Today’s episode of Next Gen Builders is all about trust. In a conversation that goes far beyond the surface of product design, Francois invites Alexis Baird, Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack, to explore the intricacies of creating digital products that not only meet but exceed the expectations of modern users—users who demand both convenience and authenticity.
Today’s episode of Next Gen Builders is all about trust. In a conversation that goes far beyond the surface of product design, Francois invites Alexis Baird, Head of Product Experience at Thumbtack, to explore the intricacies of creating digital products that not only meet but exceed the expectations of modern users—users who demand both convenience and authenticity.
Thumbtack is a digital marketplace where homeowners can match with skilled professionals to confidently and easily accomplish their honey-do lists. Alexis shares how the company prioritizes building trust by creating a holistic home maintenance platform, detailing that trust is earned by genuinely caring for user needs, even when it doesn’t immediately benefit the business. This approach has helped Thumbtack extend beyond just connecting users with professionals to supporting them as they tackle home tasks on their own.
Alexis highlights the importance of a beginner’s mindset and continuous learning in product management. Her liberal arts background enables her to synthesize diverse inputs and approach problems with fresh perspectives. For product managers, fostering seamless user experiences and empowering both homeowners and pros is crucial for long-term success and operational efficiency.
Finally, Alexis touches on leadership and team management, emphasizing the importance of personalized coaching and recognition. She believes in adapting management styles to individual team members' needs to create a positive work environment. By focusing on empathy and growth, product managers can build innovative products that truly meet user needs while fostering a thriving team culture.
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Guest Bio
Alexis has been working on products for the past 16 years, looking at the world through her customer's eyes, to build features that make a real impact for them. She is currently leading the experience teams at Thumbtack.
Before her current role, she spent almost three years at Lyft, leading the teams building the rider experience and later, Lyft Healthcare which included their concierge products.
She has also worked as a Senior and Group Product Manager at LinkedIn. She worked on the Talent Solutions, Content, Slideshare as well as LinkedIn Profiles and data product teams. Her first product position was as a PM for the Captions Metrics team at Microsoft Bing.
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Guest Quote
“We wanted to create a really holistic, all-in-one place that homeowners could go to care for their home, regardless of whether they decide to use a Thumbtack Pro or not. Maybe it doesn't directly serve our business, but we believe this is the right experience to create for customers. And ultimately that creates the right trust, that right long term relationship with customers.” – Alexis Baird
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Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:52 What is Thumbtack?
02:53 The unique path that led Alexis to Product
04:48 Having a learner's mindset
07:35 Serving the specific needs of each side of the business
11:21 Why home maintenance can feel so daunting
13:35 Building trust with your users digitally and physically
16:57 How Thumbtack superpowers local business
21:36 Measuring success
27:20 Alexis' Oh Shit Moment
32:31 Investing back in your employees
35:48 Alexis' most recent home project
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Links
0:00:00.0 Alexis Baird: I once heard trust described as, it's not just the consistency of showing that you have someone else's interests at heart. It's also about showing that you have those interests at heart, even when it might run counter to your own. When we created this new version of the app, we wanted to create a really holistic all in one place that homeowners could go to care for their home, regardless of whether they decide to use a Thumbtack Pro or not. Maybe it doesn't directly serve our business, but we believe like this is the right experience to create for customers. And ultimately that creates the right trust. That right long-term relationship with customers.
0:00:46.2 Francois Ajenstat: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. Today we're talking about building digital products that also have a physical experience. Some of us might remember calling a taxi on a wired phone or using the Yellow Pages to blindly find a plumber. It was exhausting. Well, it's a different world now. It started with tech companies disrupting physical products. Interestingly now, every company and product needs a digital element. People expect a frictionless and seamless experience between the two. But how do you build and balance both then? Well, someone especially suited to speak to this topic is Alexis Baird, head of Product Experience at Thumbtack. Welcome to the podcast, Alexis.
0:01:43.8 Alexis Baird: Awesome. And thank you so much for having me, Francois.
0:01:46.4 Francois Ajenstat: Well, we're so glad to have you here. Maybe we can start, explain to us what is Thumbtack?
