Dave Bottoms leads Upwork’s Marketplace organization, a world team accountable for the core Talent Marketplace, search and discovery, ads and monetization, core mobile experiences, in addition to latest product innovation and analytics.
Dave brings greater than 20 years of Silicon Valley experience to Upwork. He joined the corporate in 2022 from Meta, where he led the Ads Manager Platform and Experiences team, accountable for the flagship enterprise product utilized by hundreds of thousands of small businesses and global advertisers to drive invaluable business outcomes across Facebook and Instagram. Prior to Meta, Dave led the self-service customer growth team at Dropbox and multiple product teams at Yahoo!, including those for the Homepage, News, Sports, and other core media experiences.
Upwork began over 20 years ago by pioneering a greater way of working, helping businesses find more flexibility and connecting talent with more opportunities.
Upwork, a 20-year-old platform, is undergoing significant transformation under your leadership. What are the challenges and opportunities in driving innovation in such a well-established company?
It’s an exciting time to be at Upwork as we’re each driving a metamorphosis across our products and platform, in addition to leveraging AI tools to vary how we work and construct latest capabilities and workflows. In some ways, we’re a mature, public company who’s operated through various incarnations and adoption cycles, but the brand new age of advanced machine learning and generative AI has been an incredible boon to innovation and product solutions we’re in a position to deliver to our customers.
As with all major technological shift and particularly during this era of AI expansion, challenges and opportunities emerge as latest capabilities are born. At Upwork, we see AI as a force-multiplier for our platform and for the talented professionals who use it not only to enhance work for clients – whether that’s coding, marketing, research or design – but in addition in getting began on that work faster. It’s also an accelerant for the companies on our marketplace which might be finding talent to drive to their true business outcomes more quickly.
One challenge is ensuring that the combination of AI into our products addresses real and substantial customer problems. We’re not only constructing or adding latest features for the sake of providing something “latest,” but truly leveraging the facility of assorted AI models to drive increased efficiency and solutions for the freelancers and businesses that use our platform on a regular basis. Fortunately, we’re in an advantageous position to drive these outcomes with AI tools due to tremendous amount of high-quality signal –from real-time behavioral data to wealthy, historical data – that we have now amassed from a various range of specific work delivery that goes back a few years. We’re using this data to coach our custom large language models (LLMs), power lots of our latest product experiences, and deliver the very best work outcomes for our customers.
Along with your extensive experience at Meta, Dropbox and Yahoo, how has your approach to product management evolved? What lessons have you ever carried forward to your current role at Upwork?
My approach to product management has evolved to emphasise a balance between user-centric design and scalable innovation. There aren’t many places higher than Meta for learning the way to construct products at scale and for a various range of users – Facebook and Instagram have billions of energetic every day users! In my role leading product for the Ads Manager Platform and Experiences team, I learned the way to manage global, cross-functional teams constructing products that cater to each small and medium-sized businesses in addition to large global agencies supporting Fortune 100 enterprises.
Moreover, my experiences at Dropbox and Yahoo were crucial in helping me develop a deep understanding of product-led growth mechanics for SaaS solutions, in addition to content personalization and the way to balance “big bets” across a portfolio of consumer media products. Each roles required a holistic understanding of product strategy and development from latest product concept prototyping to launch and driving consumer adoption. I learned the way to ship products and manage the teams that built those products.
Now at Upwork, I get pleasure from drawing on the last 15-years of Product Management experience to guide and steer innovation at an organization that’s reshaping the long run of labor. Definitely, the most important challenge is how freelance talent and small to mid-sized corporations grapple with how best to embrace and adopt the AI technology wave.
Across my previous experiences, I’ve seen some seismic technological shifts just like the one we’re now seeing with AI –from the rise of social media to the shift to smartphones and the necessity for products to be mobile-first. While big technological shifts can mean big changes, at its core product development continues to be about doing one thing consistently well – solving customer problems. With the rise of AI, technological advancements are providing an enormous opportunity to reinvent Upwork products so that companies and talent work higher together and produce stronger results. We’re starting to comprehend some early wins with our recent release of Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI.
How do you balance making small, medium, and large bets in AI product development, especially given the rapid evolution of AI technologies? Could you share an example of how this strategy has been implemented at Upwork?
AI product development requires a strategic mix of experimentation, scalability, and long-term vision. One core framework that I take advantage of in product planning that has been helpful in developing AI products at Upwork is what I prefer to call a VC-approach to product development, where I’m balancing a wide-range of portfolio products. About 40% of what my team is working on is big rocks or big bets that may have a really large impact on the business, but in addition are larger risk items and take a substantial period of time. The remaining 60% is split in half on near term items that I even have high confidence the team will execute against the plan on, but likely won’t have a serious ROI for the business and the opposite 30% is product work that keeps the lights on like fixing bugs. AI at Upwork is a giant bet for us. It’s difficult from a development perspective requiring a high level of experience, but the advantages will be massive and so we’ve allocated a healthy portion of our product focus to this area of labor over the past 12 months.
We launched job post generator, which is now powered by Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, towards the tip of last 12 months for example of a “big bet” product that got here about through a means of experimentation from our in-house product incubation team, Upwork Labs, and scaled right into a viable solution. With the rise of generative AI last 12 months, the team explored a myriad ways to assist our customers reap the benefits of the chance the brand new technology presented. We knew that clients often encountered the obstacle of starting with a blank page when describing their work needs. As such, we set out to find out how we could use generative AI to beat this challenge. Last 12 months, we announced a serious expansion of our AI offerings including the launch of job post generator, which is an AI-powered generator of a job post that helps clients get a job post drafted in seconds.
How does Uma, Upwork’s Mindful AI, differentiate itself from other AI solutions available on the market, particularly by way of enhancing the hiring and matching process for businesses and freelancers?
AI models are only as powerful as the info that they’re trained on. Uma is built on top of industry-leading large language models (LLMs) and customised with Upwork platform data, and it’s this customization that differentiates it from other AI solutions in our industry. Today, Uma powers a variety of key experiences within the hiring and matching process which might be critical to clients and freelancers discovering one another, getting began, and completing more high-quality work. We’re in a position to enhance these work actions because we have now access to twenty+ years of information, trillions of tokens of specific and highly relevant data from our two-sided marketplace that encompass a big selection of labor interactions. Uma learns off these data points to function a relentless, intelligent companion for our customers, helping businesses and freelancers every step of the way in which across your complete Upwork experience.
With features like Best Match insights and Upwork Chat Pro, how is Uma specifically tailored to assist freelancers stand out and secure more projects? What feedback have you ever received from freelancers through the beta phase?
Powered by Uma, Best Match insights help businesses find the very best potential person for his or her job quickly by identifying relevant insights like top proposals, client reviews, and skill alignment with a job post. From the freelancer’s POV, it specifically highlights projects that closely align with a freelancer’s skills and preferences due to this fact increasing their probabilities of being noticed by potential clients and finding work that most closely fits their expertise. With Upwork Chat Pro, Upwork’s work companion powered by Uma, freelancers have a dedicated chat app that helps them solve difficult tasks, boost productivity, and do their best work.
We’re excited in regards to the progression of those key experiences and located that in early releases freelancers reported increased visibility and more targeted project matches, resulting in higher engagement and success on our platform. Just this past quarter, every day energetic users of Upwork Chat Pro grew 68% quarter-over-quarter, and we’re seeing freelance professionals beginning to land more work and earn more because of this.
How do you envision the long run of labor evolving over the subsequent decade, particularly with the combination of AI and emerging technologies?
It’s hard to not see a future, at the very least within the near term, where AI becomes increasingly embedded in our day-to-day work and lives. Businesses and professionals will proceed to include AI into their workflows and this may result in increased productivity. It’s vital to notice that humans remain an important component of this future. As AI increasingly handles routine tasks and provides invaluable insights on command, professionals will turn into faster, more efficient, and give you the chance to do more. Jobs and skills will naturally evolve, as they do in most technological shifts. While some jobs may change or fade, many others will emerge, compelling humans to adapt. We’re already seeing many traditional roles being transformed by automation, necessitating upskilling or reskilling, while latest opportunities are arising in areas that complement AI, similar to data annotation, curation, and AI security, to call a number of. Humans will increasingly give attention to tasks requiring emotional intelligence, creativity, critical pondering, and sophisticated problem-solving—areas where human ingenuity excels. With AI taking over routine tasks, we could have the latitude to tackle more intricate, strategic, and pressing challenges inside our organizations. It’s an exciting future and I’m proud to be at an organization that’s leaning in and leading on the forefront of its industry with regards to AI.
