Nextdoor // 2021 · marketplace · 0 to 1
Hire A Pro
Built Nextdoor's home services marketplace from 0 to 1, connecting millions of neighbors with local professionals
Every quarter, over 10 million home service inquiries happen on Nextdoor, while more than 1 million local businesses maintain a claimed business page. Despite strong demand and supply, neighbors still relied on fragmented conversations to find and hire trusted professionals.
Hire A Pro was Nextdoor's first marketplace designed to bridge that gap—connecting neighbors with verified local service providers through a trusted booking experience. Our challenge was to introduce a new business while staying true to the community-first experience people already expected from Nextdoor.
Launched Nextdoor's first home services marketplace in 6 months
Released MVP to the Bay Area
Exceeded initial transaction goals within the first quarter by 33%
As the lead product designer, I partnered with Product, Engineering, Research, and Content Strategy to define Nextdoor's first home services marketplace from concept through launch.
I led the end-to-end product design across mobile and web, helping shape the customer journey, product strategy, interaction patterns, and MVP scope while balancing the needs of homeowners, local businesses, and the marketplace itself.
Service providers must be verified to participate
Trust and safety is top of mind
Optimize for sole proprietors
Bring your own tool vs end-to-end solution
Surface Hire A Pro where neighbors were already looking for help
We couldn't rely on dedicated marketing or major navigation changes to drive adoption. For our MVP, Hire A Pro needed to feel like a natural extension of existing Nextdoor behaviors.
Rather than introducing a standalone destination, we surfaced Hire A Pro within existing search results and business pages, allowing neighbors to discover trusted professionals in the moments they were already looking for recommendations.
Search results with pros ranked highest
Business page of local pro
Make conversation, not automation, the center of the experience
Research revealed that home service professionals valued personal relationships with customers more than automation. While scheduling workflows could have reduced effort, they also risked removing an important part of how pros built trust.
Instead of automating every interaction, we designed chat as the hub of the experience, giving neighbors and providers flexibility while supporting the conversation with structured quote requests and booking information.
Chat serves as the hub for the job
Build trust into the offline experience
Hiring doesn't end when someone books a service. We needed to help neighbors feel safe when meeting someone in person while protecting both parties if disputes occurred.
I facilitated a cross-functional workshop to identify ways the experience could be abused, then translated those insights into a verification flow using unique job codes that confirmed job start and created a shared record for dispute resolution.
Unique code required to start the job