0:01:54.0 Alexis Baird: So, Thumbtack helps homeowners care for their home and connects them with local service pros. So think like plumbers, electricians, in order to complete home projects. And the core experience, and Thumbtack has really been about hiring a pro where my teams are focused on building kind of that next generation of customer and pro experiences. So, on the customer side, it's about helping customers proactively care for their home, kind of through personalized guidance and planning tools. And then for pros, it's about obviously first connecting them with customers who are looking for their expertise and then really help them get more value from those existing homeowners by ensuring that customers can seamlessly reengage with their favorite pros, whether it's re-booking them or referring them to friends and family.
0:02:43.4 Francois Ajenstat: You know, a few of our guests have had unconventional backgrounds for product roles. Tell us about yours. It's kind of unique.
0:02:51.0 Alexis Baird: I love this question. So, when I first started in product management, I think this has changed over the years, but when I first started there was sort of a classic path to product management and it looked something like a, you did your undergrad degree in computer science, you did some kind of consulting like a McKinsey or a Bain or something. And then you went and got your MBA and then you became a product manager. And that was very much not my path. I was a liberal arts major at a small school called Bryn Mawr College in outside of Philadelphia, I kind of dabbled around before finally settling on majoring in linguistics for my undergrad degree. I didn't know what I wanted to do with that. So, I spent actually a year in Vietnam after that trying my hand at teaching English where I discovered I didn't have the gift of teaching.
0:03:45.5 Alexis Baird: And so, I went back to school to get a degree in computer science to try to merge that and study computational linguistics. So, I kind of fell into product management. My first job out of grad school, we just didn't have a lot of product managers in the office. And I was sort of approached by that one product manager and asked if I wanted to do this, and I said yes, not really knowing what that would entail. And then that, you know, that is kind of has how I ended up there. But over the years I really, I love kind of hearing about those origin stories 'cause I think there are some really interesting ways to sort of find yourself in product management.
0:04:25.6 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, for sure. And you've got like that perfect combination of art and science, which need to come together to build amazing things.
0:04:31.4 Alexis Baird: I certainly think so. I think that that liberal arts kind of really helps me in my job on a daily basis.
0:04:38.9 Francois Ajenstat: Can you say more about that? Like how does that liberal arts education, the way of thinking makes you see the world in a different way maybe today?
0:04:47.1 Alexis Baird: Yeah, lots of different ways. So I think fundamentally at least my experience with liberal arts was that you learned how to kind of learn, if that makes sense. And whether it was evolutionary biology, whether it was like Afro-Latino literature just kind of to approach with that learning mentality. And then from that, all those different inputs synthesize sort of a point of view and a path forward. And that is very much product management, right? You have to take in all these different inputs, everything from marketing insights, business needs, your user needs. What are your different users saying? What is that, you know, sort of classic qual and quant? What is the data saying? What are kind of, you know, some of those more qualitative insights? You have to understand the technical constraints, the design constraints, all of those together. And then be able to synthesize those into an experience that ultimately is going to be really impactful. And that kind of, that core talent, I guess, or skill, skill for a better way of putting it I think is something that again, at least in my experience, I really got from my liberal arts background.
0:06:03.5 Francois Ajenstat: You know, we talk a lot about the idea of the beginner's mind and you just kinda described this, the learning mindset. You know, here you're learning technology, you're learning product management, a skill, but you also have to learn a new domain. Like when we're gonna talk about Thumbtack and the physical world, there's a lot in there that you have to go and have empathy, but also learn kind of how do you serve them better. Do you apply that in how you engage with customers or how build good products?
0:06:33.3 Alexis Baird: Yeah, absolutely. At Thumbtack, we are helping homeowners care for their home. We are connecting them to home service professionals or what we call pros. And we're helping those pros grow their business. And that means that we have to kind of serve both the needs of those customers and the needs of the pros. We have to bring those together in a digital experience. So, whether it's the app or on the web on both sides. And then there's a bunch of things that are gonna happen in the real world between those pros and those customers. And I felt this when I worked at Lyft. I still feel it when I am working at Thumbtack. It is both really challenging but also really exciting to kind of have to think through those different challenges to know that as a product experience, you aren't going to be there for the whole kind of experience for the customer and the pro.
