Behind the Feature: Why We Built our Service Library like a Shopping Experience at Wethos
Behind the feature written by: Kristin Hodgkinson (Lead Product Manager @ Wethos)
Understanding the Problem: Building proposals is time-consuming, risky, and takes away from doing the actual work.
Early on in my career, I worked in account and project management at various advertising agencies. I experienced first-hand how time-consuming defining and building a proposal can be. Once you’re past the first hurdle of aligning with the client on the work needed to achieve the goal at hand, you’re tasked with making sure you include what’s necessary to ensure clarity in what you’ll deliver and what you expect to be compensated for it.
“Am I charging enough for the work?”
“Am I accurately describing what will be delivered to avoid pushback down the road?”
“Am I forgetting anything that I could be charging for?”
Project after project, these questions would be on a loop in my brain as I worked to build out a proposal. From the user research I conduct now as a product manager, I know this pain point persists. And, we know that the time spent agonizing over building out the ‘perfect proposal’ takes away from doing the actual work.
Understanding this pain first hand is what pushed us to create a solution that not only took the guesswork out of the process but also ensured it’s a streamlined, delightful experience. And to do that, we took a look at the e-commerce experience.
The E-Commerce Influence
Example from Shopify
E-commerce has long been a trailblazer in creating immersive and enjoyable online experiences. From personalized recommendations to interactive product visuals, e-commerce platforms have set a high standard for customer engagement. We realized that these trends had a lot to offer beyond shopping, and they could be applied to our product.
Discovery: The joy of discovering new products or content is a key part of shopping. We looked to emulate this through our Wethos libraries. Similar to an e-commerce site, we offer 1,000s of products in the form of scope, service and contract term templates. Users can easily browse via filters and search to find templates for services they currently offer, and inspiration for services they could be offering. You can access this library outside of a project when you’re just browsing, as well as from within when you have a proposal to build.
Feedback and Reviews: Shoppers rely on feedback and reviews from other customers to inform their purchases. Our libraries include templates and pricing that are 100% peer sourced. On a regular cadence, our team is reviewing adjustments to pricing to ensure we are providing industry averages, as well as reviewing new services created to add to our library.
Ease of Use: Online shopping platforms prioritize making the purchase process as simple as possible. One way they do this, is allowing you to favorite items you want to return to. We took this practice and applied it to our product by providing you with your own template library. As you’re browsing through the Wethos libraries, with just a click you can save templates to your own library. From there you can easily edit templates to best fit your business needs. And, just like you can access the Wethos library from within a project, you can also access your own for a super streamlined proposal process.
Conclusion: Work smarter with a delightful, streamlined proposal process.
We know that data-backed templates are perfect for providing a jumping-off point for what to include in a proposal, but what truly gives you an edge is tools that allow you to take that template and quickly personalize it to fit your business needs.
By borrowing from e-commerce philosophies, we created an intuitive and delightful experience that allows our users to build proposals with confidence and ease. A process that is easily customizable, repeatable, and truly puts the pitching process on wheels.
Read more “Behind the Feature” article from our team
✨ AI-Generated Proposals, The Future of Proposal Creation from Anay Gupta (Software Engineer) and Claire Humphreys (CPO)
⚖️ Balancing Optionality & Rigidity in Product Design from Noah Neustadt (Lead Product Designer)
🪢 Streamlining Operations with Embedded Proposals in Invoices from Gemma Horn (Director of Product Operations)