Thanks for Helping Us Be Better ❤️

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, I’m Outlier’s community manager aka u/Alex_at_OutlierDotAI 👋

Remember when I mentioned in my last post that your feedback kicked off some key discussions in our contributor product meetings? While we've been building toward many of these improvements, your input has helped us to validate our direction and prioritize some key changes. Here's the update:

What We're Building Together ~ The TL;DR Version

  • Skills: As most of you have seen, we've rolled out our screening-based Skills catalog. We're rolling out more screenings slowly and carefully — the idea here is the more skills you add to your profile through screening, the more doors open up. You might discover projects you're perfectly qualified for but didn't even know existed!
  • Expert Match: Looking to expand your opportunities? Visit Expert Match to enhance and update your professional profile!
  • Marketplace: We heard your feedback about the confusion of navigating between various project pages, so we launched a unified Projects page where you now have one clear view of your current projects and available opportunities, as well as a dedicated Project History page with enhanced functionality. We rolled this out to 50% of contributors last week, and will be expanding to everyone this week.
  • Onboarding: Our team is revamping the onboarding experience to make it smoother, guided, and mobile-friendly.
  • Referrals: We're adding clearer referral status tracking to give you real-time visibility into your candidates' journeys. We're also excited to be working on an elevated referral program that lets trusted contributors refer friends and family to specific projects (we believe that people who contribute together, stay together 💪)
  • Project Experience: We’re launching interactive project previews soon — this means you'll get to click around sample tasks to get a really clear idea of what you're signing up for before you begin to onboard to a project.
  • Reviews: Are you a contributor who’s used the review dispute system that some projects are currently testing? We know reviews have been a major pain point for folks, so we'll be expanding on this review system throughout the year.
  • Trust & Safety: Our T&S guardians work tirelessly to protect platform integrity (on a platform like ours, that is not easy! 😅), and we deeply appreciate your patience and feedback, especially if you been inadvertently affected by these efforts. T&S is currently developing new policies that provide more granularity and transparency around contributor guidelines to help set you up for success while enabling more precise decisions about policy violations. Combined with enhanced onboarding screenings that verify both skills and trustworthiness, these improvements will help us maintain a platform that maximizes opportunities for the many, many well-intentioned folks on the platform (we see you!)

Want to dive deeper into any of these? Let me know what you want to hear about most! (Wrong answers include 'EQ issues' and 'when is Alex getting a raise?' 🥲)

What's Next?

Recently, u/FlintSpellhunter shared a really cool pay analyzer tool here. This kind of initiative from the community is so awesome — it's already fanned the flames of internal discussions around revamping the Earnings tab. The team would love to hear more of your thoughts on what would make that tab most useful to you. Drop your thoughts below.

While we've still got plenty to work on (trust me, my to-do list keeps me up at night), every improvement here started with someone speaking up. Your feedback → Product team discussions → My continued employment → Platform improvements (The cycle of life at Outlier! 🎭)

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

-Alex at Outlier