Secrets to a Successful App Redesign with Alexis Baird, Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack – Masters of MAX ep. #26

Featuring Alexis Baird, Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack

This week’s episode of Masters of MAX features Tom Butta interviewing Alexis Baird, the Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack. Alexis shares her journey from linguistics and computer science to product management roles at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Lyft. At Thumbtack, she leads innovations that connect homeowners with home service professionals.

Today’s focus is all about redesigns. Alexis and the team at Thumbtack recently launched an extensive redesign to expand their offerings beyond hiring professionals to provide their users a single app for all of their home needs. 

Alexis underscores the critical need for a personalized, user-centric approach, explaining how Thumbtack tailored their app to meet individual homeowner goals and house-specific needs, integrating tools like personalized guides and educational tidbits to boost user engagement. She discusses how the dev team was given a sandbox environment with a small percentage of customers and without traditional revenue targets, allowing for bold experimentation and significant advancements in user experience without the pressure of immediate financial returns.

Listen to the full episode now, to learn how Thumbtack successfully executed a redesign. Alexis advises maintaining flexibility, refining hypotheses with careful analysis, and creating a cross-functional team encompassing design, engineering, marketing, and more. By aligning a long-term vision with short-term iterative goals, and ensuring continuous feedback loops, Thumbtack was able to deliver a significantly enhanced product that better serves their customers’ evolving needs.

Subscribe to “Masters of MAX: The Mobile App Experience Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, or Audible.

Make Connections:

• Connect with Alexis Baird on LinkedIn
• Connect with Tom Butta on LinkedIn