0:07:29.5 Alexis Baird: And so, how do you kind of equip each party with the tools to really be successful at what they're trying to do? So for us at Thumbtack, we spend a lot of time talking to our customers and our pros. We also, on the product side, we rely a lot on what we call our frontline teams. So, sales and support who are kind of talking regularly to those users to understand what are their core needs, what are they trying to solve for, what are the pain points that they're facing? Where's the experience falling short? And then I think this is an interesting piece that a lot of product managers don't necessarily gravitate towards, but we've seen a lot of value in being able to merge sort of the operational side. So, equipping our support teams with like the right tools to then be able to kind of supplement the product experience to ensure that we're really serving both our customers and our pros as well as we possibly can.
0:08:25.7 Francois Ajenstat: So, it's interesting because you've got a multitude of customer experiences. You've got the customer experience of the pro, you've got the customer experience of the consumer of your teams in between, yet you also don't have the full customer experience because what happens in the field is maybe outside the digital product is also a core part of the experience. How do you stitch them all together and like, how do you even prioritize across all three? Is like one more important than the other? How do you make that trade off?
0:08:56.4 Alexis Baird: Well, it really starts with what is the problem that we're trying to solve for our users. And so, for our customers, our homeowners owning a home is really overwhelming and it's filled with a lot of uncertainty about kind of, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing too much? Am I doing too little? How do I get this thing done? Is this a good price? What am I supposed to ask the pro? How do I ensure that they're actually gonna kind of do the job that I need them to do? How do I convey what I need them to do? So, there's a lot of aspects of homeownership that is really, really challenging. And so, we are attempting to look at that entire journey. Where are the biggest pain points, the biggest places where we can add value to make that really seamless?
0:09:43.6 Alexis Baird: And that was kind of the genesis of this big launch that we recently did last spring. It was the biggest product launch that we have done in the company's history. And we took the experience from being able to just find a pro and book a pro to all of kind of the experiences that happen before and after that around caring for your home. So, personalized guidance on understanding what customers need to do or what homeowners need to do, when they need to do it, how they can get it done. Tools around planning to ensure that they can kind of stay on top of of those different tasks that they've decided they wanted to prioritize. Obviously connecting to our broader booking experience to ensure that they can book those home service professionals that will help them with those tasks. And then finally tools around re-engaging or like re-booking, referring their favorite pros that they've worked with in the past. And so, that was kind of the genesis we began with that what are those needs? How are we uniquely going to solve them? And that's kind of how we prioritized from there.
0:10:49.0 Francois Ajenstat: That's great. And I remember when we were talking earlier, you were describing that fear, like of fear of not knowing how to maintain your home, like how...
0:10:58.2 Alexis Baird: Yes, yes.
0:11:00.9 Francois Ajenstat: Not knowing whether you should be an expert at the domain or not. And...
0:11:03.5 Alexis Baird: Yes, yes.
0:11:05.4 Francois Ajenstat: You know, [chuckle] making that first call. Can you like tell us a little bit more about that story?
0:11:10.5 Alexis Baird: Yeah. Well, this one's deeply personal for me. I became a homeowner for the first time about three years ago. And we hear this echoed from our homeowners as well. This idea that your home for most people is your largest financial asset, and yet the shirt that you are wearing has more how to care for it instructions than your home comes with. And that certainly has resonated for me as a homeowner. And the sort of the emotion that we hear from people is this like uncertainty this, some people even describe it as feeling silly, where, you know, I feel like I should know these things, but I don't. And increasingly we're kind of seeing with sort of the millennial generation, certainly again, kind of a stereotype in comparison to boomers who were much more kind of willing to DIY or like more handy sort of these newer, more digital generations are thinking about, I mean, the rest of their lives, right?
