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
"What if we moved at the speed of care, support, and hospitality instead of just the speed of trust?"
Rachael Dietkus, LCSWTrauma-Responsive Design: Reimagining the Future of Design Now
December 10, 2021
"Once you start changing components because you didn’t like them, and those changes live only in people’s heads, then the system starts to break down."
Robin CannonAI means your design system can't suck anymore
September 9, 2026
"Grandmas provide grounding, resilience, and long-term perspective often through rituals and storytelling."
Gina MendoliaTherapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems
December 3, 2024
"Testing with real users humanizes the problems and reveals simple fixes like changing one label or color."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
October 2, 2023
"Technical difficulties happen, so please use hashtag.deo help within our Slack channel or email for support."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
September 29, 2021
"Organizational culture and values have been essential to ensuring successful delivery."
Stephen PollardClosing Keynote: Getting giants to dance - what can we learn from designing large and complex public infrastructure?
November 7, 2017
"Multimodal design adds a layer of orchestration on top of modality-specific designs like voice or graphical UI."
Cheryl PlatzDemystifying Multimodal Design: The Design Practice You Didn't Know You're Doing
April 4, 2024
"Consistency between control labels and prototype instructions matters a lot, because mismatches can cause big problems for alternative navigation."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
October 1, 2021
"Now design ops teams must be fit for purpose. We should meet the needs of the work we have to do."
Dominique WardThe Most Exciting Time for DesignOps is Now
September 8, 2022
