Gumtree Pets Project
A company and squad-wide project that overhauled how multiple multi-disciplinary product / design / development squads could coordinate on a sweeping initiative at speed, while also utilising new user mindset research and quick fire insights to guide and align commercial targets and inform which features to build for a customer segment they had note effectively monetised yet.
WHAT WAS IT?
Gumtree is a peer-to-peer marketplace with several product / service areas including selling / rehoming Pets, a category in decline.
This project was initiated to tackle three main reasons the business identified to turn this category around:
1. Fixing search and categorisation - users couldn't find the types of animals they were looking for.
2. Changing the commercial model (e.g. addressing fees to list, creating business incentives for professional breeders to list on the platform).
3. Building trust with buyers / adopters between them and the breeders and trust in Gumtree as a marketplace that cares about pet welfare.
WHY WAS IT NEEDED?
This would be a proof of concept testing ground for larger platform changes and company commercial initiatives.
1. Fixing the search functionality and taxonomy, especially guided by user research around which attributes and categories users found most important or most natural to search by, would have profound benefits on how taxonomy was handled for search globally on the platform.
2. Discovering how to better engage and keep small business on the platform (e.g. pet breeders) would provide more stable revenue sources.
3. Trust with peer-to-peer platforms is paramount for traffic - by looking into ways to verify sellers and signpost a commitment to welfare and safety would have positive impacts for the rest of the marketplace categories.
Outcomes
It was a very successful proof of concept
The work produced 3 distinct tranches of output:
1. Knowledge, output and a tech playbook for how to add or adjust attributes into the taxonomy to aid in delivery better search results for buyers (more relevant ads) and better ad categorisation for sellers (making sure their ad shows up where buyers expect to find them). This laid important groundwork for larger, future taxonomy work.
2. How to integrate larger strategic research along with quicker turnaround user insights into a fast moving, complex project. This led to more effective, user-centric prioritisation of features which had immediate positive impacts on user engagement, sentiment and revenue.
3. Clear insights on how to approach a commercial package of features and benefits for smaller businesses trading on Gumtree.
Specific outcomes
• Uptick in revenue of 16% in paid placed pets ads within the first month. Lower the listing fee for pets, based off of extensive research with breeders (as they post most often in pets), along with listing improvements aided the uplift.
• Placing an ad for pets became more specific to the vertical. Feedback from pet sellers and breeders was much more positive.
• In launching of dog breeds within the taxonomy, all dog related ads had breeds attached to them by week 3 after launch. Breeds in the cats category launched soon after with similar results.
• Verifying breeders - by allowing cat and dog breeders to be verified, this opened the door to having more prominence in the search results and badging to help build trust with buyers / adopters.
MY ROLE IN THIS PROJECT
Director of Product Design and User Research +
+ Service Designer + de-facto Programme Manager
I had a lot of hats for this project. Gumtree hadn't had a project this big with this much crossover and knock-on-effects for multiple departments and customer journeys in quite while.
My role involved:
- Strategising with Senior Leadership, Product Management, Commercial and Legal on how to integrate research findings into product, messaging and marketing priorities while shaping new commercial and revenue expectations.
- Leading and collaborating on producing a Service Map
- Coordinating feature sequencing and new cross-team ceremonies and coms
- Directing investigative and evaluative research strategy
- Coordinating and directing design across iOS, Android and web
- Coordinating multi-disciplinary teams knowledge and asset sharing
- Cross-departmental relationship building
- Communicating and coordinating with Senior Leadership to track progress, insights and success against KPIs and other proposed metrics
Core team I led or collaborated with:
- All product designers
- All user researchers
- Customer service
- CRM + social marketing
- Product analysts
- B2C product management
- Tech delivery managers
- Development leads for web, app and database
Senior leadership-level collaborators:
- Director of Product
- Director of Engineering
- Commercial owners
- Legal / Trust and safety
GETTING STARTED
We had the broad objectives, but the key to success was to clarify the opportunities and insights in the Pets space specifically, while also identifying what could be carried across all listing categories.
We brainstormed with those in Product & Tech, Commercial, Customer Service and beyond to get all of the possibilities on the table.
Next came the evaluation of the research and insights we had already and new research we had commissioned just for Pets.
USER MINDSETS: Pet sellers and buyers
The User Research team had just finished a massive project I had assigned them around User Mindsets, something more flexible and expandable compared to our initial user personas. The focused mindsets around Pets helped everyone concentrate on the specific needs of Pets users, especially breeders advertising on the platform.
USER NEEDS POWERING FEATURE PRIORITY
User research with breeders / sellers / re-homers and prospective pet buyers / adopters prioritised what product and commercial picked up first.
Breeders / Sellers
- They needed tools to help their business seem more legit: verification badging, business page. They could not justify the high listing price if they were not trusted by buyers.
- Breeders were the start of Gumtree's strategy for engaging small business. These insights helped prioritised balancing short term revenue impacts with longer term small business engagement.
Buyers / Adopters
- Research teased out a ranking of information and attributes buyers needed to find and consider an appropriate pet on platform.
- This helped prioritised terms to be added to the Pets Ad Listing form and the search term taxonomy / categorisation.
Trust for both
- Trust came up as a big factor for both Sellers and Buyers, especially in pets.
- Gumtree need to instill trust as an ethical platform to deal in pets. This led to project areas devoted to breeder verification and PAAG (pet welfare org) messaging and signposting through all Pets related journeys.
BRINGING CUSTOMERS INSIDE
The mindsets helped prioritise which aspects of the taxonomy (aka "attributes") needed to be added or surface within the search functionality. But we needed to make sure the Breeders knew they needed to add these terms to their listing!
Breeders were the key
By focusing on smaller breeders, we could:
- Look at how to build trust in our pet sellers (giving more visual prominence and priority to breeders with certification)
- We could more easily normalise and enforce PAAG / pet welfare requirement pet listings
- We could look at a larger set of features and support to offer smaller businesses across multiple verticals to help separate them out as professionals actively trading on the platform vs occasional private sellers.
SERVICE DESIGN: Mapping out all of the touch points
A project this big requires mapping out all of the customer touchpoints and the related functions - we needed to know who owned what. The mapping helped to inform:
1
How the Seller focused squad needed to capture the new "attributes" data in the listing form and the timeline it needed to sit in the system before it showed up in search for Buyers
2
How the Customer Connections / Buyer-to-Seller Chat squad (that also handled profiles) was going to work with Trust and Safety to add welfare messaging throughout the experience.
3
Which internal product, tech and commercial teams would own the external breeder verification process and implementation.
4
How eCRM was going to work with Trust and Safety and the product Customer Connections team to provide welfare related reporting and support.
ROLLING IT OUT
The starting pistol fired and we were off to the races of design and implementation. Most of the heavy lifting for what got implemented within this timeframe happened on the development side of things. The prioritisation of which aspects to tackle that would show up in the user interface was heavily influenced by research findings and work done in conjunction with the design and trust and safety team.
Here are some samples of work that did get launched in the interface to help improve audience engagement and revenue impact (from sellers within Pets).
The Search / Buyer's search experience
The Sellers / Breeders ad listing experience (image carousel)
The Sellers / Breeders ad listing experience (image carousel)