0:12:09.7 Alexis Baird: And so, I had this experience recently where I thought like, God, I really should know how to clean my garbage disposal. And I actually don't know how to do that. And you know, what do I do? I of course I, you know, turn to the internet. And what we found is obviously the internet has a wealth of information, but oftentimes it's one-size-fits-all. And you get like, also you get kind of random advice on the internet, right? And again, so what we set out to create was something that was tailored to your home and your needs and your goals for your home to kind of help you understand how do you not feel so uncertain and see with again, what is probably your largest financial asset and obviously the place where you spend a significant portion of your time. Did that touch on that one.
0:13:00.3 Francois Ajenstat: It does, but it also kind of hits me personally too, 'cause I'm not handy and I have tried to follow some of the internet guides yet I personally feel like scared sometimes to say, who do I call? Who do I trust?
0:13:15.4 Alexis Baird: Yes. Yes.
0:13:15.9 Francois Ajenstat: And how do I know that I don't get, I don't wanna say ripped off, but you know, bad advice from people I don't know. So...
0:13:24.1 Alexis Baird: Yeah, absolutely.
0:13:25.8 Francois Ajenstat: So how do you build that trust, right? Like as a digital property, yet you have a physical presence. How does trust build?
0:13:33.1 Alexis Baird: Yeah. I once heard trust described as it's not just the consistency of showing that you have someone else's interests at heart. It's also about showing that you have those interests at heart, even when it might run counter to your own. And I think that that was like a really interesting piece. So, we for over a decade now, Thumbtack has been a home services platform, and we have, again, connected customers who are looking for home service professionals to home service professionals. When we created this new version of the app, again, our goal here was to create a platform or an app that homeowners could use to care for their home. Now part of caring for your home is doing some tasks yourself. And so, we wanted to create a really holistic all in one place that homeowners could go to care for their home, regardless of whether they decide to use a Thumbtack Pro or not. And so we have functionality where customers can add tasks that they're gonna do themselves. They can also track tasks that they have a known Thumbtack pro for. But again, it all kind of came back to what is the homeowner's needs? How do we serve those needs? Even when sometimes in the short term, maybe it doesn't directly serve our business, but we believe like this is the right experience to create for customers, and ultimately that creates the right trust. That right long-term relationship with customers.
0:15:06.8 Francois Ajenstat: That's awesome. Please tell me that there's not a honey do list for my wife to tell, put all the tasks that I'm behind of.
0:15:14.7 Alexis Baird: It's funny. We actually have discussed this a lot internally. There's a big divide between people internally who really want this feature and people who really don't want this feature. So yes, I... Stay tuned.
[laughter]
0:15:31.0 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I actually think, [laughter] as bad as it feels, 'cause the list keeps growing it's actually an interesting lead gen opportunity if you really think about it.
0:15:39.4 Alexis Baird: Absolutely.
0:15:40.8 Francois Ajenstat: 'Cause then you're expressing what needs to happen and how do you motivate people like me to actually get it done.
0:15:46.0 Alexis Baird: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really key to sort of how do we help the customer sort of first generate that list, obviously, but then we wanna ensure that we can help them get it done. And I think that's a key piece of it as well. So, not just create a way for your significant other to sort of nag you about the things you're behind on.
0:16:09.5 Francois Ajenstat: I think it'll happen regardless. [laughter] And that's a great thing.
[laughter]
0:16:12.9 Alexis Baird: Touché. Touché. Touché.
[laughter]
0:16:16.6 Francois Ajenstat: So, we talked a lot about the consumer side, you know, that end user experience, but you've got an interesting aspect with your marketplace where the professional. I mean, you talk about the pro and sometimes you think of the pro in terms of sophistication, but here are the professionals at their craft, not necessarily at technology. I guess how do you design it in a way that they want to use the technology and they're able to spend more time doing what they're skilled for, right? Which is solving whatever problem there is than having to deal with all of this technology overhead.
