners your own story? Obviously culminating into the role at Upwork.

Partnering with entrepreneurs who are, in the high tech, advanced manufacturing and life sciences space, and every morning thinking about like, what are the, what are the things that they were struggling with? Because we are a startup incubator dealing with startups at the same time. And we come in each morning and one of my jobs was to like, make popcorn for them, something very small, but like also immediate feedback.

Like if you burnt it, everyone knew they had been doing a good job today. But like, what are the little hassles that you can take off of entrepreneurs place? Well, obviously that's, that's a small token, but I still think sometimes. When I'm engaging in conversations about like, what is the equivalent of making popcorn?

When are we burning popcorn for our customers? And how does that translate into the experiences that we build for them into the way that we engage with them across all of our touch points, et cetera, over the past decade as fast forwarding, a little bit, I've been a student of two-sided marketplaces, and I had a really long run at eBay and it was in multiple roles doing emanate strategy and business development.

And. leading our collectibles team and business unit and experience, and then eventually multiple verticals and then leading the broader verticals and just everything that was sold on ebay.com. And then also one of our SAS subsidiary for a little while. And they're all those experiences. There are so many different needs for customers that emerged, as you can imagine, like customers who are purchasing bullying versus customers who are purchasing.

cell phone cases versus customers who are purchasing tractors have very different needs, very different experiences. One size definitely does not fit all. And so, as I looked at addressing customer pain across multiple lenses, I really spend some time thinking about like, how do we deeply understand the customer?

Cause we all require, we all have like a role to play. And making sure that our customers who are true bosses are delighted in every interaction they have with our products and services. And so that was, I think earlier in my journey, and then, I joined Upwork in November, 2020 to lead the product of experience team, basically overseeing everything that touches a customer.

we're the, we're the world's work marketplace we're really seeking to disrupt the future. By connecting businesses with the independent talent they need to get work done. And so we want to be that always on solution for companies who are hiring independent talent and then also managing programs of scale.

And really in this role, in this remit, thinking through like, how do we launch and lead the work marketplace? How do we scale our product to experience. And then how do we drive customer growth through delighting them across multiple product lines and innovative integrations?

What you're doing every day and the resources it takes, not just even people, but technology, et cetera. And it's just really, if you're going to do it right and do it super well like you guys are today, clearly the commitment is across the entire firm. Your background is really interesting. I mean, one on the eBay side, clearly that that helped shape a lot of your thinking.

That's a great parallel to the work that you're doing at Upwork. When you think about your experience though, and all that you've acquired. How do you think that that has given you a deeper understanding of the customer as well as the product, because of your background? Do you think that you're able to appreciate both at a different level, but also be able to connect them maybe in a different way to,

I think that it starts with really thinking about if there's a unified understanding on. What it means to actually make the customer successful. It starts with like, how do you set intentionality for your team? And obviously that's been influenced by the various experiences that I've had over time, right?

Like I've been in prior lives and investment banker and I've, I've sold companies or advised on selling companies or buying companies that, for whatever reason. either were delighting customers or had taken their eyes off the ball and we're no longer delighting customers. If so, now they're being picked up by someone else who was able to go like customers.

So I think about each of the different lenses, how that influences, like, the customer feedback that we were constantly getting and therefore how it leads to us making, more holistic end to end decisions. That span, or boundaries. Right? So if I think about how I translate that into my current role, a lot of it comes down to how you instill the culture of customer obsession.

So for our product experience team, we really prioritize the customer about everything else. And I've learned that through all these different vantage points. So one of our product experience packs as we call it principles. Number one is make the customer win big and that unifies all our different functions and all of our different touch points.

Because it's a question we can ask ourselves as we're building products, we can ask ourselves as we are having customer interactions, we can ask ourselves as we are crafting business development deals, we can ask ourselves as we're writing policies for trust and safety, like will the customer win big here?

And there's a complexity of being a marketplace and that you have two customers. You have both clients. And so how do you enable them both to win big? And if something doesn't go the way that one of them feels like it should have gone, how do you enable them to come to a good resolution in a way that they still feel like they, they one bank?

Right? So we take a step back and we think about like our vision for Upwork. Being where the world wants to work. That's again, very customer centric, right? Like we inspire people around the world to make the choice, the ones to be here because we have to delight customers, such that they are willing to give their mind share and their wallet share to us because we've learned their trust.

Yeah. Deliberate delight and then work like even as work evolves, we are constantly racing to stay ahead and anticipate and deliver in advance of customer expectations. Right? So whether it comes from my time, working with startups at the business incubator or advising CIO at Forester or engaging. C-suite leaders, as they were thinking about which companies would be bought or sold and how they engage with customers or the different vantage points and functions.

