S N A G A J O B
Shifts
Redesigning a marketplace product that allows businesses request single shifts from hourly workers & allows those workers to pick them up.
Background
Snagajob as a company connected hourly workers to hourly work and operated like a jobs listing site. Unlike most job listings sites that you or I have looked at in the last few years, this one really serves a community that was left behind by the internet. Many of these workers still find their work through friends of friends, newspaper ads and tear-aways in coffee shops.
To tap into the “gig economy” an internal product lab was spun up to test a shift based idea where these individual workers (hired by Snagajob) could pick up single shifts at different businesses.
My role
I came into the project after some preliminary prototypes had been made by the external lab team. The project was brought back in house to focus on scalability & growth. I first looked at overhauling the employer facing side of the product, which had the most room for improvement compared to it’s worker-facing counterpart.
Kick off & Discovery
To start, the first thing my product manager and I did was build out an opportunity tree to see where there was room for improvement from all of our stakeholders. Right off the bat, we knew our operations and sales teams were white gloving a lot of the processes and for scalability, and we knew it would be crucial to pull some of the weight off those teams. We also wanted to explore combining “snag work” with other existing Snagajob products.
Requesting a shift
Requesting a shift was the primary action of all our employers. Pre me joining the team, when research was first done, employers mentioned wanting to select multiple workers over multiple dates. For example Kimmy’s ice cream shop would want three people extra people every Saturday and Sunday, so the shift flow was built where date and time were selected on two seperate screens, on paper making this easier for Kimmy. In practice though, what Kimmy said and what Kimmy did were two different things. I heard clearly in research employers expected date and time to be paired together– on one screen. When I rebuilt this form, I focused on condensing it so date and time were the first things selected.