0:16:54.2 Alexis Baird: Absolutely. I love that question. So, when you talk to our pros or I'm sure even if you were to kind of ask a home service professional in your life for most of them, they did not get into the line of business that they're in so that they could do sales pitches and try to track down new customers or try to chase people down for their availability and schedule the next task. They got into it because they enjoy and are good at the craft, and that's what they wanna focus on, whether it's plumbing, whether it's painting, whether it's floor work, whatever it is. And so, we again, I think view our job as how do we ensure that we can take some of that work off their plate to help them continue to grow their business, ideally even grow their business more effectively, of course, than they would be able to, and so that they can go back to focusing on that craft.
0:17:53.2 Alexis Baird: And so, I think there's several pieces to that. The first, when you talk to pros, getting a customer who perhaps is not like fully educated about what they wanna do, when they wanna do it, how they wanna do it. And so again, that was some of the pieces of the customer launch that we did earlier was about really educating customers, giving them that guidance. So that pros didn't have to do that. Pros didn't have to spend their time saying, well, you don't need to do this, or you do need to do this, or this is how much it's roughly gonna cost, et cetera. So we really wanna get customers into a place where then when we hand them off to pros, it's a high quality customer for the pros. The other piece that we've seen is that around kind of scheduling and some of these like vetting the customer to make sure that the customer is actually looking for something that the pro can do. And so, that's where Thumbtack's matching experience comes into play. And this is an area that we've invested a lot into and will continue to invest in the future. But yeah, the dream here is not that it's like 1992 where you're going back and forth on the phone and the pro kind of finally gets to the point where they're like, I don't even do jobs like that. That's a really frustrating experience. This is more...
0:19:09.1 Alexis Baird: We wanna create that, you know, 2024 experience where it's really seamless for both customers and pros so they can go back to enjoying the things that they love.
0:19:18.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's awesome. Can we go back to some 1992 music though? 'Cause some really good bands back then.
0:19:23.9 Alexis Baird: I'm with you, I'm with you, yeah. [laughter] That part is good.
[laughter]
0:19:28.8 Francois Ajenstat: You know, your story resonates a lot 'cause I think of myself as a builder and when I think about building, I'm thinking of two things. One is, how do I remove problems that customers have so they can do their jobs better? Whatever their job is. The ultimate goal is not use technology, is spend more time doing the thing you're supposed to do and the technology should facilitate that. And that applies everywhere. At the same time, there's also the building for like higher impact.
0:20:00.8 Francois Ajenstat: Like how can you be more successful at your job by giving you better tools, et cetera. Kind of feels like you guys are tackling both of them. It's remove the stuff they don't like to do 'cause it's not core...
0:20:10.2 Alexis Baird: Exactly.
0:20:11.4 Francois Ajenstat: Yet at the same time enable them to be more effective at spending the time on the right stuff.
0:20:17.2 Alexis Baird: Absolutely, yeah. And we see that on both the sort of customer, homeowner side and the pro side as well. So, our homeowners talk a lot about, I wanna go back to living the rest of my life. I don't wanna be kind of constantly worrying about like, I got to take care of this, I got to take care of that. And so, removing some of that friction for them. Well, at the same time, we don't want them just kind of status quo, like continuing to do what they were doing before, maybe with like a little less time.
0:20:48.4 Alexis Baird: We want them to walk away feeling much more confident that they're on top of caring for their home. And it, you know, I say it feels good to feel like you're being proactive, especially on something that again, it's your largest financial asset that you spending all this time in, that your family spends all this time in. And so yeah, absolutely that resonates for the customer experience we've created. And then as I mentioned on the pro side as well, we wanna make it easier for them to grow their business and we want them to be able to grow their business significantly more than obviously if they had tried to do that on their own.
0:21:24.4 Francois Ajenstat: Right. Along those lines, how do you think of success? Like what does success look like in your environment?
0:21:35.4 Alexis Baird: I think there's a bunch of ways to kind of answer that. One is just kind of, what are we trying to accomplish for our users, right? And in the case of homeowners, we're trying to ensure that they can care for their home with confidence. And on the pro side, we want them to be able to seamlessly grow their business. And so I think starting from that place, if we do that well, what is sort of the, almost the metric or sort of expression of that. And so, we talk about ultimately that is about being able to get jobs done seamlessly, right?