At eBay, even as we were thinking about how to deliver and build vertical experiences, like all of those different skillsets or experiences or interactions all are just different lenses on how do you interact with the ultimate boss, who's the customer. And so that then gives us insight and certainly plenty of skin needs and, and learnings, to hopefully try to integrate as we're working through things.

And I know that obviously Upwork is changing people's lives in a number of. Are there core tenets that you think about wet that you try to apply to customer experience or as you've gone from place to place even, has that thinking changed or evolved? I hear all the time sometimes like, Hey, I've been doing this work for a long time.

Here's my model. Here's how I'm gonna do it. And it's worked every time and I've been successful. How do you think about that? Or, or do you kind of adjust and change based on the company or the, or the end consumer?

Plus to learn over time through great mentors, coaches, mistakes experiences, what have you, that I try to apply across the board. But I do think that context specific, there are context, specific applications that just vary depending on where you're working, what your, what the dynamics with customers are, how aware they are of your product and your experience, et cetera.

But I think part of the reason why we said make the customer win. Is because of the fact that it constantly holds us to a higher level and it reflects one of the, one of the tenants around really trying to ingest customer obsession. Like how are we asking our teams? Not only are we solving customer problems, but how are we going about solving those problems?

Hmm. Frosted Upwork that is of course about how businesses are connected with independent talent to get more work done in this complex environment of remote work and hybrid workforces and economic uncertainty. But we're also asking ourselves, are we using the customer experience to set the pace as an innovator and our competitors?

To, to an earlier point I made, how deeply are we listening to customer pain? Because sometimes customers aren't able to really articulate what they're looking for until they see it. And they're like, oh, that's, that's what I'm looking for. And so how closely are we listening? How, how, how constructively paranoid are we about, customer experiences?

The customer expectations always changed. I mean, another tenant in addition to just customer obsession is, being willing to explain. So we continuously seek to learn and improve. Right? So customer experience has never truly done a it's a continuous journey. It's not a one-time project. It has to be embedded in that.

we as operate within our companies and has to be embedded in our culture as new people come on board, like they understand that this is sort of the way that we operate in order to be successful with each other and for our customers. And so how are we open to make adjustments and temporaries change as we learn from customer feedback?

That is just a reflection of someone not resetting the bar for them, of what they'd be able to meet their needs even faster. And so I think that creates for us. As customer experience professionals and leaders there's ever dynamic landscape or where we know that people are in a race to deliver value to customers, including our customers faster.

And if we don't showing up with that in mind, those customers won't be ours over time.

I, I, I've been talking a lot about just organizational structure for success. Do you think that there are any like great models out there that you've seen? I mean, clearly you're building something really unique and great at, at Upwork and we'll get into more of that, but like, what do you think is like a, just an optimal way to start to bring that

together?

And a lot of it comes down to how folks are organized. And so I think bringing customer experience as close as possible to the experience so that those feedback loops are very easily in place. Very transparent is really important. And I've seen it both within Upwork. I've also seen it in ways that in prior lives, we have tried to align customer experience teams to specific strategic priorities at that moment in time that align with different customer needs.

Like I've seen that be really effective, but if you're thinking about. customer experience is separate from other customer touch points. I think that raises that raises challenges that can slow organizations down in terms of like, when is it. When can you, how much translation is occurring versus not, you really want this feedback loop of like, Hey customer articulate pain, we research it.

We come up with other ideas on how we can solve it. We validate it with customers, we release it into the market. They're like, well, that's all part of it, but there's more than. And we continue to validate it and then we fix it or we tweak it and then we go back and tell customers about, and they give us more insight.

And it's this ever ongoing dialogue that is unbroken by org boundaries. And so I think that that having the touch points with the customer. As closely connected as possible, even if they're not in the same org, but as closely connected as possible is really important for those feedback loops to occur because it leads to CX teams understanding the product tomorrow.

It leads to product teams, understanding what customers are saying to frontline team members at every given point in time. It leads to mutual empathy to folks being, able to, in some cases have, different types of, career rotation opportunities, et cetera. And so it's really the intentionality that I think is important.

And. Are collaborating and partnering with each other.

Clearly you just outlined some of the benefits of that model. What was the driver behind your vision to do that? is it something that you saw in a past life? Is it something you were like, Hey, you thought about it in a shower and it came up like, That's not something that people, a lot of people do, but the benefits are real and they're tangible and can make a profound difference.

