Announcing Hopscotch: Your Personal Guide to LinkedIn

You're about to get better at using LinkedIn, and you might not even realize it.

Last year, I had an idea for a site touring platform that would guide someone through an interaction, including complex interactions spanning multiple pages. In other words, we wanted to create a personal guide to help you get more out of LinkedIn. I teamed up with Hacker In Residence Matthew Shoup and UX Designer Jessica Clark to create a prototype during one of our company Hackdays.

I was approached about applying to the brand new LinkedIn Incubator program. The possibility to turn a hack into a real product, with time, space, and executive mentorship from LinkedIn executives Deep Nishar, Kevin Scott and Jeff Weiner sounded like an amazing opportunity. I quickly recruited Gordon Koo to become a two-man team. We called the project Hopscotch because of how quick & simple (and playful!) it is to hop through a few easy steps.

Fast-forward several months: on April 25th, the first Hopscotch tour was launched to introduce the new LinkedIn Contacts product and is now available as part of our new unified search experience (take the tour here). The excitement for Hopscotch has been high across our internal teams, and many teams now have tours in the pipeline.

What started as a quick hack turned into a fully-built product experience. The Incubator program allowed Hopscotch to grow as a sort of startup inside LinkedIn - largely autonomous, but with a strong company to back it. We’ve also open sourced a main component of Hopscotch, as well as a companion tool that we hope to release very soon called Sidewalk Chalk that allows for click & drag creation of Hopscotch tours.

How amazing is it to think a team of two can improve the experience of over 238 million professionals around the world? It's a truly humbling thought, and something I'm proud to be a part of.