0:22:15.3 Alexis Baird: For both the customer and pro side. And I think we're very lucky in that in general as a marketplace, if we sort of serve the customer well, we're also serving the pro well. So, I say if we help customers care for their home with more confidence in general, obviously there's always some edge cases, but in general, that means more jobs for our pros. It means more sort of educated and informed customers for our pros, which we know is something our pros really want. And then from the sort of thumbtack or business perspective, our business like incentives are very aligned with that as well, which I think is really, really important to ensure that you have all three of those things are in good alignment.
0:22:56.0 Francois Ajenstat: In this kind of business where it's a marketplace, right? How do you know you're heading in the right direction? And it kind of made me think of, you were at Lyft, you're at Thumbtack, there's a flywheel that happens where the more demand will create more supply, the more supply will create, like it is a flywheel.
0:23:17.9 Alexis Baird: Yes.
0:23:18.9 Francois Ajenstat: Is there a formula or an approach that you've seen that that flywheel actually accelerates itself?
0:23:24.9 Alexis Baird: I would say, I think a lot about almost that coming back to that incentive piece and asking yourself if I have been really successful and it's funny, you mentioned like success. My immediate thought was this sort of intangible, like we create peace of mind for both our customers and our pros. But what does that look like?
0:23:46.5 Alexis Baird: And then ask yourself if that feels very aligned and those incentives are very aligned between the two sides of your marketplace, then you've hit on what can be a flywheel, right? So, if you're creating value on both sides and that's feeding each other, then that's where you get that beautiful flywheel. But without that, yes, [laughter] it's much, much harder to kind of build these sustainable marketplaces.
0:24:11.3 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. Sometimes I find people are you know, think, talk a lot about OKRs or success metrics and agonize to align everybody there. What I find kind of interesting here is in a way, in this case as a consumer, I might use a service and I actually don't wanna call it back because my job is done. And so, how do you actually get people to wanna do more jobs and expand the possibilities? So I don't know how much repeat business is important versus its reviews, size of business.
0:24:46.7 Alexis Baird: Yeah. Well, in our case, I think we're really lucky because we're not a single marketplace. So, we're not a marketplace where you can find plumbers and that's it. We are a marketplace where you can find all kinds of home service professionals. And so, our strategy is really built on create a really valuable first time experience. So, in that moment when a homeowner says, "Oh my God, my sink is broken, I don't know any plumbers, I need to find a plumber," they come to Thumbtack, they have an amazing hire experience with a really great plumber.
0:25:23.4 Alexis Baird: Then they think, great, that was actually really, really helpful. And they sort of open the Thumbtack app and say, how do I feel like I'm more on top of kind of caring for my homes that I don't find myself in this place where my sink is broken and I'm scrambling to find a plumber. And then they sort of step through that experience so that then when the time comes for them to say, actually, oh, I just learned I really need to clean my gutters so that I don't get mold in my roof. Well, guess what? We have like gutter cleaning pros. So I think that's where Thumbtack is in some ways unique compared to, I know I've never worked at a dating platform, but I've heard this is sort of like the chronic issue, right, with like dating marketplaces.
0:26:08.9 Alexis Baird: If you sort of do your job well, your users disappear. Whereas Thumbtack has the luxury of, we have all of these different home service categories. And again, so, if we do really well kind of on that first initial project, then we're looking to kind of create a longer term relationship with the customer.
0:26:25.6 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, moral of the story is a home is a lot of work and how do you get peace of mind, so you don't have to worry about the amount of work that needs to happen.
0:26:32.1 Alexis Baird: Yes, yes, exactly. So, you can go back to enjoying your home. Yeah, not worrying about it.
[laughter]
0:26:40.0 Francois Ajenstat: Exactly. Spend more time doing life than worrying.
0:26:44.2 Alexis Baird: Yes, exactly. It's a great life motto.
0:26:50.0 Francois Ajenstat: Talking about mottos and building, one of the things I find always interesting to hear about when you talk to builders is, talking about their oh shit moment. That moment when you're building something and something unexpected happens. Could be good, could be bad. Do you have one of those like standout oh shit moments?
