How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
Summary
Shipra Kayan, the former head of insights at Upwork, will present the origin story of Upwork's hugely successful and long-running VoC program. From the moment that triggered the formation of a VoC initiative, the ups, and downs of experimenting with its operating model, to why this program is still going strong 7 years after it was launched. She will field questions like "Who owns the VoC?", "What is its purpose?", and "Will we just create another presentation that won't have any real impact?" - 15 minutes Upwork VoC case study - 15 minutes for Q&A
Key Insights
-
•
Rapid company growth creates chaotic, conflicting user feedback that overwhelms product managers without a clear VOC process.
-
•
Crisis moments, like Upwork's NPS drop post-rebrand, can catalyze executive support to start formal VOC programs.
-
•
Aligning around a single, existing customer loyalty metric (NPS) helps maintain focus rather than fragmenting goals.
-
•
The key operational metric was the number of VOC-tagged product issues fixed, translating feedback into actionable roadmap items.
-
•
Manual note-taking and affinity mapping worked initially but required evolution to collaborative software and AI tools as scale grew.
-
•
UserVoice was adapted internally to aggregate and cluster customer issues before migrating to more automated idiomatic software.
-
•
Monthly prioritization meetings with cross-functional stakeholders and frequent product leadership syncs ensured transparency and action.
-
•
VOC ownership was best handled as a coalition with a facilitator rather than a single owner to avoid silos or turf wars.
-
•
VOC findings expanded impact beyond product to pricing and legal policy changes, showing broader organizational influence.
-
•
Attempting to change company culture too quickly or solo is less effective than focusing on incremental, visible customer-driven product improvements.
Notable Quotes
"Going from 100 to 200 people, suddenly product managers started hearing from a dozen people a week with conflicting requests."
"I tried to do everything all by myself at first and it didn’t catch on because no one else knew I was doing it."
"The rebrand caused our NPS to plummet and freaked out our executives — that was the trigger to get serious."
"We stuck with NPS because it was a pure metric with a long history we could trend, instead of muddying things with loyalty or revenue."
"Our one metric that mattered was maximizing the number of VOС-tagged tickets solved – showing customer feedback made it to the roadmap."
"We moved from Evernote to spreadsheets, to a giant affinity board in Mirror, then to UserVoice, and finally to idiomatic software with AI."
"We had to push through analysis paralysis and trust our guts as customer-facing teams that knew the business."
"Ownership of VOC is a hot potato, so we built a coalition with a facilitator to keep it collaborative and effective."
"VOC wasn’t a replacement for user research, but an enhancer that captured nuggets researchers might miss during discovery."
"I spent too much time trying to change company culture and should have focused more on just getting things done."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Inviting other teams into research sessions lets us triangulate findings by combining interviews, observations, and focus groups."
Joanna Vodopivec Prabhas PokharelOne Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority
March 9, 2022
"The language is like an entirely different lexicon, and sometimes the same acronyms mean different things."
Louis Rosenfeld Lashanda Hodge Senongo Akpem Chris HodowanecBecoming a Civic Designer: Making the Move from Private to Public Sector
November 17, 2022
"We are closing out design ops 2024 with innovation curated by the incomparable John Kuda."
Bria AlexanderDay 3 Welcome
September 25, 2024
"Yesterday we touched upon topics like chatDBT, chatbots, trust, intentionality, agency, and even alien interns."
Uday Gajendar Louis RosenfeldDay 2 Welcome
June 5, 2024
"Consistency is so important that sometimes even consistency in failure works if it means I only have to learn the workaround once."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
June 7, 2023
"Internal projects give new hires a safe place to learn how the organization functions without fear of breaking things."
Russ UngerOnboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
November 7, 2017
"Being able to see faces and first names of people we're learning from makes those users tangible to the team."
Catherine DubutBridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design
March 18, 2021
"Characters live at the extreme of radically adaptive AI—they react in the moment and follow the user’s lead."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design: New Postures for AI-Mediated Experiences (2nd of 3 seminars)
January 29, 2025
"If you don’t have those challenges, it’s a lot easier to make it in the corporate world."
Dantley DavisLeadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
September 17, 2020
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What strategies help manage vision creation in organizations that are top-down and frequently reactive?
How does Rally’s research infrastructure facilitate participant management and integration with enterprise data systems?
How can play be integrated seamlessly into traditional workshops to avoid seeming frivolous?