Not only from a product perspective, but even organizationally and culturally, as you just laid out.

if it hadn't been, because I've seen too many silos between customer experience and product. And so I think as an organization, we intentionally co-located them to have, as, to bring the insights together. So when you have a more unified team there, VPs and product managers from our various product lines, sit right alongside.

Right? Because then we, we tweak that to say, okay, how do we include closing the loop? So, and then we reference back, Hey, this was feedback the customers made beforehand or gave us beforehand. And here's something new that we released addressing. Addressing that feedback. Right. and so those views have been not only of utmost importance in terms of like delivering for customers, but also in terms of helping us culturally get to a place where customer centricity is paramount, because it's really hard to be customer centric without talking to customers a lot of times.

And, so we've been aggressively hiring leaders, building out teams to bring them to fruition. We also have been really, really benefited from, we have, a great leader on my team, Brandon Savage, who came in and leads our customer experience and trust organization. And he had previously led product teams in the past before migrating into customer experience.

And so he brings. Perspective that is really able, there's really helpful. And, and kind of like educating our customer experience teams on how product teams tend to think. And also enabling being able to communicate the customer experience needs with our product teams while sitting all within the same organization.

So under. We can already see some of the benefits that are occurring from that I expect. We'll see more over, over time that progresses.

[00:19:27] Sam Bright: Yeah, for sure. So I think community kind of sits on a continuum. I've seen various. versions of it. I'm not going to like say that we've fully gotten to where we want to go, though. We are, we've brought community and a product to experience. So we brought in a great leader to, to drive it and in line with like the aspirations that we have, but I've seen community, everything kind of function everywhere from being in a.

Somewhat of a public relations function too. I've seen it B, which is, which is great. And there's value associated with that to being within marketing, which there's, there's great. And that's great. And there's value within that to being somewhat of a customer service. The deflection, mechanism, which that's great and there's value within that to being, more of like an operational, series of programs in which we connect with customers.

And that's, that's great. And there's value with that. Like all the way to like community being fully integrated into the. For us personally, we're seeking to go to that latter part, that latter part of the continuum. And I think in some cases, we, we don't view community as a contact deflection mechanism.

Like we can route folks there to get their questions answered and other things, but we're really seeing that as another dimension of the dialogue. And so for us, it was important to have that separate from a customer experience and to really think about like, how can we. Engage our customers to be able to not only connect, but solve each other's problems and then eventually get the best answers to various common questions that we can, thread throughout the experience.

So, it becomes another dimension of the feedback loop and, there are already some changes that we're making under our new community leaders, guidance, Fran, Fran Murphy to, upgrade our current community experience to make it a bit more thoughtful in terms of how we announce product releases to think about like how we thread through feedback from different community members, et cetera.

But to us, it's just another part of the feedback loop. We get, we get validation from VOC that we get validation from our community members. We get early views. If we have. we share different tests we're running or what have you that then help us improve before we do a Fulbright launch at enables us to make better decisions, over, over time.

So a lot of work, a lot of wood to chop, across the board. I'm not gonna pretend that we've gotten to everywhere we want to be, but this is part of the direction that we are, that we are headed. And I'm really excited for. How these different viewpoints and touch points with customers will enable us to be sharper and sharper on meeting their needs.

Right. So by default, I'm just going to take an example, even if they gave you a 10 out of 10 on a scale, they're still going to also be so invested. They'll say here's the one thing that would make this even better. Like if you go to 11, I'd make an 11, but you got to change this one thing versus someone who's like, eh, you're doing okay.

Right. Like they're not going to really go that extra mile to give that feedback. So kudos to you for, for bringing it together. I think that's awesome. I want to talk a little bit about sort of the serving of multiple masters, so to speak, right? So. I for me, that really is a fascinating model because a lot of folks out there are in B2C or B2B or in places where it's B2B to C et cetera, but you really, outside of even investors, partners, shareholders, et cetera, you have very, very distinct individuals that you're serving.

How do you kind of, what types of challenges does that create from a customer experience perspective and how have you guys been able to, or how do you think about managing through that?

It definitely makes things a lot of fun because you, you get, you, you're able to draw pattern recognition from very surprising, places over time.

And so the challenge from a customer experience perspective is to try to ascertain what the driver is of that particular customer engaging, either selling or buying, and then being able to partner with them. At Upwork, there's even more complexity in some regards in terms of you've got consumer and enterprise and in terms of customer segments and on the client side, I mean, you've got everyone from freelancers to agents.

And so again, the challenge is like, how do you ascertain where the customer pain is at or what the, what the driver is of someone wanting to get work done or wanting to do work, along the way. And so for us, we've really given a lot of thought about. How do we enable both sides of our platform to be successful?

How can we make them both win big, which is sort of like our something we continue to aspire to. And so for us, that meant launching early in the work marketplace, which meant that we went from offering a single product line, which is our crown jewel talent marketplace post. To being a multiple, multiple product line company and adding new product lines, like project catalog for like browse and buy, preschool, upfront price projects, or talent scout for like more low domain complex work clients and talent clients connect to the better talent.

Our enterprise suite, that speaks to the two specific use cases there, or, payroll, it bring your own talent or direct contracts. Like there, all these different, these different, product lines that we realized had different resonance for the variety of customer segments that we had and enabled us to say, okay, well, this is how we're going to not take a one size fits all approach, but really say, okay, these are the painful.

That we can leverage the scale of our marketplace to solve in a very dedicated, product offering. And so each time as we are dreaming of developing, deploying a new product, we kinda have to go through that whole feedback loop, on, both the client experience for the independent talent experience side, and really try to balance or optimize that our feedback there accordingly.

So just to give you an exact. We recently announced our virtual talent bank, which is sort of this, the set of features that makes relationship building central to the customer experience on Upwork. So clients can discover talent, they can organize talent, they can put them in list. They there's also pre curated list of folks that they've engaged with, et cetera.

So that's really easy for them to re-engage with them again. And then for talent, of course, any time that they've worked with clients before. And it's easy for those clients to go and rediscover them again like that just increases the likelihood that they're going to get hired and increases the predictability of their earnings.

So that came from a ton of research that we did and testing that we had done on, like, how do we solve both of these customers? So we built this feature to try to span both of those needs and the light, both masters. if you

my perspective at least is that we'll continue to play a key role. and, and how work has even reshaping being redefined. How do you think customer experience needs to shift and maybe redefine as we think about future work, because there's so much conversation out there, right? Because CX is dead or it's dying, blah, blah, blah.

[00:27:34] Sam Bright: Yeah, I definitely don't think. CX is dead. I think, I don't see that happening.

I do think that I do see that CX is a discipline is constantly evolving just as other functions are, as customer needs change. And so, as we've discussed a bit here, I can see tighter coupling with other functions, whether that is product or even some facets of engineering and marketing over time, really increasing sort of influence.

And insights that are generated from talking to customers each day into other parts of the, of the organization, which I think is really. And then I think there is always going to be this dynamic of like, how do you connect the CX teams with the specific customer segments that they're seeking to, to serve.

And so I think that'll be an ongoing dialogue as well as to like, how do we meet those needs? How, how do we arm our CX team members? Insight into the different activities that we have to meet, recurring areas, pain. So whether that is, tooling or that structure or that, more cross pollination across functions, I think there's gonna be a lot of experimentation on that.

I think that'll be, that'll be really good, in terms of really driving customer centricity into the core of organization.

[00:28:59] Sam Bright: Yes. In addition to my family who, are an incredible source of inspiration for me, I really find inspiration and experimentation and curiosity and encroaching CX, and really product in general through an entrepreneurial mindset. But I think, where I'm going to go. I always go back to the customer.

And so, I touched on a little bit, our voice of the customer programs, one of my favorite emails to read. Uncover emerging themes that we seek to understand where customers are friction and then how to build solutions that meet their needs. Similarly, every all hands we have, as a product experience team, we start with a customer call and then I also each week try to meet with a customer, at least one customer, either client or a freelancer.

I take copious notes. and then I add my notes to a slack channel for all 830 of us to discuss a second. Like, what are customers telling us? And that often will give us insights into how we can make our features better into like, what are the different things that are resonant. And so it enables us to serve them better as well.

A lot of great ideas and inspiration out of that. So I'm blessed to have great mentors and friends and other things, but in terms of like what guides my day to day. Work it's really like, what can I have a touch points with the customer we're never smarter than they are. We always learn something as, as, as we engage that tends to energize me and hopefully my team

And this has been a great show. Thanks again for your time. And joining us on be customer led. It's been a pleasure to have you on and to, and to learn from you today.

[00:30:42] Bill Staikos: That's super kind of you all right. Everybody, Sam bright, an incredible conversation. If you're not on Upwork today, you should check out the site I've been on there in the past. It's amazing just from a UI and platform perspective, but also the way that it does bring people together. We'll see you next week.

Everyone we're out. Talk to you

soon, everyone. The need to be customer led with bill staikos. We are grateful to our audience. To their time, be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we're doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time we're out.