[laughter]
0:27:14.4 Alexis Baird: So many, yes. I, When you said oh shit moment, my first thought was, and this has happened to me throughout my career at every company I've been at, but that moment when you've launched something new or you have a new experiment and you get back the results and the results are amazing. And they're, some would say too good to be true. And I would say nine times out of 10, in my experience, they are too good to be true and there's a data quality issue. So, I think that data quality issue moment is definitely an oh shit moment. I would say what I sort of over the years have taken from that is obviously the, when they're too good to be true, they're often too good to be true.
0:28:03.1 Alexis Baird: But I think it's really easy to get wrapped up in the story when you see those positive numbers because you believe in the strategy, right? And I think being able to kinda pair what you're seeing in the numbers with that broader intuition is really, really important to being able to balance those two things. I also think it requires a certain degree of cognitive dissonance. So, on one hand, as a product leader, you believe in the strategy and I think it's important to kind of have that confidence as kind of a leader on the team or broader teams. But at the same time, you need to always be open to those new signals coming in to sort of ask yourself, do I need to reevaluate this? And so, yeah, that one has bitten me many times.
0:28:56.6 Francois Ajenstat: So part of what I hear in that is that you kinda have to question everything. Don't just assume that everything is there, like really dive deep into the details and get to the truth. And even if the truth isn't quite right, try to understand what went wrong and what you would do differently. I guess, if you're in a situation like this one, and sometimes people are confronted with one of these oh shit moments and they just don't know what to do, they feel sometimes can be paralyzing when a crisis emerges or, crisis can be again, positive or negative, but it happens and people are like, oh my God, I am stuck. What do you do? How do you help people kind of overcome that the fear of that failure or the fear of the over success and give them a path towards resolution?
0:29:55.4 Alexis Baird: Yeah, it's funny as I was thinking through this, I was also thinking about, I've learned I think a lot from some of the leaders that I've worked with in the past and of our current CEO, Marco is actually really, really excels at this. And I would kind of encapsulate that as be forward looking. You can't kind of dwell on the past too much.
0:30:20.1 Alexis Baird: And so instead, and I've seen him do this multiple times, it's something I really respect 'cause I think it's very easy in a crisis moment to kind of react with strong emotions, right? You get angry, you get really upset. I think we can all think of horror stories of like execs throwing chairs or like freaking out. But I think it's really important to kind of step back, just acknowledge like, okay, we're here. What did we learn from this that we can apply going forward? And Thumbtack actually has a culture around, the shorthand we use is CBBs, could be betters, but it's really about reflecting on maybe things that didn't go that well, but pulling out what are the learnings from them? What can we take from this to actually make things better in the future? And again, it's a practice that I've tried to implement with my teams, it's something I've tried to do for myself. And I think it does help.
0:31:21.7 Alexis Baird: I mean, again, the sting of the oh shit data quality moment isn't gonna completely go away, but it's if ultimately you can take that and kind of apply the learnings going forward, I think it's ultimately more of a positive than it might seem in the initial.
0:31:40.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I like that you guys have a very strong learning mindset and continuously be learning and growing and developing people. You mentioned to me a program that you guys are running in terms of coaching individuals and helping them think in a different way. Tell us about how you're approaching that people leadership side.
0:32:03.8 Alexis Baird: Yeah, enough, Thumbtack has a program where you can work with an external coach, worked with a really wonderful, very talented external coach named John Childers. And he really helps me kind of see things in I think a different life for my own kind of leadership style. And it sounds a little cliche 'cause people talk a lot about the platinum rule, but I something I've had to kind of learn and relearn over and over again.
0:32:37.9 Alexis Baird: And he kind of helped me see an interesting pattern where for me personally, I gravitate towards a certain style of recognition or lack thereof. When I kind of reflect back on professors, coaches, piano teachers that I really resonated with, they were always sort of a certain personality type that maybe I could describe as sort of that old world. They didn't give compliments easily and were very kind of forward in what they wanted to see in terms of their feedback. At the same time, he also helped me see, I'm very extroverted, like kind of a people person. And so, I was applying kind of the style that worked for me to my team, my peers. And he pointed out that that can be really hard for people. And so, he prompted me to kind of reflect on what are the different ways in which people wanna be coached or recognized. So some people want public recognition. Some people sort of receive that or want like more of my time is a way of recognizing their performance.
