Jobber - Home
Jan 2019-Sep 2020
Jobber's award-winning software helps small home service businesses organize their entire operations, from scheduling jobs and managing their crews, to invoicing customers and collecting payments.
Home was built to keep things running smoothly for business owners. A single place to monitor and act on the most time-sensitive aspects of their business.
My Role
As Product Manager for our Machine Learning team, I worked with our multidisciplinary teams to maximize user adoption through the introduction and implementation of Machine Learning. It was my firm belief that a tool like ML alone cannot maximize adoption, but can help improve it, or push a feature over the edge in terms of getting the most out of what users need. I used a “value first” mentality to identify that, if we wanted to introduce ML into our dashboard, we needed to make the dashboard have value without ML first.
In this role:
I conducted user research using quantitative and qualitative data
Built through an iterative process where we released the dashboard with a recommendation engine to a beta group. The data from this beta helped drive iteration decisions with the design and technology behind the dashboard which was launched August 2020
I worked closely with the development team to implement and test new technologies
I worked with our designer to conduct prototype tests and experiments
Worked with the marketing team to brand the new dashboard as “Home” along with building the packages of key messaging we would be using through the Success, Sales, and Marketing teams
Worked with Customer Success team to make sure all backlash messaging and help documentation was up to date to minimize effects of changing a key feature
Coordinated with the mobile team to share our research on what requirements were needed for customers in the dashboard. This provided guardrails for them to make a more mobile focused version of Home.
Launched features such as Activity Feed, Home (new dashboard), GPS Tracking (FleetSharp Integration), and Lead Management (Hatch Integration)
Work Requests card featured at the top of the Home page
Today’s Appointments is the key component that helps business owners see what their employees are up to
Product
Jobber Home keeps business owners on top of what their team is doing day-to-day so they can see at a quick glance if their day is staying on track (and make adjustments for those times it's not). Here they can see what actions need to be taken at each step of the workflow – how today's appointments are progressing, and payments on their way to their bank accounts.
At the top of the home page there are four cards that show a high-level overview of a business’s workflow. The workflow cards are an owners go-to spot to see what action is needed for requests, quotes, jobs, and invoices. Each card shows three suggested actions:
a primary action (shown with a button)
a secondary action (shown with the option to view)
a tertiary action (shown with the option to view)
All of these actions focus on getting work, doing the work, and getting paid for the work.
Below the primary and secondary actions, each card has a chart that shows metrics from either the last 7 days or last 30 days. These charts are a quick visual representation of how each item in your workflow is progressing.
Today's appointments breaks down your total appointments for the day by employee and color codes their progress. Each employee's name is displayed with a progress bar which updates throughout the day as your team works
Additionally there is a “Payments” card that allows owners to see how much cash is on the way to their bank account.
Metrics
Increased weekly active usage (WAU) to 45%
The highest engagement came from users who needed to know what their team was doing and who were most concerned about making sure no work requests slipped through the cracks. 81% of accounts with a team of 3 or more used the dashboard now.
Usage increase largely driven by bringing the most important actions and information to the forefront of the users experience when they first log in every day.
Key Takeaways
It was the first time in Jobbers 8 year history we released a major feature that was included in both Jobber Online and Jobber Mobile. While it was tricky to coordinate launch dates we learned how even though a feature is “the same” in Online and Mobile, the users still have a different perspective on what to expect in those areas. For example, the Today card (employee updates) was excluded from mobile because users said they are out in the field with their employees or only need to know if there are updates to clients while on the go. Team management is more important when you’re at your desk at the beginning or end of your day
Recommendations are great, but they cannot be a core feature, rather it makes more sense for them to compliment an already successful feature
How important it is to have a deep understanding of how users run their business (customer empathy) because a dashboard is only valuable if it shows the data that’s important to users running their day to day
The most vocal users are not always right. It’s important to use qualitative data to compliment quantitative data. In our interviews we often heard about how important it was to have detailed stats broken down but our users often gravitated towards pages with high level stats to get a “birds eye view” and only a minority of our users leveraged our reporting tools to dive into information. This informed us that while users say they want more detail, in reality they just needed high level numbers to make decisions. The increase in usage helped validate this hypothesis
An idea doesn’t always finish how it starts. Home originally started as a way to show only key metrics for sales teams, but evolved into something all business owners could leverage