The setting
is an online marketplace that connects homeowners with independent professionals who offer local services for home projects. is the side that those professionals use to get found and hired.
Six proposed experiments compete for access to the same pros and for a clear account of what worked.
Separate sponsors protect their learning questions, while shared participation protects the range of opportunities available to business owners.
Who you’d be doing this for
“I spent lunch answering two invitations, then realized nobody had told me whether joining one ruled out the other.”
Rafal Nowak · Owner of a residential repair business · a character in this brief
Runs a small office and receives invitations to try new ways of getting homeowner projects.
What is at stake
Four of six proposed experiments would invite overlapping groups of local service businesses. You have to weigh a shared decision point against sponsors’ need to test different ideas without another approval queue.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- shared participation vs interpretable learning
- quick decisions vs sponsor autonomy
- consistent invitations vs distinct experiment needs
- exclusive audiences vs realistic marketplace behavior
Why Thumbtack
Partner experiments connect new sources of homeowner projects to pros whose attention and capacity already limit how much new work they can pursue.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 84 more at Thumbtack, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Thumbtack. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Manager, Launch and Growth Operations (opens in a new tab)
- Clear, influential communication skills, with the ability to create a compelling vision, distill complexity, align diverse stakeholders, and influence without authority
- An owner mentality, strong learning agility, a bias for action, and a low-ego approach to leadership and collaboration
- Manager, Operational Foundations (opens in a new tab)
- Own developer and partner onboarding: Lead the end-to-end intake process from application through launch, defining acceptance criteria, review SLAs, approval workflows, ownership, and handoffs.
- Reporting to the Senior Manager of Partnership Operations, you’ll manage a globally distributed team of three to four people across the U.S. and the Philippines and own core functions spanning partner onboarding, integrations, partner finance, reporting, and internal tooling.
- Sr. Manager, Success Operations (opens in a new tab)
- Manager of Success Operations to own the strategy, tooling, and process that support our frontline teams across Manual Ops, Partnership Experiments, and the broader Experiments function that serves all of Success, plus the supply health model and levers that keep pro supply ready as more partners come online.
- We focus on building reliable processes, defining clear success metrics, generating insights that guide decisions, and driving the cross functional execution needed to improve marketplace outcomes.
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these turns on easing someone in at the cost of understanding.
Six design customers need evidence that another creative tool earns its budget.
You weigh a comparable evaluation service against the customer-specific work needed to make its conclusions useful.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Thumbtack’s Thumbtack for Pros, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Refund-policy changes are approaching review while Jira, Salesforce, and Slack disagree about unresolved work.
You must decide what AI can reconcile and what Program Managers must verify before acting.
Pros are contacting Service after paid leads because contact choices changed what refund protection they expected.
You must weigh a clearer pro moment against the need to preserve fair review for legitimate refund cases.
Some pro cases are marked closed even though QA says the refund decision was incomplete.
You have to weigh immediate service coverage against a partner model that may repeat the same errors.
Other problems with a similar purpose
In each of these, as in this one, the aim is using evidence and inquiry to uncover the true problem worth solving before committing craft or budget to an answer.
Customers delay connector activation because they cannot explain likely source and usage impact.
You must weigh a useful planning signal against claims the product cannot reliably support.
Developer teams want evidence that semantic matching improves discovery before they commit implementation capacity.
You have to weigh a repeatable programme against each customer’s need for a credible, representative test.
Twelve fit sessions produced conflicting explanations for the same discomfort reports.
You must weigh a cleaner comfort signal against changing a protocol that needs to stay comparable.