0:33:54.8 Alexis Baird: And it's something that, ironically, I've also applied this to my parenting, that it can be really powerful to reinforce for someone when they're doing something well, in addition to perhaps when they're doing something not so great that you need them to do differently, but in many ways that sort of positive reinforcement can be really, really powerful. And so it's something that I've tried to be really conscious of going forward in kind of my leadership style and the way I interact with, again, interact with my coworkers and my children.
0:34:30.6 Francois Ajenstat: I mean, I actually totally agree with that. I remember when I started managing people, I thought I should manage everybody the way that I like to be managed. And I had one style for everybody.
0:34:41.1 Alexis Baird: Yep.
0:34:42.2 Francois Ajenstat: And like my big aha moment was going through situational leadership and realizing that different people needed different things, depending on what kind of person they were, where they were, whether they needed more support, call it micromanagement, going to the details, to the superstars that need a different level of recognition, project, ambition. And you always have to balance that out when you're managing individuals.
0:35:10.8 Alexis Baird: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, that some people want to see that pay raise. Some people wanna see that promotion. Some people want more responsibility. Like, yeah, that can be very different depending on the person.
0:35:22.0 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, and you have to be able to adapt to the right situation.
0:35:25.0 Alexis Baird: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly.
0:35:29.4 Francois Ajenstat: I was thinking about the discussion and we talked a lot about what you do and what you build for other people, but I don't think that we heard about what your last home project was that you did. And how did that go?
0:35:44.6 Alexis Baird: So, my most recent project was one that, I'm actually mildly embarrassed that I put it off for as long as I did, but in, we have a bathroom fan that has been needing to be replaced for probably since we moved in three years ago. And again, speaking of the sort of silly homeowner feeling, not knowing what you don't know, I had this vague sort of like, I guess, yeah, bathrooms have fan, that's kind of important. And of course, this poor fan really, really needed to be replaced. [laughter]
0:36:24.3 Alexis Baird: Because if you don't have like a good working fan in your bathroom, mold and things like that collect much more quickly. So, I did finally knock that out a few weeks ago and happy to report that we have a much better fan in our bathroom. But yeah, again, it was that kind of, those tasks where my husband and I would go back and forth on like, I think we could probably do it ourselves. But at the end of the day, getting a professional to come in and knock it out, huge weight off my shoulders.
0:36:57.0 Francois Ajenstat: It's funny, I had the exact same problem. I called it the stinky towel problem. 'Cause no matter how much we cleaned it, it was just like, it just never smelled right. Turns out, it was the fan.
0:37:09.6 Alexis Baird: It's important. Yeah.
0:37:10.7 Francois Ajenstat: It wasn't actually clearing out the humidity.
0:37:12.6 Alexis Baird: Yeah, yeah, no, it's one of those things that again, like you think he would have gotten to this point in life and would have known already. But I think there's so many of those moments with homeowners that, yeah, you're like, I probably should have known that. But no one tells you.
0:37:28.8 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I think that's a perfect way of capping it off, 'cause there's always more to learn. There's more to learn about our homes.
0:37:35.4 Alexis Baird: Yes.
0:37:36.4 Francois Ajenstat: What you need to do and what you have yet to do. There's more to learn about...
0:37:38.5 Alexis Baird: Absolutely.
0:37:39.3 Francois Ajenstat: Building. There's more to learn about people.
0:37:43.9 Alexis Baird: Love it.
0:37:44.3 Francois Ajenstat: And there's more to learn just in general.
0:37:46.2 Alexis Baird: Yeah, love it. Okay.
0:37:48.0 Francois Ajenstat: And I think you've encapsulated that perfectly.
0:37:50.4 Alexis Baird: Great.
0:37:51.1 Francois Ajenstat: Well, Alexis, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders. Look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe.