Turning an overlooked feature into a service marketplace.

The problem worth solving

LinkedIn's Services surface lets freelancers and professionals offer their expertise — a large, underused opportunity. The barrier wasn't features; it was awareness and discoverability: 48% of members had never heard of Service pages, 72% didn't realize they'd already created one, and 80% of requests were lost to direct messages instead of a managed flow.

What I owned

I led design with the Service Marketplace team, owning the entire two-sided flow end to end. For providers: turning on services, building a Service Page, marketing themselves across the platform, and receiving and responding to incoming requests. For buyers: discovering the right provider, submitting a service request, and communicating through to a deal — with AI-assisted proposals doing much of the heavy lifting where the two sides meet.

Approach & key decisions

Three fronts shaped the work: build awareness across multiple touchpoints, make the Service Page easy to set up and discover, and reduce the friction that was losing providers their leads. The centerpiece was reworking provider-to-client communication so incoming requests became a managed pipeline rather than scattered DMs — with AI-assisted proposals helping providers respond fast and win the work.

Outcome

Relative wins from an A/B-tested, staged rollout: 6× the Q4 signup target, 3× the ARR target, +25% request-flow completion, and an 18% lift in premium sign-ups.

What I'd carry forward

Designing into a massive, established surface sharpened how I ship: land awareness and friction wins in parallel, and lean on the funnel to steer the calls rather than opinion.