Background: Proving Our Moat

Market Data is Pave's moat, the compensation data our entire platform's insights are built on. But we didn't carry the same credibility as incumbent data sources. Customers treated us as a secondary source, something to spot check rather than trust outright. When the company planned a major push to mature the data, doubling our job catalog, the easy path was to ship more jobs into the existing product and call it done.

My Approach

I didn't think more data would fix a trust problem. The real question was how we represented ourselves as a data source, not how much we had. That meant convincing stakeholders that design wasn't a finishing touch on this launch, it was the thing that would determine whether the investment landed. I used Claude to rapidly prototype a new search experience and had it in front of users within days. The early response was strong enough to make the case on its own: this needed a redesign, not an add-on.

Impact

What could have looked like scope creep, rethinking the whole search experience instead of just adding jobs, ended up winning over the partners who had every reason to push back. Engineering got behind building extensible patterns instead of one-off fixes, and an eng lead on the project noted the shift firsthand: the redesigned search "makes what could be an overwhelming user journey not just possible, but genuinely delightful." What started as a design push became a more agile way of building together.

That year, ARR doubled and exceeded our self-serve targets. We also tracked how customers perceived us as a data source, and saw a significant jump in companies using Pave as their primary source rather than a secondary check, especially among customers larger than 1,000 employees.