Bunnings, Australia's largest home improvement retailer, wanted to enter home services by extending its trusted trade ecosystem beyond retail. The obvious wedge was a marketplace connecting homeowners with contractors, like Thumbtack or Angi.
Discovery showed the better starting point was supply-side workflow. The best contractors did not need more leads; they needed help managing the work they already had — quoting, scheduling, customer communication, and job tracking.
So the product problem shifted from demand aggregation to supply-side adoption: how do we become useful enough in the contractor workflow that high-quality supply wants to participate?
The real opportunity was contractor workflow SaaS as the scalable entry point into home services.
Lead PM for Bunnings' home-services market-entry startup. I reframed the strategy from marketplace demand aggregation to contractor workflow SaaS, turning Bunnings' trade ecosystem advantage into a product wedge. Owned discovery, platform scope, roadmap, and launch, leading a 15-person cross-functional team across product, UX, engineering, research, and Bunnings trade/retail stakeholders. Built the case for the pivot through contractor discovery, supply-side economics, and retail pull-through logic — aligning leadership around contractor productivity as the scalable entry point into home services.
Workflow adoption over marketplace incentives.
The obvious path was to keep tuning the marketplace — better listings, lower take rates, more homeowner demand, or incentives to attract better contractors. But discovery showed the best contractors were not lead-constrained; they were workflow-constrained.
So I made the bigger bet: build a product that helped contractors run their existing work, instead of pushing them into a marketplace they did not yet need.
- Quoting vs. lighter workflow tasks: Focused first on quoting because it shaped contractor earnings, signaled buyer intent, and created data for pricing, promotions, and product recommendations.
- Quality supply vs. marketplace volume: Prioritized fewer, higher-quality contractors because poor service experiences would damage Bunnings' brand more than marketplace revenue could justify.
- Embedded workflow vs. transaction monetization: Shifted from episodic lead-gen or take-rate economics toward workflow engagement, recurring SaaS value, and retail pull-through.
We built a web and mobile contractor workflow SaaS product that helped contractors manage jobs from quote to payment — earning supply-side adoption before scaling marketplace demand.
- Quoting workflow: Built quote creation, reusable quote templates, and customizable pre-designed templates so contractors could estimate faster while standardizing the highest-leverage workflow.
- Bunnings pricing + purchasing integration: Integrated contractor pricing, promos, product recommendations, and materials purchasing into the web and mobile apps so tradies could quote with real costs and buy supplies directly from the workflow.
- Job management + scheduling: Helped contractors organize active jobs, availability, next steps, and project status without relying on calls, texts, and spreadsheets.
- Customer communication layer: Built email and SMS workflows with customizable branded templates for estimates, updates, and follow-ups, helping contractors manage homeowner communication without manual rework.
- Payment collection + split payouts: Enabled contractors to accept payments and split payouts with partner contractors on shared jobs, supporting how trade work actually gets delivered.
- 10K tradie users acquired in year one for the contractor workflow product
- $22M incremental retail sales driven by workflow-linked materials purchasing
- Internal Venture Lab created inside Bunnings to apply the project playbook to new digital business ideas